Dataism

Dataism is the organizing idea of the final third of Homo Deus — what Yuval Noah Harari calls the “data religion.” It treats organisms as algorithms and the entire universe as a single data-processing system, so that life itself is understood as data flow and decision-making. On this view humans are not in-dividuals but “dividuals” — assemblages of biochemical algorithms with no single authentic inner self (Free Will) — which implies an external algorithm could one day know a person better than they know themselves, replacing the voter, the customer, and the beholder.

As a religion, Dataism has commandments: maximize data flow by connecting to and producing ever more information, and link everything to the system (the “Internet-of-All-Things”), since the greatest sin is to block the data flow — and death is simply a state in which information stops flowing. Harari frames it as the successor that may sideline humanism the way humanism sidelined God: a shift from a homo-centric to a data-centric worldview, with Aaron Swartz cast as its first “martyr.” Kyle’s notes connect this to Google (the Baseline Study, decision-outsourcing — “Listen, Google…”) as the concrete, present-day face of Dataism and post-liberal authority. Harari closes by urging a critical examination of Dataist dogma — asking whether anything in the universe cannot be reduced to data, and what would be lost if non-conscious algorithms outperformed conscious intelligence at every task.

Context: “Dataism” is a term popularized by Harari (drawing on earlier usage by David Brooks and others) to describe a worldview that grants supreme value to information flow and data processing.

Where this appears

• Homo Deus — the book’s culminating thesis, the “data religion” that treats organisms as algorithms.