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

An increasingly important question is, Can people adopt any virtual identity they like, or should their identity be constrained by their biological body? If we follow the Lutheran position of sola fide, the biological body isn’t of much importance. To adopt a certain online identity, the only thing that matters is what you believe.

Just as democracy is maintained by having overlapping self-correcting mechanisms that keep each other in check, modern totalitarianism created overlapping surveillance mechanisms that keep each other in order.

When we engage in a political debate with a computer impersonating a human, we lose twice. First, it is pointless for us to waste time in trying to change the opinions of a propaganda bot, which is just not open to persuasion. Second, the more we talk with the computer, the more we disclose about ourselves, thereby making it easier for the bot to h

Despite—or perhaps because of—its utter lack of compassion and its callous attitude to truth, Stalinism was singularly efficient at maintaining order on a gigantic scale. The relentless barrage of fake news and conspiracy theories helped to keep hundreds of millions of people in line. The collectivization of Soviet agriculture led to mass enslaveme

The conspiracy theory—a Soviet twist on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—merged with age-old blood-libel accusations, and rumors began circulating that Jewish doctors were not just murdering Soviet leaders but also killing babies in hospitals. Since a large proportion of Soviet doctors were Jews, people began fearing doctors in general.[122]