Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists
P u b l i s h e d W e e k l y, N e w s, A r t s, & S t o r i e s F r o m T e x a s
Vol. 1, Issue 3,
Oct. 28, 2025
page 1
Yuval Noah Harari Nexus
The Information Flood and the Art of Staying Human,
D. M, Allison, The Mission News, Volume 1, Issue 3, . Oct. 22, 2025.
It’s a great time for getting old. We’ve got GPS so we can’t get lost, YouTube so we can’t get bored, and breakthroughs in research and supplements so we can’t quite die ..... yet. We can hear any piece of music ever recorded for free, see what’s going on anywhere in the world in real time, and now, just to keep things interesting, we are the bewildered witnesses to the birth of a new kind of intelligence: artificial, but is it really that smart, well yes and no.
AI, Harari says, is not just another gadget. It’s an evolutionary event, something on the scale of the three-legged chair, the spoken word, the printing press, radio, or television. Each of those inventions rewired civilization. This one may rewrite it entirely.
So the question becomes: is it even worth doing a blog or newsletter anymore when the entire world is already talking, shouting, and posting 24/7? Do we really need more “content creators” when our eyes, minds, and, if science could manage it, right up our snozzolas until we have pod-cast creators coming out of our ears?
Maybe the answer isn’t less content, but truer content. The kind that digs in, questions the noise, and remembers that words are the ground pigments, sentences the paint, paragraphs the composition, and the page, the canvas we still get to paint on. We need artists not more clickbait. That’s where The Mission News comes in. We’ll talk about what we’re all facing: health, AI, finances, memory, and what it means to keep creating when the machines are learning faster than we can forget. We will give artists, especially those who’ve been at it for a while, a platform to write, to argue, to stay visible.
Which brings us to Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI - a sweeping, unnerving look at how every civilization in history has been built on one thing: the flow of information. And how, for the first time, that flow might no longer need us.
In Nexus, Harari argues that the story of humanity isn’t just about wars, migrations, or technologies, but fundamentally about information networks, the flows, structures, and systems through which humans share meaning, build power, and organize societies. He takes us from the very origins of our species, when oral storytelling allowed small bands of Homo sapiens to cooperate beyond kinship, to the present moment when artificial intelligence threatens to reshape what “information” even is.
The book begins by reminding us that long before writing, humans relied on myth, ritual, camp-fire stories: inter-subjective worlds that enabled large groups to trust one another, coordinate, cooperate. These early networks were informal, slow, but powerful: they created the glue of shared reality. Over time, the invention of writing, the codification of religious texts (for instance the Bible) and the rise of bureaucracy made information more durable and manipulable, enabling states, empires, and institutions to scale. (1)
Harari draws attention to the double-edged nature of information networks. Yes, they empower printing, mass media, and later the internet expanded human reach and connectivity. But they also enable deception, manipulation, propaganda, and totalitarian control. He uses vivid historical examples: the printing press helped spread witch-hunts; bureaucratic systems in Stalinism and Nazism turned information into instruments of control rather than truth. (1)
One of his key claims is that information is not the same as truth. In fact, he suggests that many of the large networks we rely on emphasize order more than wisdom and stability rather than accuracy. He argues that what humans often need to bind large societies together are myths, shared fictions, symbols: currencies, nations, religions. These are information networks that keep things running even when they don’t correspond to objective reality. (2)
As the narrative moves into the digital age, the stakes shift dramatically. Harari asserts that we are now entering an era where information networks are powered by machines, by algorithms that can generate ideas, make decisions, and manipulate human attention. He refers to this as “alien intelligence.” The difference isn’t just speed or volume of data, but autonomy: this intelligence may not simply serve humans but may shape us. (1)
He warns that this transition threatens our institutions, our democracies, and our understanding of reality. Because if information no longer flows only among humans, but through machine-mediated networks that we don’t fully control, then power may be concentrated in unexpected nodes: in tech platforms, in algorithms, not in human deliberation. The potential for misinformation, manipulation, and surveillance is vast. He urges that we recognize this moment as the greatest information revolution yet, unequalled in history. (3)
Yet Harari does not leave us entirely in despair. He points toward the possibility of using our knowledge of past network revolutions — the way writing or printing or radio changed societies — as a guide. If we understand the mechanisms, we may act to shape them: requiring transparency, decentralization, self-correcting mechanisms in our digital networks. In other words: information networks are not fate; they reflect human choices and structures. (4)
In sum: Nexus presents the arc of human history as a cascade of ever-expanding information networks: from myth to scripture, from parchment to printing, from telegrams to smartphones to machine-learning algorithms. It challenges our sense that more information automatically means more truth or more freedom: instead, it shows that networks of meaning can bind or blind us, liberate or control us. And in the age of AI, the question is no longer simply “who controls the network?” but “who designs the network — and for whose purposes?” The book is a clarion call: if we are to steer this next great revolution rather than be swept aside by it, we must reflect on the past and act in the present.
1. Fox, Killian, Tue 10 Sep 2024 02.00 EDT, modified on Wed 2 Apr 2025 13.44 EDT, The Guardian
2. Wikipedia
3. Suleyman, Mustafa, author of The Coming Wave
4. Cummins, Walter, Thursday, October 30, 2025, California Review of Books