CONCEPT
Dataism
The emerging ideology treating information flow as the supreme value—'the universe is a stream of data,' entities worth is their contribution to data processing, and maximal throughput is the highest good.
Harari's Homo Deus describes Dataism not as a fully articulated philosophy but as an emergent worldview—assumptions so pervasive they operate as common sense rather than doctrine. Biochemistry is data processing. Economics is data processing. Politics is data processing. The differences are superficial; the computational substrate is fundamental. The highest good: maximizing data flow—more connections, more processing, fewer bottlenecks, no impediments. 'Data is the new oil,' 'the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself,' 'if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist'—these slogans are Dataism's catechism, unremarkable to adherents because they constitute the background logic of the information economy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Artificial intelligence is the Dataist sacrament—the ritual bringing the faith nearest to realization. A large language model is pure data processing: ingests billions of words (humanity's textual output), processes through billions of parameters (mathematical operations), produces outputs that are statistically probable continuations. It does not understand the data. It does not value the data. It processes the data. And