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

Other small states, such as Qatar, have established themselves as important players in the geopolitical arena. With only 300,000 citizens, Qatar is nevertheless pursuing ambitious foreign policy aims in the Middle East, is playing an outsized rule in the global economy, and is home to Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s most influential TV network. One mi

In fact, print allowed the rapid spread not only of scientific facts but also of religious fantasies, fake news, and conspiracy theories.

However, democracy doesn’t mean majority rule; rather, it means freedom and equality for all. Democracy is a system that guarantees everyone certain liberties, which even the majority cannot take away.

In its more extreme versions, populism posits that there is no objective truth at all and that everyone has “their own truth,”

the political scientist Cas Mudde has described as an “ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite.’ ”

Reflecting on the Myanmar tragedy, Pwint Htun wrote to me in July 2023, “I naively used to believe that social media could elevate human consciousness and spread the perspective of common humanity through interconnected pre-frontal cortexes in billions of human beings. What I realize is that the social media companies are not incentivized to interc

In Judaism the canonization of the Old Testament and Mishnah went hand in hand with creating the institution of the rabbinate. In Christianity the canonization of the New Testament went hand in hand with the creation of a unified Christian church. Christians trusted church officials—like Bishop Athanasius—because of what they read in the New Testam

Second, the Silicon Curtain might come to divide not one group of humans from another but rather all humans from our new AI overlords.

It was also possible to comprehend where the myths of racism originally came from. Racism argued that humanity was divided into races, that the white race was superior to other races, that any contact with members of the Black race could pollute the purity of whites, and that therefore Black children should be prevented from mixing with white child