Yuval Noah Harari: Hero and Hypocrite
Is Substack the Answer to the Social Media Dilemma?
Some anxious middle-class women have Gwyneth Paltrow, who promises enlightenment through yoni steaming and dietary restrictions. Angry, disaffected young men have Jordan Peterson, whose banal advice about tidying your room is camouflaged with Jungian blah and sulky oppositionalism. And people who shone at school and don't understand why that hasn't made them happy have Harari.
After I read Homo Deus, I put Yuval Noah Harari on a pedestal. I tried to memorize quotes from the book in English and Spanish to sound smarter than I am and to explore a new side of my personality.
If you're constantly quoting people in English, you're walking a fine line between a well-read intellectual and a pretentious asshole. But in Spanish, it makes you a refranero (someone who uses many idioms and quotes). It's also difficult to sound pretentious when your Spanish accent is as blatantly guiri as mine.
Fictions should be tools, not our goals. The idea of money and laws help us, but when we say we need to destroy this for the sake of the corporations profit or go into war for national interest, we are sacrificing ourselves for the corporation. Las ficciones deben ser herramientas, no nuestros objetivos. La idea del dinero y las leyes nos ayudan, pero cuando decimos que necesitamos destruir esto por el bien de las corporaciones o entrar en guerra por intereses nacionales, nos sacrificamos por la corporación.
If by free will, you want to say we act according to our desires, then yes, we have free will. But we don't choose our desires. Si por libre albedrío, quieres decir que actuamos de acuerdo a nuestros deseos, entonces sí tenemos libre albedrío. Pero no elegimos nuestros deseos.
The best explanation of what consciousness is this—It's a byproduct of biological functions. Other explanations can be used by robots too. The only proof we have is that we report what we consciously experience, but a computer could do that too. La mejor explicación de qué conciencia es esta: es un subproducto de las funciones biológicas. Otras explicaciones también pueden ser utilizadas por los robots. La única prueba que tenemos es que reportamos lo que experimentamos conscientemente, pero un ordenador también podría hacerlo.
These quotes live with me. They aren't only applicable when discussing the insidious effects social media and data-collecting technologies have on our society, but they also help us to break down borders.
Understanding that factors beyond our control influence our biological drives and "conscious" decisions doesn't mean we should feel powerless. Knowing how and why my choices are influenced by algorithms (whether on social media or biological) helps me better understand people’s actions and beliefs.
In other words, I’ve learned a lot from Harari.
So, by this point, you might wonder why the hell I think he’s a hypocrite.
Harari states he doesn't have a cell phone because he is careful about preserving his time and attention. But you only need to google his name to see that he's all over social media. He's made a living many of us could only dream of, not just because he's intelligent, humble, benevolent, and well-connected, but because of social media.
I don't doubt his brilliant books would have achieved a certain level of success without social media, but his interviews, tweets, and other posts wouldn't have reached as wide an audience. His recognition, status, and team allow him to live without a cell phone and avoid its damaging effects without worrying if all the work and research he does will go unnoticed.
I would give my left nut to spend my life researching and writing instead of putting my time into the soul-sucking marketing void of hyper-capitalist hell.
Is Substack the answer?
Those of you who subscribed to Born Without Borders from the beginning know the introduction of this piece was a revised article. Before joining Substack in April 2023, I was on Ghost.org and marketing via Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Google Ads, and Reddit.
Sure, Ghost has its benefits.
Open source.
Nonprofit.
Carbon-neutral.
Developer platform & API.
Over 1000 connected apps (some of which you must pay for).
$9/month instead of a 10% cut.
Yet, Substack’s community and networking features are inimitable. Within two weeks on Substack, I got more subscribers than eight months on Ghost.
You want my numbers? Let’s just say, ‘they [not] be lookin’ like phone numbers.’
Those eight months included spending $200 on Google ads, $200 on Instagram ads, and $100 on Facebook ads, joining Facebook writing communities, commenting on Instagram posts, posting on Reddit and Quora, and trying to collaborate with people I found on Ghost’s Explore page. The Google ads brought in 5 free subscribers, and the social media ads got me a few hundred likes on content that takes under fifteen seconds to understand.
Just imagine if I spent that money on fellow Substack writers instead of those poor, passionate people at Meta and Google who finally felt valued thanks to my money they so desperately needed.
On Substack, we’re not manipulated into echo chambers or baited into emotive material from which we learn nothing. Sure, you can choose to put yourself into an echo chamber like on Facebook, scream at people you disagree with like on X, and go down a rabbit hole of misinformation like on Youtube, but you’re not mind fucked into doing so.
At Substack, you’re in control. You’re free to read and learn without having your attention stolen by ads. I’d much rather be on a platform that gives everyone a voice (even those I disagree with) than one that allows advertisers to be in control.
Yes, Substack has community guidelines against hate and harmful activities, but openly supports writers who propagate hate. Money talks. But if a platform truly promotes free speech, it must support all voices, not just English ones. After all, diversity, more than policing, can stop the spread of fascist ideologies.
As Substack grows, we need to make sure it doesn’t become another tool for American imperialism. If we genuinely want to be part of a “step forward from social media,” Substack needs to become more international. It’s happening with writers like
, , , , , , and so many more writers everyone should mention in the comments.But where the hell is Harari?
I want him and more non-anglo-centric thinkers here. Yes, I called him a hypocrite, but so I am.
As much as I’d like to leave social media behind, I need to use platforms outside Substack to reach an international audience.
Luckily, many successful writers on Substack know how to navigate social media while staying true to themselves and their craft… or how and why to avoid it altogether.
The Shadows of Substack (and other platforms), I didn't associate myself as a guilt ridden person...., and Going offline after 10 years…’s The Panopticon of Social Media and Prison Break.’s How to get 5,000-20,000 new readers for your Substack publication every month and Will that new social media platform fundamentally improve your existence at all?’s The egregore passes you by and The gossip trap.You can see that no matter the level of success, using social media occupies our minds. One can use it authentically, and as a tool, but on a societal level, it does more harm than good.
The wealth of information impoverishes our spirits and minds.
But I need it. I’ve put everything I have into Born Without Borders, so I must reach people to make this sustainable. I can’t rely on a platform where almost all the top earners are American, and the app is only in English. However, I know
, , and listen and will make Substack more global in the future.’s mission and structure won’t change in 2024. I’ll post a story every Tuesday. They all belong to the collection of shorts in Forever Foreign—a series I designed for Substack after my session with . The stories stand alone but hold more weight for fans who follow the series weekly.
On Saturdays, I’ll continue to write cultural psychology and sociopolitical essays related to the short stories in Forever Foreign.
Sneak peak into Forever Foreign and what’s coming in 2024.
Stories are the only inheritance I need.
Six dates—that’s all it took for my parents to elope in Jamaica. Since then, they wandered amid CIA shadows and sticky red tape, celebrated with the Sandanistas, dwelled on a monkey-ridden island with a beat-loving recluse, rose to the top of Tenerife’s tourist sector, dodged the draft, smuggled—
They unshackled the chains of conformity.
I’ve pleaded with my father to pen his tales throughout my life. The scrawled notes, remnants of rides to school, tipsy nights, and phone calls from youth to this moment weren’t enough.
‘Schrijf verdoemme oew verhoale op!"
He told his stories in various languages, adding layers as he code-switched and retold stories from the perspective of different idiomas. I’d beg him to write the stories in Flemish, English, Spanish, or a mix of the three.
He never listened
… until now.
Cancer has a silver lining.
Soul-sucking capitalism and hypocritical heroes. There’s a lot to unpack there.
I remember the first time I discovered one of my heroes was a hypocrite. He was the guy who organized thousand mile bike trip vacations for his family and a couple of us young bucks who were his acolytes. He drove an old VW Beetle, the ultimate righteous vehicle, and I would feel such pride when I saw him driving around town in the winter wearing an Air Force survival parka and using a cigarette lighter to defrost the windshield. He lived in a house he built debt free with the help of friends, and it looked like a solar heated woolly dog in a sea of cracker boxes. He had a Salvador Dali mustache and was a photographer who, when a beautiful rodeo queen didn’t pay for the life sized print of herself in full rodeo queen regalia she ordered from him, glued it to the wall of his outhouse in a fit of spite. He was a fine craftsman who built beautiful furniture and at the time in his life when most men drive big Buicks and wear wingtip shoes, he packed up and moved to Texas to do an MFA in sculpture. And he always grew a huge beautiful garden, which is where I discovered his Achilles heel of hypocrisy. He used a gas-powered weed eater. When I saw that weed eater, my heart sank. Here was a man, my mentor, my hero, who after doing everything else right, used a gas-powered weed eater. It took me years to digest the fact that even heroes sometimes walk on feet of clay.
And yet, for all that flaw of his, he helped me learn to think my way through the maze of soul-sucking capitalism. I hated the fact that everything new, expensive, and shiny rather quickly became obsolete, last year’s unthinkably primitive model, and depreciated into worthless, all so we would turn right around and in-debt ourselves again by buying another newest and shiniest. The answer? Just don’t need stuff, and the stuff you do need, buy it when it is obsolete, unthinkably primitive, and costs 3 cents on the dollar of the price a new one. I went through the righteous car phase and froze my ass off for a few years even while wearing an Air Force survival parka and defrosting my VW Beetle windshield with a battle-worn Zippo lighter. Eventually I had an epiphany moment: buy the slightly less righteous stuff with actual heaters that worked, an idea I built upon in other endeavors. It’s more important to be righteous than to own righteous. It became my Quest, my One Big Thing. Like my friend, I built and paid for my own house. I was free to roam the world, but always had a refuge to return to, my place on Earth. I could pick and choose how to give away my life, so instead of climbing some corporate ladder, indebting myself to a ball and chain of depreciating stuff, and yearning for the sweet taste of freedom, I took a different path and it worked for me. Sometimes charting a new path toward one’s dreams can be a frightening venture, but it is worth the effort, and O! what stories a red-pilled mind can tell.
I’m not sure depending on the expensive and ever “improving” products of soul-sucking capitalism is the way to a free soul and clear conscious, and I’m absolutely certain that my answer is not the correct answer for someone else, but an answer is out there. It can become the Quest and save one from a brittle, sucked dry soul. Toss aside the conventional, search for the truly needful and find a way to achieve it with minimal hypocrisy, maybe limited to a metaphorical weed eater or two. Your answer is out there somewhere.
And that right there is my version of the Jordan Peterson Speech that Every Young Man Needs to Hear.
I love this. Thanks for the shout out!