How Stories and Bureaucracy Create Power: Yuval Noah Harari on Information Networks

In Chapter 3 of Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari examines how stories, documents and bureaucratic systems allow large societies to organise information and exercise power.

Mark and Jeremy discuss the shift from oral storytelling to written records, lists and administrative systems. Stories help people create shared beliefs, while documents turn those beliefs into laws, institutions, identities and systems of control.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How stories allow large groups of people to cooperate

• What Harari means by intersubjective reality

• Why writing transformed human societies

• How lists, records and documents enabled bureaucracy

• The relationship between information systems and political power

• How documentation supports institutions while limiting human judgement

• Whether bureaucracy makes societies more efficient or less adaptable

• Why people remember narratives more easily than administrative information

• What Shakespeare, Kafka and Alan Watts reveal about stories and systems

• How AI and misinformation are changing modern information networks

The central question is whether humans control the systems they create or gradually become shaped by their rules, categories and records.

This conversation examines how storytelling creates shared meaning, how bureaucracy converts meaning into organised power, and what these systems can teach us about artificial intelligence and the future of information.

--Timestamps(00:00) Book Lovers(00:39) William Shakespeare(02:46) Nations Are Intersubjective Realities(04:31) Dreams, Songs And Fantasies (05:53) Writing As The Catalyst For Bureaucracy(07:34) Stories Are Intersubjective Realities(09:39) Computer Says No(11:21) Alan Watts And A Conversation With Myself(14:34) Are Humans Organised?(19:30) Movies About Bureaucracy(21:31) Emergent Systems(24:44) Non Human Information Gets To Jeremy(30:10) Disinformation Debunking
--Read more: www.thinkingonpaper.xyz

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