Ep. 16: Terry Tapp on Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus

Yuval Noah Harari

On this edition of Parallax Views I speak with author and artist Terry Tapp about his reflections on reading Israeli historian and New York Times bestseller Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow and its worrying elitist underpinnings.

We begin by discussing how Terry became interested in reading Harari's Homo Deus and his extremely negative reaction to it. We then back up a bit to discuss Harari's previous book Sapiens which leads us to a brief detour into the works of Lewis Mumford.

After that we return to Terry's reading of Homo Deus and his many problems with it. This leads us into a discussion of issues related to the book such as the free will debate (which leads to a short anecdote about Terry's experience with New Atheist figurehead Daniel C. Dennett) and the elitist tendencies Terry found throughout Homo Deus which he ties back to Califronia's Silicon Valley tech community or the what he calls the "TED class". During the conversation we end up touching on the differences between the working class and the elite, Harari's unsettling concept of "the useless class", shamanism and art vs. Harari's data-ism, and the direction the Left should go in contrast to Harari.

A Serf's Journal: The Story of the United States' Longest Wildcat Strike by Terry Tapp (Zero Books, 2017)