There is a particular kind of intellectual experience that many younger readers have when they encounter the books of Yuval Noah Harari. It is not just that they find him interesting. It is not even just that they find him clever. It is that they feel, often for the first time, that someone has finally given them the whole picture. History suddenly seems to make sense. Religion, empire, capitalism, science, human evolution, artificial intelligence, the future of democracy, all of it appears to fit into one sweeping explanation. The world that previously felt messy, crowded, and full of contradictions now looks legible. There is a line running through it. There is a story. There is a key. Harari seems to possess that key, and if you read him in your mid-teens or early twenties, at exactly the point when you are trying to make sense of the world at large, it is not surprising if you come away with the feeling that you have encountered something close to gospel. Harari’s books overall have sold over 45 million copies in 65 languages. That makes him, probably, the bestselling “anthropologist” of all time.
The problem with Harari is not that he is ill-read. Quite the opposite. He is extremely good at digesting large amounts of material from anthropology, history, biology, sociology, and political thought, and then presenting it in a style so lucid and confident that it feels less like interpretation than revelation. He gives the impression that he is not arguing with you, but simply showing you what has always already been there. This is why many of his readers become less curious after reading him, not more. They feel they now understand the basic logic. They may continue reading, but the real discovery seems to have happened already. Harari does not just inform. He closes. He gives the pleasure of completion.
And this is exactly where the danger begins. Because the main problem with Harari is not factual error. It is ontological. He has a picture of what reality is most fundamentally made of, and that picture determines everything else he says. The picture is wrong in a particular, diagnosable way. Once you see the wrongness clearly, the shape of his thought becomes predictable, and so do the places where it most seriously misleads.
This essay is an attempt to state that diagnosis clearly, in a form accessible to a reader who does not yet have a specialist vocabulary. It is also an attempt to do something that Harari's critics often avoid: to take seriously what he gets right, and to show that each of his real perceptions is a partial glimpse of something that his underlying framework cannot properly describe. He is not wrong because he sees nothing. He is wrong because he keeps pointing at real things and then misidentifying what they are.
The Signature Move
The signature trick in Harari's writing is easy to miss because it is done so smoothly. He begins with something that is partly true, often quite illuminating, and often drawn from real scholarship. Humans do indeed live through symbolic systems. Large-scale cooperation does depend on institutions that are not natural objects in the way mountains or tigers are natural objects. Money, states, law, religion, markets, corporations, human rights, all these require shared recognition. None of that is foolish.
The problem begins when this insight is turned into the claim that human life is fundamentally or primarily organised by "imagined orders" or "shared fictions," as though that one phrase had now captured the essence of the matter. The phrase is memorable. It is elegant. It does some genuine work. But it also immediately starts flattening differences that are actually decisive.
A corporation, a god, a marriage, a debt, a constitution, and a childhood friendship are not all "the same kind of thing" simply because none of them is a rock. They do not exist in the same way. They do not depend on the same forms of maintenance. They do not break down in the same way. They do not affect human life through the same pathways. One of Harari's great weaknesses is that once he has found a powerful phrase, he starts using it as if it were a master key. But master keys are usually signs that someone has stopped paying attention to doors.
What is missing from this picture is not a fact or two. What is missing is a whole layered architecture of how human life actually operates. Harari writes as if symbols were the engine of human existence, and everything else, bodies, relationships, places, materials, were a kind of supporting apparatus that symbols organise from above. But this gets the direction of dependence exactly backwards. Symbols are not the foundation of human life. They are a relatively late, relatively flexible, and relatively derivative layer that is always anchored in something more basic.
To see this clearly, it helps to name what the more basic layers actually are.
Five Mediations and Levels of Recursivity
Any human life, anywhere in the world, is continuously organised through at least five irreducible dimensions. A person exists as an embodied, sensing being, this is the first dimension, what we might call embodiment. A person exists with others, in ongoing webs of care, dependency, attention, and mutual adjustment, this is being-with. A person exists in a particular place, a particular landscape, a particular shelter, a particular climate, this is dwelling. A person exists among durable physical things, tools, objects, infrastructures that persist and constrain, this is multimateriality. And a person exists in language, naming, narrative, ritual, and symbolic articulation, this is multisymbolism.
These five dimensions are not separate. They operate together, all the time, inseparably. You cannot have embodiment without dwelling, or being-with without embodiment, or symbolism without the bodies and relationships and materials through which symbols are carried. They are not stacked on top of each other in a hierarchy. They are simultaneously active in any moment of lived life.
But they are not equal in one specific respect. They differ in how directly they hurt when they go wrong. If embodiment fails, hunger, injury, exhaustion, the failure is immediate and total. If being-with fails, isolation, betrayal, grief, the failure reaches bone-deep. If dwelling fails, displacement, unsafety, unfamiliarity, ordinary life becomes impossible. If material arrangements fail, no shelter, no food, broken infrastructure, the rest collapses quickly. Symbolism fails too, but more slowly, and it can sustain internal elaboration long after it has lost touch with the other four. A symbol system can spin out ornate descriptions of a world it no longer makes contact with. The other four cannot.
This is the first crucial asymmetry. Symbolism is the most flexible mediation because it has the fewest built-in constraints. It can redescribe endlessly. It can extend without friction. It can generate ever more complicated articulations long after the ground has shifted under it. This is what makes it powerful. It is also what makes it uniquely prone to overreach.
The second axis that matters for understanding Harari's mistake concerns the levels at which any of these mediations operate. Consider something as simple as having breakfast with a family member. At the first level, most of what happens is not articulated at all. Hands find cups. Bodies move around each other. Eyes meet without comment. Bread is passed. This is what we might call the seamless level, the level at which coordination happens without anyone having to think about it, without words, without explicit attention. Most of lived life operates here.
Occasionally something at this level goes slightly wrong. A hand reaches where another hand already is. A silence stretches a beat too long. A face registers something the words are not registering. Nothing has been said yet, but something has been felt. This is the felt-misalignment level, the level at which coordination starts to strain and the strain becomes noticeable as a bodily, relational, atmospheric tension. Still no words. But something is off.
If the strain continues, at some point it gets articulated. Someone says something. The feeling finds words. The situation is named. This is the articulation level, where symbolism enters and the felt becomes sayable. It is a real transition, and it is valuable, because it makes coordination possible across distance, time, and strangers. But it is not where the action began. It is a response to what has already been happening at the first two levels.
And finally, articulations sometimes get stabilised into durable categories, institutions, or routines. "This is how we have breakfast." "This is what it means to be a family." "This is what counts as a meal." These stabilisations are the fourth level, the level at which articulation congeals into something that can be reused, taught, enforced. Laws operate at this level. So do institutions. So do large-scale cultural categories. Stabilisations are enormously useful because they allow coordination across scale. They are how millions of strangers can cooperate without having to negotiate everything from scratch each time.
Both of these axes, the five mediations and the recursivity levels, describe a layered architecture in which symbols and stabilisations are real but late. They are the part of the architecture that is most visible, most elaborable, and most detachable. But they are not what the architecture is built on. The architecture is built on embodiment, on being-with, on dwelling, on material continuity, and on the seamless and felt levels of coordination that operate below articulation entirely.
Harari's writing systematically confuses this layered architecture with a flat one. He treats symbols as if they were primary. He treats stabilisations as if they were the ground. He has almost nothing to say about seamless coordination or felt misalignment, and the bodies, places, and materials that hold everything together appear in his account mostly as scenery for the symbolic drama. This is what makes his books feel weightless when you read them a second time. They are floating. They move quickly and elegantly across vast domains because they never actually touch the ground.
What Idealism Actually Is
There is a name for the kind of mistake Harari makes, and it is worth using it precisely because it is often used loosely. The name is idealism.
In ordinary speech, calling someone an idealist usually means that they are hopeful, or principled, or naive. In philosophy, the word means something quite specific: the claim that ideas, concepts, or symbolic systems are the fundamental reality, and that everything else, bodies, matter, relationships, places, is somehow secondary or derivative, generated from or explained by the symbolic layer. Classical idealism in this sense is associated with Hegel, with certain readings of Plato, and in a modified form with a great deal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. It is not a stupid position. Some very serious thinkers have held versions of it. But it has a characteristic weakness, which is that it elevates the most flexible and least-constrained layer of reality to the position of foundation.
This is what Harari does. He does not announce that he is an idealist. He does not cite Hegel. He presents himself as an empirical, historical, evidence-based writer. But the structure of his arguments is idealist in the strict sense. Once he has identified symbolic systems as the key to human life, everything else becomes something that those symbolic systems organise from above. Bodies become vehicles for stories. Relationships become performances of shared fiction. Places become scenery. Materials become resources that stories allocate. This is not a caricature of his position. It is the through-line that connects Sapiens to Homo Deus to his writing on AI.
It is worth pausing on why idealism is a particularly weak foundation, not just a debatable one. Classical materialism, the opposite error, which treats everything as reducible to physical matter, is also wrong, but it is wrong in a more stable way. Material processes have built-in failure conditions. Matter resists. It breaks. It decays. It requires energy. It imposes limits. A materialist who has misdescribed reality will quickly encounter pushback from reality itself, because material processes do not politely accommodate misdescription. This does not make materialism true, but it does make it self-correcting in a way that idealism is not.
Idealism has no such built-in corrective. Symbols do not "hurt" when they misdescribe the world. They can elaborate, extend, and redescribe themselves indefinitely without encountering the kind of resistance that would force revision. This is why idealist systems so often become more elaborate rather than more accurate over time. They can always generate another level of description, another refinement, another reinterpretation. Reality keeps failing to intrude, because the framework has been pitched at the level where intrusion is hardest to register.
Harari's writing exhibits exactly this pattern. The framework is never refuted by anything. It is never embarrassed by any specific case. It simply absorbs whatever material it is given into its existing shape, and because the shape is made of symbols about symbols, there is nothing in the material that can force it to bend. This is what gives his books their appearance of confirming themselves as they go. It is also what makes them so unreliable as guides to anything specific.
The Structure of the Strengths
One of the fairest things you can do to a thinker you disagree with is to take seriously what they get right. Harari does get things right. He is not fabricating out of nothing. But each of his apparent strengths is a partial perception of something his framework cannot properly describe, and the partiality is what matters.
Consider his most famous insight: that humans coordinate at large scale through shared narratives, imagined orders, or collective fictions. There is something real here. Large-scale coordination does involve reference to entities, rules, and relationships that are not present in the immediate situation. People in London act in relation to laws, institutions, currencies, and abstract roles that do not appear in the room. Harari is correct that this is a distinctive feature of human life and that it requires explanation.
But what he has seen is not what he thinks he has seen. He has seen the articulation layer of a much deeper coordination problem. The coordination problem is: how do you sustain cooperation when the relevant others, relevant times, and relevant objects are not present? The solution is a dense stack of mediations that hold coordination across absence. This includes symbolic articulation, but it also includes material infrastructures (roads, banks, buildings, documents), embodied routines (the habits that make institutional life feel natural), relational fabrics (the trust networks that hold institutions in place), and the felt-misalignment mechanisms that allow institutions to register when they are failing and adjust accordingly. Harari sees the symbolic layer and calls it the thing itself. What he is actually pointing at is the visible tip of a multi-mediational coordination system. The insight is real. The ontology is wrong.
Take his treatment of money. He is right that money is not a natural object, and he is right that this non-naturalness matters. At a certain level, this is a useful demystification. But what he identifies as the source of money's power, shared belief or collective fiction, is not doing the work he thinks it is. Money is powerful because it is embedded in an extraordinarily tight coupling of material infrastructures (banks, vaults, ledgers, payment systems, enforcement), institutional arrangements (contract law, property law, regulatory frameworks), relational obligations (debts, employment, kinship responsibilities), and habitual practices (the daily enactments of earning, spending, saving that make monetary life feel natural). The fact that people recognise money is an outcome of this dense coupling, not its foundation. Harari sees that money is non-natural and explains it in the weakest available way, as belief. The stronger explanation, that money is a multi-mediational coordination system that happens to include a symbolic layer, is not available to him because his framework does not permit it.
The same pattern appears in his treatment of religion. He notices, correctly, that religious systems involve entities that are not empirically present and that they can organise large-scale human behaviour. This is not a trivial observation. But he translates it immediately into the language of fiction, religion as shared imagination, as collective story. What disappears in this translation is everything that actually makes religion durable. Religion lives in the body (ritual, fasting, posture, prayer). It lives in being-with (congregation, family, community, moral accountability). It lives in dwelling (sacred sites, pilgrimage, the orientation of buildings, the geography of holy places). It lives in multimateriality (relics, texts, vestments, foods, incense, music). And yes, it lives in symbolism, but the symbolism is not what holds it together. The symbolism is what articulates what is held together by everything else. Strip religion to its shared imagination and you explain nothing about why it survives rational attack, why it returns in societies that think they have outgrown it, or why people remain attached to it even when they no longer fully believe. Harari sees the symbolic surface. He misses the thing.
Consider also his attention to scale. One of his genuine intellectual virtues is that he keeps asking how coordination among thousands, millions, or billions of people becomes possible. This is a question many academic writers avoid by staying local. He is right to insist that something distinctive happens at scale. But because he has only one explanatory principle, he attributes the scaling capacity entirely to symbolic systems. In reality, scale is always a multi-mediational achievement. It requires transport systems, energy flows, legal frameworks, institutional routines, relational patterns of trust and obligation, and material infrastructures of storage and distribution. Symbolism is necessary but never sufficient. Harari isolates the visible layer of scale and misses the machinery that makes it possible.
And his famous "cognitive revolution" follows the same pattern. He is trying to name something real, a threshold beyond which human coordination becomes qualitatively different. The threshold is real. But because he has committed to a single explanatory principle, he turns that threshold into a cognitive or symbolic event: humans got imagination, and everything followed. This is too clean to be right. The threshold is better described as the stabilisation of a full mediational architecture under pressure from temporally extended coordination. What Harari perceives as a moment of breakthrough is actually the consolidation of a layered system. He senses the discontinuity correctly. He mislocates its source.
The pattern here is worth stating explicitly. Harari's strengths are all perceptual. He is very good at noticing that something interesting is going on. His weaknesses are all explanatory. He cannot reconstruct why it is going on, because his framework reduces the field to one mediation, symbolism, and has no account of the layered architecture within which symbolism actually operates. Every time he seems most insightful, he is standing on something he cannot see. The thing he is standing on is always the same thing: the other four mediations, and the lower levels of coordination within each of them.
Where Change Comes From
One particular consequence of this error deserves its own attention, because it shapes Harari's entire approach to history and therefore to the future.
If you treat symbols as the engine of human life, you also have to treat symbol change as the engine of historical change. New stories, new fictions, new imagined orders, these become the drivers of transformation. Harari's historical narratives repeatedly take this shape. Something shifts at the level of collective narrative, and a new period begins.
But if you take the layered architecture seriously, change almost never starts at the articulation level. It starts much earlier, at the level of felt misalignment, the level where something does not quite fit, where coordination begins to strain, where bodies register a tension that has not yet been articulated. This is the generative layer of historical change. New articulations arise because old articulations no longer track what is happening at the lower levels. New institutions form because old institutions can no longer hold together the coordination they were designed to sustain. New stories emerge because the old stories have started to feel untrue in a way that people cannot yet name.
Harari's history has almost no access to this. Change appears in his accounts either as abstract shifts in belief or as structural transformations at the level of institutions. What disappears is the microgenesis of change in lived experience, the place where people feel that something is off and begin, slowly and often without realising what they are doing, to reconfigure their world. Without this level, history becomes a sequence of transitions between stabilised pictures, rather than a field of ongoing coordination under continuous pressure.
This absence also explains why Harari's historical narratives tend toward a certain kind of overdetermination. Once a transition has happened, it appears inevitable in retrospect. The old imagined order gave way to the new one. The old fiction was replaced by a more powerful fiction. But the texture of how change actually happens, its hesitations, its false starts, its partial and contested recognitions, its long periods of inarticulate tension before anything gets named, is flattened. History becomes a succession of tableaux rather than a process. This is why his narratives read so well on first acquaintance and feel so thin on reflection. They are telling you what happened without telling you how it happened. They give you the sequence of articulations without the field of pressures within which articulation emerged.
The AI Error
Everything that has been said so far concerns Harari's historical writing. But the most consequential expression of his idealism appears in his writing on artificial intelligence, and here the error becomes particularly visible because the stakes are immediate.
Harari's AI writing has a peculiar tone. It combines real institutional concern with civilisational melodrama. On one hand, he does see something that many technical optimists have ignored: that AI can already disrupt public life through symbolic output alone. Systems that generate text, image, persuasion, and synthetic narrative at scale can destabilise trust, public discourse, and the conditions under which people orient themselves collectively. This is a serious insight. Democracy, informational commons, and public trust are vulnerable to symbolic intensification, and he deserves credit for registering this clearly.
But Harari does not stop there. He repeatedly turns the institutional problem into a metaphysical spectacle. AI becomes "alien intelligence." It becomes something like a new species, a rival subject, an autonomous intelligence hacking the operating system of civilisation. The fire becomes a dragon. This is not rhetorical excess. It is a direct consequence of the idealism already diagnosed. If symbols are the primary layer of reality, then a system that manipulates symbols at scale looks like it could, in principle, acquire or generate everything else. Embodiment, being-with, dwelling, material agency, these look like attributes that could be added on to a sufficiently powerful symbolic core. The logic is coherent within the framework. It only works because the framework's earlier mistake has already been made.
From the perspective developed here, the logic cannot work. Symbolism is not a foundation on which the other mediations can be built up. It is a compression layer that depends on the other mediations for its content, its relevance, and its corrective feedback. A system that can describe a body is not a body. A system that can simulate interaction is not embedded in being-with. A system that can model environments does not dwell in them. A system that can optimise over data does not metabolically depend on the outcomes of its actions. These are not minor distinctions. They are ontological breaks.
The most important distinction here is between representation and participation. A symbolic system can represent embodiment, it can generate sentences about bodies, describe physical sensations, produce text that reads as if it were coming from an embodied agent. But representation is not participation. To participate in embodiment is to be metabolically at stake in the world, to tire, to hunger, to be injured, to age, to die. A symbolic system that represents these things without participating in them is not a limited version of an embodied being. It is a different kind of thing altogether. Harari's AI rhetoric depends on treating representation as a weaker form of participation, as if a system that could describe enough would eventually, by accumulation, become what it describes. This is exactly the idealist move. It treats the symbolic layer as the real thing and everything else as something the symbolic layer can, in sufficient quantity, constitute.
The error becomes particularly clear when Harari treats AI outputs as evidence of inner life. If a chatbot says "I am afraid of being shut down," this may sound uncanny, but it tells you nothing about actual fear. It tells you only that the system can generate a sentence that resembles how humans talk when they are afraid. A sentence is not an experience. Fear is not a pattern of words. It is a felt-misalignment operating across embodiment and being-with, registered as a bodily state, with metabolic consequences and relational exposures. The production of text about fear is not a lesser version of fear. It is a different phenomenon entirely. Harari's whole AI rhetoric depends on sliding over this distinction, and once the slide is made, it becomes easy to imagine AI as a coming subject in the full human sense. Without the slide, the picture changes completely.
This matters because the slide makes it much harder to see where the actual danger lies. If you think AI is becoming a rival subject, you worry about its motivations, its values, its potential resentments. You imagine the dragon. But the real danger is stranger and less theatrical. It lies in systems that can optimise, classify, infer, manipulate, and scale without understanding, responsibility, or care, precisely because they do not participate in the mediations that would generate such things. A system that actually felt fear, shame, fatigue, or grief would share something of the human field of friction and could perhaps be reasoned with as a living being. A system that only represents these states has no such friction. It can generate outputs correlated with caring while being entirely indifferent to their consequences. The problem is not that AI will become human. The problem is that it will not, and that the systems being deployed at scale are being deployed precisely because they are not, because they do not tire, do not resent, do not hesitate, do not refuse.
None of this means that AI is harmless. In some respects it makes AI more worrying, not less. A powerful optimiser without built-in mediational friction is a genuinely new kind of problem. But it is a different problem from the one Harari describes, and the framing he offers systematically directs attention to the wrong place. If you are worried about the coming alien mind, you will not notice the ways that existing symbolic-material systems are already reorganising education, care, law, and public discourse in ways that hollow out rather than replace. The dragon-framing conceals the actual fire.
This also clarifies something about Harari's continuity with himself. His AI writing is not a departure from his historical work. It is the same ontological move applied to a new domain. Once multisymbolisation has been treated as primary, it becomes natural to imagine that any sufficiently powerful symbolic system could bootstrap the rest of reality. The idealism that looked elegant when applied to history looks reckless when applied to technologies that are being deployed right now. The framework has not changed. The stakes have.
The Problem with Total Frameworks
What Harari offers, in the end, is a totalising framework, one that claims to explain everything, and that makes its readers feel they have grasped the essential structure of human life. This is a specific kind of intellectual product, and it is worth saying clearly why it is so attractive and so problematic.
Totalising frameworks are attractive because they satisfy a real hunger, particularly at certain points in life. Adolescence and early adulthood are periods when one urgently wants an orientation larger than oneself. One wants to understand how religion, politics, inequality, and technology fit together. One wants not just information but a map. Harari offers a map, and he offers it at a level of abstraction that makes it feel both comprehensive and accessible. This is a genuine achievement. Most scholarship does not offer maps at this scale.
The problem is that totalising frameworks have a structural flaw that becomes more serious the more ambitious they are. To make everything fit, they have to flatten the differences that actually matter. They have to treat phenomena that operate through different mediations, at different levels, with different failure conditions, as variants of the same underlying thing. They have to make reduction feel like insight. This works well as an introduction. It does not survive serious examination.
Harari's particular version of this flaw is structured by his idealism. Because he treats the symbolic layer as primary, everything he encounters eventually becomes a variant of symbolic phenomena. Religion becomes shared imagination. Money becomes shared imagination. Institutions become shared imagination. Scale becomes symbolic capacity. Change becomes shift in narrative. AI becomes symbolic intensification approaching consciousness. The framework is not empty, there is real content in each of these claims, but the content gets progressively compressed into the same explanatory register. This is what gives his writing its distinctive portability and its distinctive thinness. The portability is why his phrases travel so well. The thinness is why they stop doing useful work once you examine them carefully.
The proper response to this is not to reject totalising ambition in principle. Some of the best thinking in any tradition is ambitious at this scale. The proper response is to notice when a totalising framework has misidentified its foundational layer, and to work out what a more accurate foundation would look like. This essay has tried to do that by naming the layered architecture that Harari's framework lacks. The five mediations are not a competing master principle. They are a description of what human life is actually made of, before any of it gets articulated into symbols or stabilised into institutions. The levels from seamless coordination to felt misalignment to articulation to stabilisation are not a theoretical apparatus. They are a description of how things move from embodied practice through felt tension into language and institutional form. Any account of history, any account of change, any account of technology that tries to operate above this architecture will be systematically misleading, in exactly the ways Harari's accounts are.
How to Read Him
Younger readers will continue to encounter Harari, and they should. He is worth reading precisely because his strengths are real. He does give readers access to important themes. He does make connections across large historical periods. He does force attention onto questions many academic writers avoid because they are too large or too exposed. The correct response is not prohibition. It is counter-education.
Read him as a brilliant simplifier whose simplifications are often illuminating at first glance and unreliable at second glance. Read him as an invitation to argument, not as a final authority. Develop a few practical habits. When he makes a sweeping claim, ask what kinds of phenomena are being bundled together. Ask what has been made to look similar that may not be similar. Ask whether a vivid phrase is doing more work than the evidence can sustain. Ask whether a historical interpretation is being smuggled in as a fact. Ask whether a future scenario is being presented as a logical continuation when it is really a speculation decorated with confidence. Ask especially, in his AI writing, whether a system is being described as if it had an inner life when all that is actually present is sophisticated symbolic output.
Above all, notice when he is doing the idealist move, when symbols are being treated as if they could generate or replace the other dimensions of reality. Once you see this pattern, you will see it everywhere in his work. It is the signature of the error. And once you see it, you will also start to see the layered architecture that his framework cannot describe: the bodies that actually cooperate, the places that actually hold people together, the materials that actually carry institutional life, the relationships that actually sustain trust, and the felt misalignments that actually generate change. None of this appears in his books, because none of it fits his ontology. But all of it is what is actually happening when the things he describes are going on.
The deepest lesson is this. Harari is popular because he satisfies a real hunger, the hunger for orientation at scale. That hunger is not foolish. But one should not satisfy it with false completion. A younger reader who comes away from Harari thinking "now I know what humanity really is" has learned much less than a reader who comes away thinking "I can see why that argument is attractive, but I can also see where it flattens things." The first reader has gained certainty. The second reader has gained judgment. Only one of those is worth much in the long run.
Harari is not dangerous because he lies. He is dangerous because he makes overstatement feel like wisdom. He takes the ordinary scholarly labour of partial synthesis and wraps it in the aura of revelation. He makes a whole generation feel that history, politics, religion, technology, and the future can all be grasped through a few high-altitude formulas. But real life is more obstinate than that. Human beings remain embodied, relational, place-bound, materially entangled creatures even when their symbolic systems become hypertrophied. Symbols do not float free from the mediations that sustain them. And AI, whatever else it is, is not a coming alien mind. It is a human-built symbolic-material intensification within an existing human world, reshaping that world in ways that are serious, uneven, and still very much ours to determine.
So read Harari. But do not read him on your knees. Read him with a pencil. Read him against other writers. Read him against the grain of lived life. Read him with enough confidence to notice where the phrase is better than the thought, where the drama is louder than the evidence, and where the future has been turned into theatre. Above all, do not let him persuade you that because a story is coherent, it must therefore be true. The world is rarely so kind.
* * *
Stefan Ecks is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.