> [!tldr] Individuals, Stories, Documents, Books, Computer to human, Computer to Computer A central theme of the book [[Nexus]] is the progression of humanity's technologies for developing information networks, which Harari argues is a central reason for humanity's rise in the animal kingdom. **Individual to individual** - This is not unique to humanity. We share this with apes and all sorts of other creatures. **Stories** - You no longer need an individual-to-individual connection - instead billions of individuals can be connected to each other via the [[Hub and Spoke Architecture|hub]] of some great story - for example the story of Jesus. - This is humanity's first invention that set us apart from other animals. It is what gives rise to [[Intersubjective Reality]] and [[Religion]] and is the first enabler of [[Mass Flexible Cooperation]]. **Documents** - Stories up until this point were orally shared. They enabled large groups of people to work together – but they were not great at keeping records. For societies to form, we needed to develop writing. Stories don't help us remember lists all that well. There's the Chinese proverb about [[The Dullest Pencil is Better than the Sharpest Mind]]. - Documents give rise to [[Bureaucracy]], which we *think* of as a "bad" thing, but really it's good and bad. It allows us to maintain order and prevents things like cholera outbreaks due to wells & cess pools being dug too close together (actual historical example). **Books** - As distinct from "documents", books are a, well, books. They are a collection of documents that tell a story. Whereas documents introduction was more about record-keeping, the introduction of "books" was about canonizing *stories*. This is where holy texts start to emerge. The book then talked about "Holy Books" as a separate and distinct thing. Whereas "books" are generally considered fallible, there are "holy books" which are, by definition, infallible. However then *interpretation* becomes a problem. **Computer to human** - Humans can use computers to talk to one-another. This stepping stone lead to the internet. It was fundamentally human-to-intermediary-to-human. The intermediary network now isn't oral stories, nor individual documents, nor books, but instead a huge network of digital artifacts known as "the internet" **Computer to computer** - This is the whole back-half of the source. All networks used to be human-to-human, sometimes with a single node (e.g. story, book, etc) in the middle. Now we are "promoted" computers to take part of the chain as a human would. Computers can talk to computers and act on inter-computer realities that don't have humans in the loop, with real-world consequences. - *Example:* a network of computers decide a particular stock is busting and a mass automated sell-off happens - which causes the stock to actually bust. **** # More ## Source - [[Nexus]]