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

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

By contrast, in the Roman Empire there was simply no way to conduct or sustain a democratic conversation, because the technological means to hold such a conversation did not exist.

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

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.

But there are cases when people disagree about the existence of certain states, and then their intersubjective status emerges. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, revolves around this matter, because some people and governments refuse to acknowledge the existence of Israel and others refuse to acknowledge the existence of Palestine. As o

For instance, when Catholics like Pope Francis himself are now reconsidering the church’s teachings on homosexuality,[105] they find it difficult to simply acknowledge past mistakes and change the teachings. If eventually a future pope would issue an apology for the mistreatment of LGBTQ people, the way to do it would be to again shift the blame to

On War created a rational model for understanding war, and it is still the dominant military theory today. Its most important maxim is that “war is the continuation of policy by other means.”[23] This implies that war is not an emotional outbreak, a heroic adventure, or a divine punishment. War is not even a military phenomenon. Rather, war is a po

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