Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Intersubjective things like laws, gods, and currencies are extremely powerful within a particular information network and utterly meaningless outside it. Suppose

This crucial difference between the two texts is clear from their opening gambits. The U.S. Constitution opens with “We the People.” By acknowledging its human origin, it invests humans with the power to amend it. The Ten Commandments open with “I am the Lord your God.” By claiming divine origin, it precludes humans from changing it. As a result, t

happens in the universe, but knowing that E = mc² usually doesn’t resolve political disagreements or inspire people to make sacrifices for a common cause. Instead, what holds human networks together tends to be fictional stories, especially stories about intersubjective things like gods, money, and nations.

What makes us so good at remembering epic poems and long-running TV series is that long-term human memory is particularly adapted to retaining stories. As Kendall Haven writes in his 2007 book, Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, “Human minds…rely on stories and on story architecture as the primary roadmap for understandin

Viewing information as a social nexus helps us understand many aspects of human history that confound the naive view of information as representation. It explains the historical success not only of astrology but of much more important things, like the Bible. While some may dismiss astrology as a quaint sideshow in human history, nobody can deny the

Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality.

The two levels of reality that preceded storytelling are objective reality and subjective reality. Objective reality consists of things like stones, mountains, and asteroids—things that exist whether we are aware of them or not. An asteroid hurtling toward planet Earth, for example, exists even if nobody knows it’s out there. Then there is subjecti

This idea, sometimes called the counterspeech doctrine, is associated with the U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis, who wrote in Whitney v. California (1927) that the remedy to false speech is more speech and that in the long term free discussion is bound to expose falsehoods and fallacies.

Rather, truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring other aspects. No account of reality is 100 percent accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than others.