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

Humanity has accumulated extraordinary power across one hundred thousand years of history, and yet we now face an existential crisis of our own making. The world teeters on ecological collapse, misinformation saturates public discourse, and we are rushing headlong into an age of artificial intelligence whose implications no one fully understands. In Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari asks a foundational question: what has gone wrong, and does the answer lie in the nature of information itself? Harari takes the long view, tracing how information networks have shaped human societies from the Stone Age through the canonization of sacred texts, early modern witch-hunts, the rise of totalitarianism, and the resurgence of populism today. His central argument is that information is neither the raw material of truth nor merely a weapon, and that failing to understand its complex, often paradoxical relationship to human power is precisely what makes us so vulnerable to the tools we build. The book culminates in an urgent examination of artificial intelligence as a new kind of information network, one that, unlike all its predecessors, can act independently of human intention. A #1 New York Times bestseller hailed as "strikingly original" by The Economist, Nexus is Harari's most timely and consequential work yet.