Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari (Hebrew: יובל נח הררי; born 24 February 1976) is an Israeli professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

• If AI can suffer, then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection, it needs rights, just like humans and animals.
  • "#390 - Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies" on Lex Fridman Podcast, found on DeepCast (17 July 2023)

• Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness. I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness, which many people, certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry, tend to miss.
  • "#390 - Yuval Noah Harari: Human Nature, Intelligence, Power, and Conspiracies" on Lex Fridman Podcast, found on DeepCast (17 July 2023)

• Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history… At first sight, domesticated animals may seem much better off than their wild cousins and ancestors. Wild buffaloes spend their days searching for food, water and shelter, and are constantly threatened by lions, parasites, floods and droughts. Domesticated cattle, by contrast, enjoy care and protection from humans. People provide cows and calves with food, water and shelter, they treat their diseases, and protect them from predators and natural disasters. True, most cows and calves sooner or later find themselves in the slaughterhouse. Yet does that make their fate any worse than that of wild buffaloes? Is it better to be devoured by a lion than slaughtered by a man? Are crocodile teeth kinder than steel blades?
  • "Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history", The Guardian (25 September 2011)

• Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.
  • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, 2024

Harper, 2011. ISBN 978-0062316097

• Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

• Homo erectus, 'Upright Man,' [survived] for close to 2 million years, making it the most durable human species ever. This record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species. It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league.

• When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force.

• Some human species may have made occasional use of fire as early as 800,000 years ago. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo erctus, Neanderthals and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis.

• Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.

• It may well be that when Sapines encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

• It (Gossip) comes so naturally to us that it seems as if our language evolved for the very purpose.

• In modern society, currency notes usually display religious images, revered ancestors and corporate totems.

• The Stone Age should be more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by the ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood.

• The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution.

• Fishing villages might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45,000 years ago.

• Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well.

• Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as small pox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domestic animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.

• Animism is not a specific religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very different religions, cults and beliefs. What makes all of them 'animist' is this common approach to the world and man's place in it.

• Theism (from 'theos', 'god' in Greek) is the view that the universal order is based on a hierarchical relationship between humans and a small group of of ethernal entities called gods.

• Planet Earth was separated into several ecosystems, each made up of a unique assembly of animals and plants. Homo sapiens was about to put an end to this biological exuberance.

• The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus' journey to America or Apollo 11 expedition to the moon.
  • Note: This refers to the journey of Homo sapiens to Australia 45,000 years ago

• The moment the hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that the Homo sapiens to the top rung in the food chain, and became the deadliest species ever in the 4-billion-year history of life on earth.
  • Note: This refers to the journey of Homo sapiens to Australia 45,000 years ago

• The settlers of Australia, or more accurately, its conquerors, didn't just adapt. They transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition.
  • Note: This refers to the journey of Homo sapiens to Australia 45,000 years ago

• It's common today to explain anything and everything as the result of climate change, but the truth is that earth's climate never rests. It is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of some climate change. In particular, our planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and warming.

• The extinction of the Australian Megafauna was probably the first significant mark Homo sapiens left on our planet.
  • Note: This refers to the journey of Homo sapiens to Australia 45,000 years ago

• No other animal (Homo sapiebs) had ever moved into such a huge variety of habitats so quickly.

• At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about one hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools.

• The elephant bird and the giant lemurs, along with most of the other large animals of Madagascar, suddenly vanished about 1.500 years ago - precisely when the first humans set foot on the island.

• The Galápagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nine-teenth century, thus preserving a unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like ancient diporotodons, show no fear of humans.

• Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.

• From sunrise to sunset humans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This work, they thought, would provide them with more fruit, grain and meat. It was a revolution in the way humans lived - the Agricultural Revolution.
• Even today, with all our advanced technology, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity came from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC - wheat, rice, maize (called 'corn' in US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant and animal has been domesticated in the last 2000 years.
• The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosion and pampered elites.
• According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.
• Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain.
• the new agricultural task demanded so much so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat field. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.
• Cultivating wheat much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.
• Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and permanent settlements would be hotbeds of infectious disease.
• One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can't live without it.
• The structures at Göbekli Tepe are dated to about 9500BC, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by hunter-gatherers.
• In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple in the middle. But Göbekli Tepe suggests that the temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it.
• The domesticated chicken is the most widespread fowl ever.

• The agricultural revolution is one of the most controversial events in history. Some partisans proclaim that it set humankind on the road to prosperity and progress. Others insist that it has led to perdition.
• From the dawn of agriculture until this very day, billions of humans armed with branches, swatters, shoes and poison sprays have waged rentless wars against diligent ants, furtive roaches, adventurous spiders and misguided beetles that constantly infiltrate the human domicile.
• The food surpluses produced by peasants, coupled with new transportation technology, eventually enabled more and more people to cram together first into large villages, then into towns, and finally into cities, all of them joined together by new kingdoms and commercial networks.
• Yugoslavia in 1991 had more than enough resources to feed all its inhabitants, and still disintegrated into a terrible bloodbath.
• The Roman Empire at its zenith collected taxes from up to 100 million subjects. This revenue financed a standing army of 250,000 - 500,000 soldiers, a road network still in use 1,500 years later, and theatres and amphitheatres that host spectacles to this day.
• This (Code of Hammurabi) was a collection of laws and judicial decisions whose aim was to present Hammurabi as a role model of a just king, serve as a basis for a more uniform legal system across the Babylonian Empire, and teach future generations what justice is and how a just king acts.
• According to the science of biology, people were not 'created'. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be 'equal'.

• But when particularly complex societies began to appear in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution, a completely new type of information became vital - numbers.
• the first text of history contains no philosophical insight, no poetry, legends. laws, or even royal triumphs. They were humdrum economic documents,recording the payment of taxes, the accumulation of debts and the ownership of property.
• The earliest Sumerian writing was a partial rather than a full script. Full script is a system of material signs that can represent spoken language more or less completely. It can therefore press everything people can say, including poetry. Partial script, on the other hand, is a system of material signs that can represent only particular type of information, belonging to a limited field of activity.
• Ancient scribes learned not merely to read and write, but also to use catalogues, dictionaries, calendars, forms and tables. They studied the internalised technique of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very different from those used by the brain.
• A critical step was made sometime before the ninth century AD, when a new partial script was invented, one that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented efficiency. This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 - 9. Confusingly, these signs were known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus.
• Writing is born as the midservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers.

• According to a famous Hindu creation myth, the gods fashioned the world out of the body of a primeval being, the Purusa. The sun was created from Purusa's eyes, the moon from Purusa's brain, the Brahmins (priests) from the mouth, the Kshatriyas (warriors) from its arms, the Vaishyas (peasants and merchants) from its thighs, and Shudras (servants) from its legs.
• The ancient Chinese believed that the goddess Nü wa created humans from earth, she kneaded aristocrats from fine yellow soil, whereas commoners were formed from brown mud.
• American plantations in places such as Virginia, Haiti and Brazil were plunged by malaria and yellow fever, which had originated in Africa. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases.
• Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans!
• the burgeoning new society of America were to be divided into a ruling caste of white Europeans and a subjected class of black Africans.
• even though the slaves were freed, the racist myths that justified slavery persisted. Separation of race was maintained by racist legislation and social customs.
• People everywhere have divided themselves into men and women. And almost everywhere men have got the better deal, at least since the Agricultural Revolution.
• Raping a woman who did not belong to any man was not considered a crime at all, just as picking up a lost coin on a busy street is not considered theft.
• To say that a husband 'raped' his wife was as illogical as saying that a man stole his own wallet.
• As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife.
• scholars usually distinguish between 'sex', which is a biological category, and 'gender', a cultural category.
• Throughout history, males have been willing to risk and even sacrifice their lives, just so that people will say, 'He is a real man!'
• At least since the Agricultural Revolution, most human societies have been patriarchal societies that valued men more highly than women. No matter how society defined 'man' and 'woman', to be a man is always better.
• Wars are not a pub brawl. They are complex projects that require an extraordinary degree of organisation, cooperation and appeasement.

• Myths and fictions accustomed people, nearly from the moment of birth, to think in certain ways, to believe in accordance with certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. They thereby create artificial instincts that enable millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instinct is called 'Culture'.
• Unlike the laws of physics, which are free of inconsistencies, every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this process fuels change.
• Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of life.
• Osama bin Laden, for all his hatred of American culture, American religion, and American politics, was very fond of American dollars. Hoe did money succeed where gods and kings failed?

• The followers of Christ and the followers of Allah killed each other by the thousands, devastated fields and orchards, and turned prosperous cities into smouldering ruins - all for the great glory of Christ and Allah.
• Money is not coins and bank notes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.
• The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and bank notes is less than $6 trillion. More than 90% percent of all money - more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts - exists only on computer servers.
• Money is accordingly, a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
• Money is more open-minded than language, state law, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.

• Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which have consigned them to oblivion. Empires, too, ultimately fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies.
• 'imperialist' ranks second only to 'fascist' in the lexicon of politically swear words.
• Imperial elites used the profits of conquest to finance not only armies and forts but also philosophy, art, justice and charity.
• Present-day Egyptians speak Arabic, think of themselves as Arabs, and identify wholeheartedly with the Arab Empire that conquered Egypt in the seventh century and crushed with an iron fist the repeated revolts that broke out against its rule.
• The first empire about which we have definitive information was the Akkadian Empire of Sargon the Great (c.2250 BC).
• The mandate of Heaven was bestowed upon the emperor not in order to exploit the world, but in order to educate humanity.
• The Muslim caliphs received a divine mandate to spread the Prophet's revelation, peacefully if possible but by the sword if necessary.
• Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring the Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.
• the modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire. The British killed, injured and persecuted the inhabitants of the subcontinent, but they also united a bewildering mosaic of warring kingdoms, principalities and tribes, creating a shared national consciousness and a country that functioned more or less as a single political unit.

• religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empire.
• Religion can thus be defined as a system of human laws that is founded on a belief in superhuman laws.
• majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive. Their followers believed in local deties and spirits, and had no interest in converting the entire human race.
• universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC. Their emergence was one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to the unification of humankind, much like the emergence of universal empires and universal money.
• For thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, religious litiguri consisted mainly of humans sacrificing lambs, wine and cakes to divine powers, who in exchange promised abundant harvest and fecund flocks.
• These (polytheistic) religions understood the world to be controlled by a group of powerful gods, such as the fertility goddess, the rain god and the war god. Humans could appeal to these gods and the god might, if they received devotions and sacrifices, deign to bring rain, victory and health.
• Two thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry.
• In Hindu polytheism, a single principle, Atman, controls the myriad gods and spirits, humankind, and the biological and physical world. Atman is the central essence or soul of the entire universe, as well as of every individual and every phenomenon.
• The only god that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic and evangelising god of the Christians.
• Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
• The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are particularly notorious. All those involved accepted Christ's divinity and his gospel of compassion and love. However, they disagreed about the nature of this love.
• The first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt, c.1350 BC, when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared that one of the minor deties of Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten. was, in fact, the supreme power ruling the universe.
• Judaism had little to offer other nations, and throughout most of its existence it has not been not been a missionary religion. This stage can be called a 'local monotheism".
• Christians began organising widespread missionary activities aimed at all humans. In one of history's strangest twists, this esoteric Jewish sect took over the mighty Roman Empire.
• Christian success served as a model for another monotheist religion and that appeared in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century - Islam.
• Dualistic religions expouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil. Unlike monotheism, dualism believes that evil is an independent power, neither created by the good God, nor subordinate to it. Dualism explains that the entire universe is a battleground between these two forces, and that everything that happens in the world is part of the struggle.
• Dualistic religions flourished for more than a thousand years. Sometime between 1500 BC and 1000 BC a prophet named Zoroaster (Zarathustra) was active somewhere in Central Asia. His creed passed from generation to generation until it became the most important of dualistic religions - Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good god Ahura Mazda and the evil god Angra Mainyu.
• Gnostics and Manichaeans argued that the good god created the spirit and soul, whereas matter and bodies are the creation of the evil god. Man, according to this view, serves as a battleground between the good soul and the evil body.
• He (Gautama Buddha) encapsulated his teachings in a single law: suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.
• The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism.
• Like Buddhism, Communist believed in a superhuman order of natural and immutable laws that should guide human actions.
• Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that 'humanity' is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct.
• the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal or eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or can degenerate into subhuman.
• Nazis said that the Aryan race, the most advanced form of humanity, had to be protected and fostered, while degenerate kinds of Homo sapiens like Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally ill had to be quarantined and even exterminated.
• According to Nazis, Homo sapiens had already divided into several races, the Aryan race, had the finest qualities - rationalism, beauty, integrity, diligence. The Aryan race therefore had the potential to turn man into superman. Other races, such as Jews and blacks, were today's Neanderthals, possessing inferior qualities. If allowed to breed, in particular intermarry with Aryans, they would adulterate all human population and doom Homo sapiens to extinction.
• Biologists have since debunked Nazi racial theory. In particular, genetic research conducted after 1945 has demonstrated that the differences between the various human lineages are far smaller than the Nazi postulated.
• Scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that human behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than free will - the same forces that determine the behaviour of chimpanzees, wolves and ants.

• When Constantine assumed the throne in 306, Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect.
• Revolutions are, by definition unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts.
• So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means of making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.
• postmodernist thinkers describe nationalism as a deadly plague that spread throughout the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, causing wars, oppression. hate and genocide.

• For most of history, humans knew nothing about 99.99 per cent on the planet - namely, the microorganisms.
• Each of us bears billions of one-celled creatures (microorganisms) within us, and not just as free-riders. They are our best friends, and deadliest enemies. Some of them digest our food and clean our guts, while others cause illness and epidemics.
• Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ignoramus - 'we do not know'.
• The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.
• the prophet Muhammad began his religious career by condemning his fellow Arabs for living in ignorance of the divine truth. Yet Muhammad himself quickly began to argue that he knew the full truth. and his followers began calling him 'the Seal of Prophets'.
• The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge.
• Mere observations, however, are not knowledge. In order to understand the universe, we need to connect observations into comprehensive theories. Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories. Modern science uses mathematics.
• The greatness of Newton's theory was its ability to explain and predict the movement of all bodies in the universe, from falling apples to shooting stars, using three simple mathematical laws.
• Only around the end of the nineteenth century did scientists come across a few observations that did not fit well with Newton's laws, and these led to the net revolution in physics - the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
• A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspect of reality: statistics.
• Throughout most of history, mathematics was an esoteric field that even educated people rarely studied seriously. In medieval Europe, logic grammar and rhetoric formed the educational core, while the teaching of mathematics seldom went beyond simple arithmetic and geometry. Nobody studied statistics. The undisputed monarch of all science was theology.
• exact science - defined as 'exact' by their use of mathematical tools.
• Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad would have been bewildered if you'd have told them that in order to understand the human mind and cure its illness you must first study statistics.
• Presidents and generals may not understand nuclear physics, but they have a good grasp of what nuclear bombs can do.
• THe most important military invention in the history of China was gunpowder. Yet to the best of our knowledge, gunpowder was invented accidentally, by Daoist alchemists searching for the elixir of life.
• Only in the fifteenth century - almost 600 years after the invention of the gunpowder - did cannons become a decisive factor on Afro-Asian battlefields.
• Until the Scentific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress. They thought that the golden age was the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating.
• Throughout history, societies have suffered from two kinds of poverty: social poverty, which withholds from some people the opportunities available to others; and biological poverty, which puts the very life of individuals at risk due to lack of food and shelter. Perhaps social poverty can never be eradicated, but in many countries around the world biological poverty is a thing of the past.
• Scientists themselves are not always aware of the political, economic and religious interests that control the flow of money; many scientists do, in fact, act out of purely intellectual curiosity. Hovever, only rarely do scientists dictate the scientific agenda.

• Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, scurvy is estimated to have claimed the lives of about 2 million sailors. No one knew what caused it, and no matter what remedy was tried, sailors continued to die in droves.
• For the aborigins of Australia, and to a lesser extent for the Maori of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never fully recovered.
• The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable.
• In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy. The combined economies of India and China alone represented two-thirds of global production. In comparison, Europe was an economic dwarf.
• The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia.
• Under the European aegis a new global order and culture emerged. Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, Europeans in dress, thought and taste.
• Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any technological advantage. When the technology bonanza began, Europeans could harness it far better than anybody else.
• The Far East and the Islamic world produced minds as intelligent and curious as those of Europe. However, between 1500 and 1950 they did not produce anything that comes even close to Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology.
• European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories.
• In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost every important military expedition that left Europe for distant lands had on board scientists who set out not to fight but make scientific discoveries.
• When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he took 165 scholars with him. Among other things, they founded an entirely new discipline, Egyptology, and made important contributions to the study of religion, linguistics and botany.
• The European imperial expeditions transformed the history of the world: from being a series of histories of isolated peoples and cultures, it became the history of a single integrated human society.
• Columbus's fleet in 1492 - which consisted of three small ships manned by 120 sailors - was like a trio of mosquitoes compared to Zheng He's drove of dragons.
• For modern Europeans, building an empire was a scientific project, while setting up a scientific discipline was an imperial project.
• On 10 April 1802 the Great Survey of India was launched. It lasted sixty years. With the help of tens of thousands of native labourers, scholars and guides, the British carefully mapped the whole of India, marking borders, measuring distances, and even calculating for the first time the exact height of Mount Everest and other Himalayan peaks.

• Money has been essential both for building empires and for promoting science. Neither modern armies nor university laboratories can be sustained without banks.
• to understand modern economic history, you need to understand just a single word. The word is growth.
• Smith's claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history - revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.
• Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth, on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.
• Napoleon made fun of the British, calling them a nation of shopkeepers. Yet the shopkeepers defeated Napoleon himself, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.
• In the late nineteenth century, about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country's population, were opium addicts.
• In the Middle Ages, sugar was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly as a secret ingredient in delicacies and snake-oil medicines.
• The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eight kilograms in the early nineteenth century.
• From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations.
• Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.

• For decades aluminium was much more expensive than gold. In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III of France commissioned aluminium cutlery to be laid out for his most distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold knives and forks.
• Consumerism sees the consumption of every more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption.
• Religious holidays such as Christmas have become shopping festivals.
• Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over.
• The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is 'Invest!' The supreme commandment of the rest of us is 'Buy!'

• Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.
• Understanding human history in the millennia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question: how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
• Yet from the viewpoint of the herd, rather than that of the shepherd, it’s hard to avoid the impression that for the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe. Their evolutionary ‘success’ is meaningless. A rare wild rhinoceros on the brink of extinction is probably more satisfied than a calf who spends its short life inside a tiny box, fattened to produce juicy steaks. The contented rhinoceros is no less content for being among the last of its kind. The numerical success of the calf’s species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures.
• Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most humans ran its course within three ancient frames: the nuclear family, the extended family and the local intimate community.
• Most people worked in the family business – the family farm or the family workshop, for example – or they worked in their neighbours’ family businesses. The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.
• Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings. Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer. Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.
• How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.
• As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.
• So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.
• Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
• Biology enables, Culture forbids.
• We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.
• In the last few decades we have at last made some real progress as far as the human condition is concerned, with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating more rapidly than ever before, and the improvement in the lot of humanity is too recent and fragile to be certain of.

Introduction to Peter Singer's Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals, Random House, 2015. ISBN 9781473524422

• Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.

• Today more than ninety per cent of all large animals are domesticated. Consider the chicken, for example. Ten thousand years ago it was a rare bird confined to small niches of South Asia. Today billions of chickens live on almost every continent and island, bar Antarctica. The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever. Alas, domesticated species paid for their unparalleled collective success with unprecedented individual suffering.

• The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities.

• The fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue. It concerns the majority of Earth's large creatures: tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, but who live and die as cogs in an industrial production line.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Random House, 2016. ISBN 978-1-910-70187-4

• As human soldiers and workers give way to algorithms, at least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard levels of health for masses of useless poor people, and it is far more sensible to focus on upgrading a handful of superhumans beyond the norm.

• The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support these useless masses even without any effort from their side. What will they do all day? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D-virtual-reality worlds, that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What's so sacred about useless bums who pass their time devouring artificial experiences in La-La Land?

• In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction.

• In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens.

• Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. More than 2,000 years ago thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’. Yet such doubts don’t really change history much unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals.

• In the past there were many things only humans could do. But now robots and computers are catching up, and may soon outperform humans in most tasks. True, computers function very differently from humans, and it seems unlikely that computers will become humanlike any time soon. In particular, it doesn’t seem that computers are about to gain consciousness and start experiencing emotions and sensations. Over the past half century there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness. As far as we know, computers in 2016 are no more conscious than their prototypes in the 1950s. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.

• Of course, by 2033 many new professions are likely to appear, for example, virtual-world designers. But such professions will probably require much more creativity and flexibility than current run-of-the-mill jobs, and it is unclear whether forty-year-old cashiers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if they do so, the pace of progress is such that within another decade they might have to reinvent themselves yet again. After all, algorithms might well outperform humans in designing virtual worlds too. The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms.

• ...Suppose you have two free hours a week, and are uncertain whether to use them playing chess or tennis. A good friend might ask: ‘What does your heart tell you?’ ‘Well,’ you answer, ‘as far as my heart is concerned, it’s obvious tennis is better. It’s also better for my cholesterol level and blood pressure. But my fMRI scans indicate I should strengthen my left pre-frontal cortex. In my family dementia is quite common, and my uncle had it at a very early age. The latest studies indicate that a weekly game of chess can help delay its onset.’

• Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, they can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but not an Apple or a Wikipedia.

• ...Meanwhile in the USA paranoid Republicans have accused Barack Obama of being a ruthless despot hatching conspiracies to destroy the foundations of American society – yet in eight years of his presidency he barely managed to pass a minor health-care reform.

• From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system through four basic methods:

  1: Increasing the number of processors.

  2: Increasing the variety of processors.

  3: Increasing the number of connections between processors.

  4: Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections.

Spiegel & Grau, 2018. ISBN 978-0525512172, Jonathan Cape, 2018. ISBN 978-1787330672

• Without criticising the liberal model, we cannot repair its faults or go beyond it. But please note that this book could have been written only when people are still relatively free to think what they like and to express themselves as they wish. If you value this book, you should also value the freedom of expression.

• In the beginning, the liberal story cared mainly about the liberties and privileges of middle-class European men, and seemed blind to the plight of working-class people, women, minorities and non-Westerners. When in 1918 victorious Britain and France talked excitedly about liberty, they were not thinking about the subjects of their worldwide empires.

• But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts.

• The loss of many traditional jobs in everything from art to healthcare will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs. GPs who focus on diagnosing known diseases and administering familiar treatments will probably be replaced by AI doctors. But precisely because of that, there will be much more money to pay human doctors and lab assistants to do groundbreaking research and develop new medicines or surgical procedures.

• As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more so than in Nazi Germany, and resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible. Not only will the regime know exactly how you feel – it could make you feel whatever it wants. The dictator might not be able to provide citizens with healthcare or equality, but he could make them love him and hate his opponents. Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or humans will come to live in ‘digital dictatorships’.

• But in reality, there is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness. Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve problems in a very different way.

• The race to obtain the data is already on, headed by data-giants such as Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these giants seem to have adopted the business model of ‘attention merchants’. They capture our attention by providing us with free information, services and entertainment, and they then resell our attention to advertisers. Yet the data-giants probably aim far higher than any previous attention merchant. Their true business isn’t to sell advertisements at all. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which is worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers – we are their product.

• What will happen once we can ask Google, ‘Hi Google, based on everything you know about cars, and based on everything you know about me (including my needs, my habits, my views on global warming, and even my opinions about Middle Eastern politics) – what is the best car for me?’ If Google can give us a good answer to that, and if we learn by experience to trust Google’s wisdom instead of our own easily manipulated feelings, what could possibly be the use of car advertisements?

• The so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the Arab world started in hopeful online communities, but once they emerged into the messy offline world, they were commandeered by religious fanatics and military juntas.

• In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel?

• I cannot name the 8 million people who share my Israeli citizenship, I have never met most of them, and I am very unlikely ever to meet them in the future. My ability to nevertheless feel loyal to this nebulous mass is not a legacy from my hunter-gatherer ancestors, but a miracle of recent history.

• If Greeks and Germans cannot agree on a common destiny, and if 500 million affluent Europeans cannot absorb a few million impoverished refugees, what chances do humans have of overcoming the far deeper conflicts that beset our global civilisation?

• Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7 million people. So why do we fear terrorism more than sugar, and why do governments lose elections because of sporadic terror attacks but not because of chronic air pollution?

• In the 1930s Japanese generals, admirals, economists and journalists concurred that without control of Korea, Manchuria and the Chinese coast, Japan was doomed to economic stagnation. They were all wrong. In fact, the famed Japanese economic miracle began only after Japan lost all its mainland conquests.

• When I think of the mystery of existence, I prefer to use other words, so as to avoid confusion. And unlike the God of the Islamic State and the Crusades – who cares a lot about names and above all about His most holy name – the mystery of existence doesn’t care an iota what names we apes give it.

• Not visiting any temples and not believing in any god is also a viable option. As the last few centuries have proved, we don’t need to invoke God’s name in order to live a moral life. Secularism can provide us with all the values we need.

• The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Seculars strive not to confuse truth with belief.

• I have participated in numerous private and public debates about gay marriage, and all too often some wise guy asks ‘If marriage between two men is OK, why not allow marriage between a man and a goat?’ From a secular perspective the answer is obvious. Healthy relationships require emotional, intellectual and even spiritual depth. A marriage lacking such depth will make you frustrated, lonely and psychologically stunted. Whereas two men can certainly satisfy the emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs of one another, a relationship with a goat cannot. Hence if you see marriage as an institution aimed at promoting human well-being – as secular people do – you would not dream of even raising such a bizarre question. Only people who see marriage as some kind of miraculous ritual might do so.

• One would have thought that conservatives would care far more about the conservation of the old ecological order, and about protecting their ancestral lands, forests and rivers. In contrast, progressives could be expected to be far more open to radical changes to the countryside, especially if the aim is to speed up progress and increase the human standard of living. However, once the party line has been set on these issues by various historical quirks, it has become second nature for conservatives to dismiss concerns about polluted rivers and disappearing birds, while left-wing progressives tend to fear any disruption to the old ecological order.

• Leaders are thus trapped in a double bind. If they stay in the centre of power, they will have an extremely distorted vision of the world. If they venture to the margins, they will waste too much of their precious time. And the problem will only get worse. In the coming decades, the world will become even more complex than it is today. Individual humans – whether pawns or kings – will consequently know even less about the technological gadgets, the economic currents, and the political dynamics that shape the world. As Socrates observed more than 2,000 years ago, the best we can do under such conditions is to acknowledge our own individual ignorance.

• Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic – rather, it increases your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health and sports – and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage.

• In the early twenty-first century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction. Very few people read the latest articles in the fields of machine learning or genetic engineering. Instead, movies such as The Matrix and Her and TV series such as Westworld and Black Mirror shape how people understand the most important technological, social and economic developments of our time.

• In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

• Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.3 More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations.

• So at twenty-five you introduce yourself on a dating site as ‘a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop’. At thirty-five you say you are ‘a gender-non-specific person undergoing age-adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before’.

• For years I lived under the impression that I was the master of my life, and the CEO of my own personal brand. But a few hours of meditation were enough to show me that I hardly had any control of myself. I was not the CEO – I was barely the gatekeeper. I was asked to stand at the gateway of my body – the nostrils – and just observe whatever comes in or goes out. Yet after a few moments I lost my focus and abandoned my post.

• The typical scientist doesn’t actually practise meditation herself. Rather, she invites experienced meditators to her laboratory, covers their heads with electrodes, asks them to meditate, and observes the resulting brain activities. That can teach us many interesting things about the brain, but if the aim is to understand the mind, we are missing some of the most important insights.

• If we are willing to make such efforts in order to understand foreign cultures, unknown species and distant planets, it might be worth working just as hard in order to understand our own minds. And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us.

• Can you name a great work of art inspired by the Old Testament? Oh, that's easy: Michelangelo's David, Verdi's Nabucco, Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. Do you know of any famous work inspired by the New Testament? Piece of cake: Leonardo's Last Supper, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Monty Python's Life of Brian. Now for the real test: can you list a few masterpieces inspired by the Talmud?

  Though Jewish communities that studied the Talmud spread over large parts of the world, they did not play an important role in the building of the Chinese empires, in the European voyages of discovery, in the establishment of the democratic system, or in the Industrial Revolution. The coin, the university, parliament, the bank, the compass, the printing press, and the steam engine were all invented by Gentiles.

• A lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story, even if their material conditions are still relatively good. In the 20th century, what was common to all the stories—the liberal, the fascist, the communist—is that the big heroes of the story were the common people. Not necessarily all people, but if you lived, say, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, life was very grim. But when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future, you were there. You looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in heroic poses, and it was obvious that this is the future. Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of, you know, these big ideas and big words about "machine learning" and "genetic engineering" and "blockchain" and "globalization", and they are not there. They are no longer part of the story of the future. And I think that—again, this is a hypothesis—if I try to understand and to connect to the deep resentment of people in many places around the world, part of what might be going on there is people realize—and they're correct in thinking that—that, "The future doesn't need me. You have all these smart people in California and in New York and in Beijing, and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bio-engineering and global connectivity and whatnot, and they don't need me. So maybe if they are nice, they will throw some crumbs my way, like universal basic income." But it's much worse psychologically to feel that you are useless than to feel that you are exploited.
  • "Yuval Noah Harari Reveals the Real Dangers Ahead" (13:59). The TED Audio Collective, 2022.

• Yuval Noah Harari: If you go back to the middle of the 20th century—and it doesn't matter if you're in the United States with Roosevelt, or if you're in Germany with Hitler, or even in the USSR with Stalin—and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers. You need them. You don't have any kind of future without them. And now, fast forward to the early 21st century, when we just don't need the vast majority of the population.

  Chris Anderson: Because?

  Yuval Noah Harari: Because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like, again, artificial intelligence, bioengineering. Most people don't contribute anything to that, except perhaps their data. And whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant, and will make it possible to replace the people.

  • "Yuval Noah Harari Reveals the Real Dangers Ahead" (16:32). The TED Audio Collective, 2022.

Harari, Yuval Noah (2024). Nexus: a brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-593-73681-4. 

• Humans are organic beings who live by cyclical biological time. ... Even the money market respects these biological cycles. The New York Stock Exchange is open Monday to Friday, from 9:30 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon, and is closed on holidays like Independence Day and New Year’s Day. If a war erupts at 4:01 p.m. on a Friday, the market won’t react to it until Monday morning.
  In contrast, a network of computers can always be on. Computers are consequently pushing humans toward a new kind of existence in which we are always connected and always monitored. In some contexts, like health care, this could be a boon. In other contexts, like for citizens of totalitarian states, this could be a disaster. Even if the network is potentially benign, the very fact that it is always on might be damaging to organic entities like humans, because it will take away our opportunities to disconnect and relax. If an organism never has a chance to rest, it eventually collapses and dies. But how will we get a relentless network to slow down and allow us some breaks?

• Imagine a situation—in twenty years, say—when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possesses the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel, and CEO in your country: every text they ever sent, every web search they ever made, every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took. Would you still be living in an independent country, or would you now be living in a data colony? What happens when your country finds itself utterly dependent on digital infrastructures and AI-powered systems over which it has no effective control?
  Such a situation can lead to a new kind of data colonialism in which control of data is used to dominate faraway colonies. Mastery of AI and data could also give the new empires control of people’s attention. As we have already discussed, in the 2010s American social media giants like Facebook and YouTube upended the politics of distant countries like Myanmar and Brazil in pursuit of profit. Future digital empires may do something similar for political interests.

• During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain was in many places literally made of metal: barbed wire separated one country from another. Now the world is increasingly divided by the Silicon Curtain. The Silicon Curtain is made of code, and it passes through every smartphone, computer, and server in the world. The code on your smartphone determines on which side of the Silicon Curtain you live, which algorithms run your life, who controls your attention, and where your data flows.
  It is becoming difficult to access information across the Silicon Curtain, say between China and the United States, or between Russia and the EU. Moreover, the two sides are increasingly run on different digital networks, using different computer codes. Each sphere obeys different regulations and serves different purposes.

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