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

Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.

So every year, in the most important celebration of the Jewish calendar, millions of Jews put on a show that they remember things that they didn’t witness and that probably never happened at all. As numerous modern studies indicate, repeatedly retelling a fake memory eventually causes the person to adopt it as a genuine recollection.[12] When two J

In addition to human-to-human and human-to-story chains, such societies are held together by human-to-document chains.

A story can thereby serve like a central connector, with an unlimited number of outlets into which an unlimited number of people can plug. For example, the 1.4 billion members of the Catholic Church are connected by the Bible and other key Christian stories; the 1.4 billion citizens of China are connected by the stories of communist ideology and Ch

When both conservatives and progressives resist the temptation of radical revolution, and stay loyal to democratic traditions and institutions, democracies prove themselves to be highly agile. Their self-correcting mechanisms enable them to ride the technological and economic waves better than more rigid regimes. Thus, those democracies that manage

The most common method strongmen use to undermine democracy is to attack its self-correcting mechanisms one by one, often beginning with the courts and the media. The typical strongman either deprives courts of their powers or packs them with his loyalists and seeks to close all independent media outlets while building his own omnipresent propagand

This network is also likely to create inter-computer mythologies that will be far more complex and alien than any human-made god. The potential benefits of this network are enormous. The potential downside is the destruction of human civilization.

Telling a fictional story is lying only when you pretend that the story is a true representation of reality. Telling a fictional story isn’t lying when you avoid such pretense and acknowledge that you are trying to create a new intersubjective reality

The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.

Both Napoleon and George W. Bush fell victim to the alignment problem. Their short-term military goals were misaligned with their countries’ long-term geopolitical goals. We can understand the whole of Clausewitz’s On War as a warning that “maximizing victory” is as shortsighted a goal as “maximizing user engagement.” According to the Clausewitzian