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

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

To conclude, information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn’t. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic. Therefore, when examining the role of information in history, although it sometimes makes sense to ask “How well does it represent reality? Is it true or false?” often the more crucial questions are “How well

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

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

The trademark of science is not merely skepticism but self-skepticism, and at the heart of every scientific institution we find a strong self-correcting mechanism. Scientific institutions do reach a broad consensus about the accuracy of certain theories—such as quantum mechanics or the theory of evolution—but only because these theories have manage

As we have seen again and again throughout history, in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose. To tilt the balance in favor of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them

The sanctity of the Holy Rock, and of Jerusalem generally, is an intersubjective phenomenon that exists in the communication network connecting many human minds.

the witch hunts were fueled by an expanding ocean of information that instead of representing reality created a new reality.