The Data Religion

From this axiom several specific commitments follow. Privacy stops being a right and starts being friction. Death becomes a software problem, not a metaphysical event. The individual self loses status because the individual is just one local processor in a much larger data system.

Harari is careful to note that no one has formally proclaimed Dataism a religion, and no one applies for membership. It is a worldview spreading the way humanism spread before it — through the gradual normalization of practices that presuppose its truth. When you upload your DNA to a genealogy service, you are acting as if your genetic information has more value flowing in a database than staying private. When you let an algorithm choose your music, your news, your romantic partners, you are acting as if the algorithm's data-driven judgment is more reliable than your own felt preferences. Each individual choice is small; the cumulative trajectory is the systematic surrender of decisions that humanism reserved for the individual self.

The chapter does not predict that Dataism wins. It notes the unresolved problems. Consciousness remains a black box; the hard question of why information processing should give rise to subjective experience has not been answered, and Dataism's tendency to dismiss the question may be premature. The Dataism worldview also struggles with ethics — if all that exists is data flow, then suffering is just one type of information and there is no principled reason to minimize it. And the systems Dataism celebrates have political implications — a world organized around data flow tends to concentrate power in the hands of whoever owns the largest data systems, which empirically has been a small handful of corporations and states.

The book closes by inviting the reader to take three questions seriously rather than to accept any answers. First: are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing? Second: which is more valuable, intelligence or consciousness? Third: what happens to society, politics, and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves? Harari's wager is that the next century will be shaped by what humanity decides on these questions, mostly by default rather than by deliberate choice, and that the choices being made now in research labs and corporate strategy meetings will set the trajectory long before any democratic process catches up. Homo Deus, the species that engineered its own divinity, may have engineered its own irrelevance instead. The book ends on that uncertainty, not as resignation but as call for the reader to notice.