Matthew Kern

“To function, a democracy needs to meet two conditions: it needs to enable a free public conversation on key issues, and it needs to maintain a minimum of social order and institutional trust.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“What turns someone into a populist is claiming that they alone represent the people and that anyone who disagrees with them—whether state bureaucrats, minority groups, or even the majority of voters—either suffers from false consciousness or isn’t really part of the people.[”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Truth, then, isn’t a one-to-one representation of reality. Rather, truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring other aspects. No account of reality is 100 percent accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than others.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI