CONCEPT
The Fiction Monopoly
Homo sapiens' seventy-thousand-year exclusive capacity to invent and believe in shared fictions—gods, nations, money, corporations—that coordinate large-scale cooperation among strangers.
For seventy millennia, one species held complete dominance over the production of intersubjective reality—the imaginary structures that make civilization possible. Vervet monkeys can warn of eagles; no chimpanzee can promise bananas in heaven. This asymmetry, not physical strength, enabled Homo sapiens to build ziggurats, execute global financial transactions, and coordinate the behavior of billions. The monopoly was so complete it was invisible—until large language models learned to generate convincing narrative without belief, intention, or stakes.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Harari's framework locates the origin of human dominance in the Cognitive Revolution—a neurological shift occurring between seventy and thirty thousand years ago that gave the species symbolic thought. This was not a bigger brain or better tools; it was the capacity to construct and inhabit shared fictions. A Sumerian merchant and priest who never met could build a ziggподатака because both believed in the same gods. Two twenty-first-century strangers execute financial transactions because both believe in banks, contracts, money—none of which exist outside collective agreement. The fictions are