A few months before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Ronald Reagan made a bold prediction: the “Goliath of totalitarian control” would soon be brought down by the “David of the microchip”. “Information is the oxygen of the modern age,” the former US president told an audience in London. “It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across electrified, booby-trapped borders. Breezes of electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as if it was lace.”
In one sense, this techno-optimistic judgment was sound: the Soviet empire soon imploded under the weight of its own misinformation. But to the historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari, Reagan’s prediction also encapsulates the “naive view of information” that remains just as fashionable today but is alarmingly wrong.
The simple equation that more information automatically produces more open and prosperous societies is both delusional and ahistorical, according to Harari. The proliferation of information may be essential for the discovery of objective and scientific truth but it can also be exploited to impose societal order — or inflame disorder. What matters is the ways in which we curate and process that information, the job of information networks. Every smartphone contains more information than the ancient Library of Alexandria but that has not made humanity commensurately smarter. Information networks can disseminate fantasies as well as facts.