In October 1918, deep in the Argonne Forest of northern France, over five hundred American soldiers found themselves trapped behind German lines. To make matters worse, American artillery misidentified their position, dropping a catastrophic friendly-fire barrage directly onto them. With no telegraph wire and runners shot down, Major Charles Whittlesey turned to his absolute last resort: an army carrier pigeon named Cher Ami. He strapped a tiny note to the bird's leg: "We are along the road parallel 276.4. Our artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake stop it." Cher Ami flew straight into heavy German gunfire. A shell splinter tore through the pigeon's chest, blinding one eye and leaving its right leg hanging by a single tendon. Yet the wounded bird flew forty kilometers in forty-five minutes to division headquarters. The barrage was halted, and the Lost Battalion was saved. Cher Ami became a decorated hero. But think about this: 鸽子对纸条上的墨水符号一无所知。The pigeon had zero comprehension of the symbols, yet those markings altered the course of a battle. And information doesn't even need human symbols—like Noah's dove returning with an olive branch, or ancient mariners steering by the North Star. What makes an object count as information? It is strictly a matter of perspective. A constellation like Libra is crucial navigation data for a ship, but for an alien living on one of its planets, it is simply home. Ink on paper can save an army battalion, or serve as a tasty breakfast for a colony of termites. Consider the First World War in the Middle East, where a pro-British Jewish spy network called NILI operated behind Ottoman lines. Sarah Aaronsohn signaled British warships simply by opening or closing a window shutter on her Mediterranean villa. To Ottoman soldiers passing by, it was just a wooden shutter. But to the British navy, it was vital military intelligence. In September 1917, NILI's luck ran out through a bizarre accident. One of their carrier pigeons went off course and landed directly in the courtyard of an Ottoman officer. The officer couldn't decode the cipher, but he didn't need to. The pigeon itself was the information! As Marshall McLuhan famously put it, the medium was the message. The mere presence of a carrier pigeon proved that an underground espionage ring was operating under their noses. NILI panicked and slaughtered all their remaining birds, but the damage was done. Sarah Aaronsohn committed suicide under torture. So ask yourself: When is a pigeon just a bird, and when is it lethal information? Conventional wisdom gives a straightforward answer: The Naive View of Information (朴素信息论). This view assumes that information is an attempt to represent reality in the pursuit of truth. If a spy report says there are ten thousand Ottoman soldiers in Gaza, and there are indeed ten thousand, the information is true and useful. If it gets the number wrong, it is an error. But Harari drops a bombshell right here: Most information in human society, and indeed across nature, does not attempt to represent anything at all! Representation is only a rare and exceptional byproduct. To understand history, we must discard this naive equation of information with truth. Before dismantling the naive view, Harari clarifies what truth actually is. Truth is an accurate representation of certain aspects of a single, universal reality. While different cultures hold conflicting beliefs, they cannot possess conflicting truths. But here is the catch: No statement can ever represent reality in its entirety! Take that military report of "ten thousand soldiers in Gaza". The moment you count them as a single number, you focus on their shared category while erasing all meaningful differences. Were they battle-hardened veterans or terrified raw recruits? Were they sick or healthy? Statistics can never capture the lived human reality. Furthermore, reality includes not only objective physical facts, but also subjective psychological facts. It is an objective fact that Sarah Aaronsohn died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on October 9, 1917. But it is equally a fact that Israelis revere her as a patriotic martyr, Palestinians view her as a British imperialist agent, and Orthodox Jews condemn her suicide as a religious sin. 这些相互冲突的立场与情感，本身就是客观现实的一部分。A truthful account cannot capture reality simply by flattening everyone into an arithmetic figure or pretending multiple viewpoints mean multiple physical universes. If an information system tries to achieve complete representational accuracy, it runs straight into the famous paradox described by Jorge Luis Borges in his 1946 parable, On Exactitude in Science. In that story, an empire becomes obsessed with creating the perfect map, until the map covers the entire empire on a one-to-one scale! The empire collapses under the sheer weight of maintaining it, leaving only tattered fragments of paper rotting in the desert. 一比一的绝对表征不再是地图，它直接变成了现实本身。Representation requires selection and abstraction. Truth is never an exhaustive replica; it brings attention to specific aspects while ignoring others. Now, how does the Naive View explain falsehood? It splits errors into two neat boxes: Misinformation, which is an honest mistake, and Disinformation, which is a deliberate lie. And what is the naive remedy? Silicon Valley and liberal democracies have long championed what legal scholars call the Counterspeech Doctrine (反向言论原则). Coined by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927, this doctrine claims that the remedy for false speech is simply more speech. Under this logic, if we just build faster networks and flood the world with information, the truth will naturally win out and expose the lies. Harari shows that this optimistic faith in more information is catastrophically blind. Consider astrology. If the naive view were correct, astrology would be a minor historical footnote—a piece of debunked misinformation that vanished the moment modern astronomy explained the stars. But look at reality: For thousands of years, astrology shaped world history. Roman emperors executed anyone who dared cast their horoscopes. In 2005, the military junta of Myanmar relocated their entire national capital based on astrological prophecies. Today, astrology is a twelve-billion-dollar global industry. 朴素信息论根本无法解释：为什么一个在表征上彻底破产的东西，能拥有如此巨大的历史统治力？ The answer lies in the true definition of information: Information does not inform us about things; it puts things in formation! 它的本质不是表征现实，而是将离散的节点编组为一个协同网络。Horoscopes put lovers into romantic formations; propaganda broadcasts put voters into political formations; military marches put soldiers into combat formations. Errors, fictions, and fantasies are not malfunctions of information—they are primary tools for building social order! Information is whatever ties disparate individuals together into an operational nexus, creating brand-new collective realities that never existed before. Look at music. Does Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or a modern electronic beat represent anything in the physical world? Of course not! There is no such thing as "fake music" or "untrue melody." Yet music is one of the most powerful information technologies ever devised. It synchronizes human heart rates, makes thousands of clubbers sway in unison, rallies soldiers onto the battlefield, and unifies church congregations in shared rhythm. Music creates immense emotional and physical alignment across large crowds without representing a single external fact. The same principle governs biology. Take DNA, the fundamental informational code of life. Does zebra DNA represent reality? There is no sequence of nucleotides in a zebra that represents a "lion," the "sun," or "running." Nor is there any chemical string representing "fear." Instead, DNA initiates enzymatic cascades that produce adrenaline. Adrenaline doesn't represent reality either—it circulates through the bloodstream, dilating pupils, accelerating the heart, and pumping oxygen to the legs. DNA binds trillions of individual cells into a synchronized network capable of escaping a predator. 生命不是靠表征外部世界活下来的，而是靠内部网络的协同涌现。 When DNA copying makes a mistake, biologists call it a mutation. This is not "disinformation"—it is the generative engine of evolution! Without genetic copying errors, complex life would never have evolved. By the same token, human networks thrive on creative fictions. Truthful representations can connect people, like six hundred million humans watching the 1969 Apollo moon landing. But false representations connect people just as tightly, like millions bonding over conspiracy theories that the moon landing was a Hollywood hoax. Consider Mark Zuckerberg's vision of the Metaverse: It is an entirely synthetic information universe designed not to map Buenos Aires, but to create new digital homes from pure bits. Now Harari turns to the most decisive evidence in human history: The Bible. If the naive view were right—that information's power comes from representing reality accurately—the Bible should have been forgotten centuries ago. The book of Genesis claims that all humans descend from a single family that survived a flood four thousand years ago. In reality, the San people lived continuously in Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, and Australian Aborigines settled their continent over fifty thousand years ago. Furthermore, the Bible depicts infectious plagues as divine retribution for sin that can be cured through prayer, rather than bacterial and viral infections requiring sanitation and vaccines. Yet, despite being demonstrably wrong about human origins and epidemiology, the Bible became the most influential text in human civilization! Why? Because like DNA binding trillions of cells into a living organism, the Bible acted as a social nexus that bound billions of human strangers into vast religious networks. An isolated human cannot build cathedrals, maintain continental legal systems, observe unified calendars, or wage massive crusades. But a network organized by a shared sacred narrative can. The Bible succeeded not because it informed people about objective biology, but because it placed entire empires in religious formation. This uncovers the foundational paradox of human history: Connectivity does not equal truth. Homo sapiens conquered the planet not because our ancestors were gifted at creating accurate scientific maps of the world, but because we were uniquely talented at inventing shared myths that united massive networks. That is why highly educated, technologically advanced nations like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia could fall prey to horrific pseudoscientific delusions about race and class. Delusions did not weaken their networks—they provided the ideological glue that made tens of millions march in ruthless unison. This brings us to Harari's ultimate warning for our digital and AI era: Truth is expensive, but fiction is cheap! Investigating objective reality requires tedious experiments, peer review, and courage to admit error. Inventing a flattering myth or conspiracy requires zero cost and spreads like wildfire. If all you do is accelerate network bandwidth and flood society with information, cheap connective fictions will inevitably drown out expensive truths. The remedy to false speech is not more speech; it is institutional mechanisms for error-correction. In the coming chapters, we will trace the very first information technology invented by humans to solve this problem: The Story.