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

History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change.

The naive view argues that by gathering and processing much more information than individuals can, big networks achieve a better understanding

History is often shaped not by deterministic power relations, but rather by tragic mistakes that result from believing in mesmerizing but harmful stories.

The witch hunts illustrate the dark side of creating an information sphere. As with rabbinical discussions of the Talmud and scholastic discussions of Christian scriptures, the witch hunts were fueled by an expanding ocean of information that instead of representing reality created a new reality. Witches were not an objective reality. Nobody in ear

The technology developed by recognizing cute kittens was later deployed for more predatory purposes. For example, Israel relied on it to create the Red Wolf, Blue Wolf, and Wolf Pack apps used by Israeli soldiers for facial recognition of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.[7] The ability to recognize cat images also led to the algorithms Ira

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.

Instead of building a network from human-to-human chains alone—as the Neanderthals, for example, did—stories provided Homo sapiens with a new type of chain: human-to-story chains. In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story.

Its defining feature is connection rather than representation,

In theory, kulaks were an objective socioeconomic category, defined by analyzing empirical data on things like property, income, capital, and wages. Soviet officials could allegedly identify kulaks by counting things. If most people in a village had only one cow, then the few families who had three cows were considered kulaks. If most people in a v