In the last 100,000 years, sapiens have gained immense power. But despite our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we have now fallen into an existential crisis. The world is on the brink of ecological disaster. Political tensions are rising. Misinformation is rampant. And we are charging headlong into the age of artificial intelligence – an alien network of information that threatens to annihilate us. Why, despite all that we have achieved, are we so self-destructive?

The Nexus looks through the lens of human history to understand how the flow of information has brought us here. Guiding us from the Stone Age and the shaping of the biblical narrative to the invention of the printing press, the rise of mass media, and the recent resurgence of populism, Yuval Noah Harari invites us to reflect on the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power.

It examines how systems like the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, and the Soviet Union used information to achieve their goals, whether good or ill. And it discusses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Information is neither the raw material of truth nor simply a weapon. The Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these two extremes, rediscovering along the way our common human trait.