Three Rules for Living in the 21st Century (2024)

I loved Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. History seen through the eyes of really smart people becomes a lens that magnifies the traces of our own psychosocial make up. But eye-opening and compelling as Sapiens may have been its follow-up hom*o Deus was way less endearing.

The problem lies with the author and its roots are to be found in the very same focus that made Sapiens such an exceptional book to read. Harari is unusual amongst historians in his anthropological and cross-disciplinary extrapolative approach that uses data to link specific points of the past and draw a continuum that allows us to make sense of our journey from our point of origin to today.

The technique is solid when it’s applied to evidence we can see and facts we can examine and its suppositions make the kind of total sense you expect from a historian of Harari’s caliber. But apply this to the future, even the very near future and you’re on shaky foundation from which it is difficult to build much.

“what science fiction takes into account is what Harari doesn’t because, bound by the need for data and the use of as a scientific approach as possible, he cannot.”

So Harari does what anyone in his shoes would do. He takes the worst excesses of the past as a role model to apply to the future, amplifying the impact of every ill (because technology makes everything bigger and faster) and painting the kind of picture that Michael Moorco*ck painted better and with greater aplomb in his science fiction trilogy Dancers At The End of Time.

I mention Harari because he’s in the news, at present, warning us of the coming dystopian age. Now, quite possibly, the next 20 years may turn out to be a kind of Mad Max world where wealth inequality and unemployment due to automation will get so bad that we’ll turn to William Gibson’s Virtual Light for guidance. But I doubt it.