NEXUS by Yuval Harari

We have read the Coming Wave before and I think/hope that people will be interested in this one as well it is a lot to take in but we will see… NYT says about it:
„First, it must be said that the subtitle — “A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to A.I.” — is misleading. Really, what we have is two separate books, neither brief. The first 200 pages are indeed historical in their way. Unfortunately, this is a dizzying, all-in version of history that swerves unsatisfyingly from Assyrian clay tablets to a 19th-century cholera outbreak to an adaptation of the “Ramayana” on Indian TV to the Peasants’ Revolt in medieval England to the Holocaust in Romania, and so on. It doesn’t feel controlled, or even particularly expert — and the effect is a little like a flight where the person sitting next to you is well-read, hyper-caffeinated and determined to tell you his Theory of Everything.

In a nutshell, Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value; democracies, by contrast, are transparent information networks in which citizens are able to evaluate and, if necessary, correct bad data.“

I am happy if you join me in reading and discussing this book.