The information wars are about to get worse, Yuval Harari argues
Nexus. By Yuval Noah Harari. Random House; 528 pages; $35. Fern Press; £28 “Let Truth and falsehood grapple," argued John Milton in Areopagitica, a pamphlet published in 1644 defending the freedom of the press.
Such freedom would, he admitted, allow incorrect or misleading works to be published, but bad ideas would spread anyway, even without printing—so better to allow everything to be published and let rival views compete on the battlefield of ideas. Good information, Milton confidently believed, would drive out bad: the “dust and cinders" of falsehood “may yet serve to polish and brighten the armory of truth". Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, lambasts this position as the “naive view" of information in a timely new book.
It is mistaken, he argues, to suggest that more information is always better and more likely to lead to the truth; the internet did not end totalitarianism, and racism cannot be fact-checked away. But he also argues against a “populist view" that objective truth does not exist and that information should be wielded as a weapon. (It is ironic, he notes, that the notion of truth as illusory, which has been embraced by right-wing politicians, originated with left-wing thinkers such as Marx and Foucault.) Few historians have achieved the global fame of Mr Harari, who has sold more than 45m copies of his megahistories, including “Sapiens".
He counts Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg among his fans. A techno-futurist who contemplates doomsday scenarios, Mr Harari has warned about technology’s ill effects in his books and speeches, yet he captivates Silicon Valley bosses, whose innovations he critiques. In “Nexus", a sweeping narrative ranging from the stone age to the era of artificial intelligence
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