21 Lessons for the 21st Century

This chapter focuses on whether online social networks can help build a global human community that safeguards liberty and equality. Despite our technological advances, humans remain “Stone Age animals” (86). For much of our evolutionary past, we lived in small groups, comprising no more than a few dozen people. This group structure still influences us today. We find it challenging to truly know more than 150 individuals. Intimate connections remain essential for humans to flourish because they give us a sense of purpose and support. Unfortunately, we have seen the disintegration of these “intimate communities” (87) over the last 200 years. Despite attempts to replace small groups with social media, nation-states, and political parties, Harari emphasizes that humans have never been lonelier.

Harari explores whether Facebook might be a solution to reconnecting humans. After the surprising 2016 US election results, Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and CEO of Facebook, announced that Facebook engineers would create new tools on the social media platform to make building communities easier. To Harari, this attempt is the first of its kind “to use AI for centrally planned social engineering on a global scale” (88).

One of the challenges Facebook will need to overcome is bridging the online versus offline divide.