Hi – I’m reading “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari and wanted to share this quote with you.
“Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.”
“Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.”
This will not be a return to the days of Hitler and Stalin. Digital dictatorships will be as different from Nazi Germany as Nazi Germany was different from ancien régime France.
Louis XIV was a centralizing autocrat, but he did not have the technology to build a modern totalitarian state. He suffered no opposition to his rule, yet in the absence of radios, telephones, and trains, he had little control over the day-to-day lives of peasants in remote Breton villages, or even of townspeople in the heart of Paris. He had neither the will nor the ability to establish a mass party, a countrywide youth movement, or a national education system.30 It was the new technologies of the twentieth century that gave Hitler both the motivation and the power to do such things. We cannot predict the motivations and powers of digital dictatorships in 2084, but it is very unlikely that they will just copy Hitler and Stalin. Those gearing themselves up to refight the battles of the 1930s might be caught off guard by an attack from a totally different direction.”
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