Why does easier access to information sometimes spread dangerous ideas instead of truth? What can history teach us about managing the flow of knowledge in society?
In his book Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari explores how the democratization of knowledge has shaped human civilization. From written language to the printing press, each advancement in sharing information has brought both progress and peril, fundamentally transforming how societies function.
Keep reading to discover fascinating historical examples that reveal important lessons about information technology’s power to reshape our world.
The Democratization of Knowledge
Throughout human history, information and power have moved together. Harari explains that each time a new technology has made information more readily accessible, it has fundamentally reshaped society. First, written language, inscribed on stone or clay tablets, enabled our ancestors to keep records and codify their rules of government. Next, books produced by hand—on tablets, scrolls, parchment, and papyrus—enabled large bodies of knowledge on law, history, religion, and other topics to be shared in writing and over time and distance, instead of just orally and person-to-person. Then, the printing press enabled the widespread dissemination of information and therefore the democratization of knowledge.
(Shortform note: As Harari notes, the ways in which technology makes information more accessible have always been tied to shifts in power: The advent of written language helped governments enforce laws, hand-produced books allowed experts to curate and disseminate knowledge, and the printing press circulated diverse ideas. This explains why experts often frame literacy as a human right. The ability to read helps people make sense of the world’s ideas, empowers them to put the world’s knowledge into action, and enables them to participate in political and social life.)
Harari explains that this democratization of knowledge had unexpected consequences that reveal important lessons about how new information technologies can transform society.
#1: Technology Makes Information—Good and Bad—Easier to Access
When new technology makes it easier to share information, Harari explains, it accelerates the spread of both truth and lies. The invention of the movable-type printing press offers a striking illustration of this principle. While historians often celebrate how the printing press enabled the Scientific Revolution by spreading new ideas about experimental methods, quantitative thought, and rigorous inquiry, its first major impact was far darker: It supercharged the spread of dangerous misinformation.
The printing press didn’t immediately usher in an era of scientific thought. In fact, 200 years passed between the invention of movable type and the real beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Long before scientists like Galileo and Copernicus used the printing press to share new kinds of scientific thought and codify novel methods of gathering knowledge about the world, one of Europe’s first bestsellers was the Malleus Maleficarum (or Hammer of Witches), a manual for hunting witches written by German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. The book promoted a conspiracy theory that witches were part of a Satan-led campaign to destroy humanity.
By distributing copies of this text across Europe, Kramer spread his superstitious ideas, which he falsely represented as the position of the Catholic Church. His paranoid and misogynistic claims about women being vulnerable to demonic influences gained widespread acceptance. Witchcraft came to be seen as the highest of crimes and the gravest of sins, leading to centuries of brutal witch hunts that claimed tens of thousands of lives.
| How the Witch Hunts Overlapped With the Scientific Revolution As Harari notes, while the printing press would spread scientific ideas, it first spread superstition, fear, and moral panic. Furthermore, science and superstition shared more ideological ground than one might expect. Stuart Clark writes in Thinking With Demons that demonological beliefs influenced scientific assumptions of the era: Rather than being straightforwardly opposed to these ideas, the science of the period often operated within the intellectual framework of demonology and a belief in witchcraft. Furthermore, religious disagreements about witchcraft generally occurred within sects rather than across them, showing the pervasiveness of these beliefs. Even prominent scientific figures like astronomer Johannes Kepler—who defended Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system—didn’t reject the existence of witches and magic. As chronicled in Ulinka Rublack’s The Astronomer and the Witch and fictionalized in Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, Kepler became involved in a lengthy trial when he defended his mother against accusations of witchcraft in the early 1600s. This occurred during a period of deep religious conflict in Europe, a century after the Protestant Reformation and on the eve of the Thirty Years’ War. |
Just like today’s bestsellers, the Malleus Maleficarum reveals what sorts of ideas captured people’s attention when the new technology of the movable-type printing press emerged. But more importantly, its success illustrates one of Harari’s key observations: Making information easier to access doesn’t guarantee that truth or wisdom will prevail. While Kramer’s superstitious ideas might sound laughable today, the potential for extreme messages to manipulate people’s thinking and whip societies into the kind of frenzy that fueled the witch hunts remains. In fact, Harari argues that this potential is exactly what makes AI—our newest revolution in sharing information—so dangerous.
(Shortform note: Historians agree with Harari that the surge in cheap printed materials, like broadsides and pamphlets, enabled sensational stories about witchcraft to spread widely among the masses in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not only could people access new writing about witches, but they could also access new images: With the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut, many publications featured lurid woodcut images of witches that helped establish stereotypical images of witches in the European imagination. These images depicted the witch as an old, bitter woman living on the fringes of society, keeping animal familiars, stirring cauldrons, and consorting with demons—fueling paranoia and hysteria across Europe.)
#2: Societies Have to Balance Truth Against Order in Controlling the Flow of Information
The world looks different now than it did when there were witch hunts in Europe, but society’s underlying mechanisms for spreading ideas—true and false—are still basically the same. Harari calls these mechanisms “information networks”: They’re a fundamental structure underlying our society, and they’re made up of groups of people who share stories that spread the truth (or circulate misinformation) and create order (or engender chaos).
In managing the flow of information among people, social groups have a choice to make: Do they want to prioritize the spread of truth, or control the flow of information to maintain social order? What we should hope for, Harari explains, is information networks that can help us strike a balance between truth and order. Enabling a flow of information that errs too far on the side of one or the other can have disastrous consequences.
What Happens When We Value Truth More Than Order?
As we saw during the Scientific Revolution, human society can flourish when we seek the truth. It pushes human thought forward when we’re open to questioning long-held beliefs and replacing disproven information with updated observations. But, Harari notes, a tradeoff typically occurs: An emphasis on truth comes at the expense of order. The perception that the facts are changing can be destabilizing. For example, Galileo’s discovery of the heliocentric nature of our solar system upended the religious societies of Renaissance Europe. Likewise, Darwin’s theory of evolution threw the Victorian-era understanding of the natural world into chaos.
What Happens When We Value Order More Than Truth?
On the other hand, if a society considers order its highest value, it can take control of the flow of information to achieve that end. (If you manipulate the flow of information, you can manipulate what people think and do.) Unlike in a democracy—where information is shared freely with citizens so they can fact-check it and correct errors and falsehoods, even those put forth by the state—a dictatorship doesn’t want open conversation. Authoritarian regimes selectively promote ideas without regard for whether they’re demonstrably true or untrue. The logic goes that, if knowledge becomes too freely available, then the stories the regime is built upon could be thrown into doubt and potentially rejected by the state’s citizens.
