The Distopias of Story Telling

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Technology is like engineering the perfect memetic cancer, or story telling cancer. It's not a kind of evil system that iis trying to take over the world. You can even tell it, look, i want to expand my musical horizons. Please manipulate me for that purpose. This kind of system can actually be better at widen your musical taste than anything previously in history. And you know, for every species sufficiently technologically advanced event, they'll begin to reverse engineer their own code. Wrihte, the ability to open up their scalp and like, manipulate their own strings.

Yuval Noah Harari is one of the rare historians who can give us a two-million-year perspective on today’s headlines. In this wide-ranging conversation, Yuval explains how technology and democracy have evolved together over the course of human history, from paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to nation states. So where do we go from here? “In almost all the conversations I have,” Yuval says, “we get stuck in dystopia and we never explore the no less problematic questions of what happens when we avoid dystopia.” We push beyond dystopia and consider the nearly unimaginable alternatives in this special episode of Your Undivided Attention.