Since the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Thales proclaimed that everything was water, ambitious theorists have sought a single element capable of explaining the physical or social world. For Karl Marx, history unfolded through the dynamics of class struggle. Given our era’s dominance by digital information and computation, it is hardly surprising that Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, argues that not only history but also politics and economics must be understood entirely “in terms of information flows.” For Harari, information is not merely the key to knowledge but also to societal power. Although information can accurately portray reality, more frequently, it serves as a tool for manipulation.

According to Harari, the specific form this manipulation takes is determined by the prevailing information technologies. He warns that today’s technologies possess unprecedented potency, enabling manipulation on a scale never before possible. Indeed, he cautions that artificial intelligence, though currently shaped by human hands, may develop sufficient autonomy and power to manipulate humanity itself. The dominant beings of tomorrow, therefore, will not descend from the stars as imagined in science fiction. We ourselves are creating the equivalent of space aliens right here on Earth.

Harari has achieved worldwide acclaim as an intellectual, selling millions of copies of his previous books. In Sapiens, he argued that homo sapiens rose to dominance through storytelling and myths that facilitated large-scale human cooperation. In Homo Deus he contended that humanity’s quest to attain godlike powers—particularly through artificial intelligence—threatens our very agency, potentially reducing us to servitude. Nexus, similarly, is engagingly written, fast-paced, and full of elegant and perceptive observations. Nevertheless, the book’s central thesis is excessively reductionist. The trajectory of humanity is determined by more than mere information. Human desires, interests, and values play crucial roles.

Harari is correct that information creates a social nexus and therefore “states and markets are information networks absorbing information from the environment.” But to describe the way states and markets operate we cannot consider merely information in the abstract, but also human interests and desires. As Adam Smith famously wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” That constellation of interests is needed to explain why markets work spontaneously. To be sure, information is also exchanged within a state as well as a market, but the interests of citizens vis-a-vis one another in a state are hugely different from those in a market, explaining why the state requires a coercive rather than spontaneous form of order. And while information is always being exchanged within a family, the nature of that exchange as well as other characteristics of domestic life are explained by other kinds of desires and interests, particularly mutual love, and dependence.

Values, indeed, significantly shape the consequences of information—an insight Harari’s reductionism overlooks at times. For example, he views seventeenth-century witch hunts merely as products of expansive information networks: “Professional witch hunters offered their services to governments and municipalities, charging substantial fees. Archives were filled with detailed reports of witch-hunting expeditions, protocols of witch trials, and lengthy confessions extracted from alleged witnesses.” He thus concludes provocatively that witch hunts were simply a “problem caused by information, worsened by more information.” Yet, witch hunts arose from complex social phenomena, rooted in psychological mechanisms such as fear, paranoia, and collective anxiety. Communities searching for explanations amid unexplained misfortunes, like disease, often turned on vulnerable individuals. Such tragic episodes stemmed fundamentally from human emotions and interests, not merely the flow of information.

From a legal perspective, defective trial processes themselves reflected a value: the government’s minimal regard for truth. Witch trials operated under a presumption of guilt rather than innocence, often accepting hearsay evidence and forced confessions obtained through torture and coercion. To attribute witch hunts simply to an excess of information is superficial. With a more flourishing society and fairer judicial standards, such accusations would have swiftly been dismissed. More information accurately assessed could have provided salvation rather than condemnation. Crucially, this process depended significantly on the values and character of the individuals involved. Consider John Winthrop Jr., a scientifically inclined Puritan, who acquitted all accused witches brought before him in Connecticut, demonstrating clearly that character, not merely information flows, guided outcomes.

Harari’s neglect of values leads him similarly astray in his critique of modern informational practices, wrongly condemning them wholesale rather than discerning that their virtue or vice depends on their systemic context. For instance, Harari denounces social credit ratings—systems designed to score individuals based on social behavior, trustworthiness, and compliance with societal norms or laws. While China’s implementation of such ratings is rightly criticized, the true issue lies not in information per se but in the authoritarian process through which it is imposed. The Chinese Communist Party unilaterally defines social credit criteria and mandates their rigid application. Here, authoritarianism—not information itself—is the genuine problem.

Contrast that with credit ratings—another form of social credit—in a market economy. They too score people based on trustworthiness, but no government has decreed what goes into the ratings. Companies and employers can then make of them what they wish. The great virtues of these ratings come from the spontaneous order in which they are created and deployed. Reputation has been a useful screen for deciding whether to deal with others from time immemorial. But word of mouth is ineffective and inefficient in the modern world. Credit ratings fill a need for more than just information, and it is the market ideally that determines their content and deployment.

Harari also sneers at the value of freedom to address the downside of information flows. He argues that libertarians are wrong to believe that free speech will create a marketplace of ideas that will align information flows with the truth. But he caricatures libertarian ideas of free speech when he suggests that they believe this marketplace is perfect. The more sophisticated argument of libertarians and classical liberals is that freedom of speech will align information with truth better than other systems overall. Just because markets sometimes fail, it does not mean that government regulation will do better. The Nirvana fallacy—comparing the market with an idealized government-imposed solution—is particularly foolish when it comes to information because government actors have powerful incentives to suppress truths that are inconvenient to their maintenance of power.

Moreover, free speech should be seen as part of a larger framework for good government—that is to say, a government that aligns policy decisions with reality. Representative democracy creates a feedback loop: If the people are fooled by incorrect political information, representatives have incentives not to act on it, because if adverse consequences result, such as low economic growth or crime, the electorate will hold the representatives responsible, not themselves. And representative democracy works even better if it proceeds on federalist principles. Free speech ought to be guaranteed across the whole nation, but government should operate as much as possible on the state or local level. If those more local governments act on poor information, they will lose people and investments even if their leaders are reelected. Foot voting—another kind of freedom—intensifies the feedback loop, sifting good social information from bad. One of its advantages is that not everyone needs to move to put pressure on government, because the loss of even some talented people and well-run companies reduces the revenues of a badly governed state.

Thus, free speech works best when it is located in larger mechanisms of self-correction. Harari praises democracy’s greater power of self-correction as compared to authoritarian systems but surprisingly does not understand how free speech can be strengthened by well-designed mechanisms within it. The history of human flourishing is propelled by greater freedoms, not information flows.

Harari also harms his credibility by making contentious claims about America’s past and present. He says, for instance, in the early days of the United States “only wealthy men had … political rights.” But wealth qualifications were more modest in the United States than elsewhere and the Constitution in particular was ratified by an electorate that included people of modest means. Harari also claims that the Democratic Party today is the “guardian of the old order.” But reality is obviously far more complicated when many in that party are challenging that order, as in proposing to defund the police and defy the binary distinction between men and women.

More generally, Nexus demonstrates the inherent weaknesses of the “big history” approach. Big history, striving for simplicity, seeks a unified framework to account for a vast range of historical phenomena overlooking the profound variations in context and circumstance. Although Harari did not invent this genre, his work is perhaps the most current popular example of it. The problem is that his approach disregards a crucial insight familiar to anyone experienced with rigorous social analyses: historical events invariably arise from multiple intertwined causes.

Even more troublingly, though, big history systematically undervalues human agency—both individual, such as John Winthrop Jr.’s principled intervention to acquit witches, and collective, like that of the Framers to establish a political system conducive to aligning information with the truth and thus with human flourishing. While the nineteenth-century theory of Great Men overemphasized the impact of singular influential figures, contemporary big history errs in the opposite direction by dethroning the power of agency. In doing so, it not only diminishes the accuracy of historical narratives but also impoverishes their richness. Recognizing the decisive role of human choice and character produces not only a fuller, more engaging portrayal of our shared past but accurately reminds us of our responsibilities today.