Dataism

The view that the universe is best understood as data flows and that the value of any entity — human or otherwise — is determined by its contribution to data processing.

Type
Concept
Published
2026-05-23
Aliases
Data-ism
Brief definition

The view that the universe is best understood as data flows and that the value of any entity — human or otherwise — is determined by its contribution to data processing. Coined by David Brooks in The New York Times (2013) as a methodological stance; reworked by Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus (2016) into an explicit ideology Harari frames as a “new form of religion.”

What it is

The term has two distinct senses. Brooks (2013) described an emerging methodological preference — in domains of complex human behaviour, defer to data over intuition because data can “illuminate patterns of behavior we haven’t yet noticed” and reduce cognitive bias. Harari (2016) took the same word and used it to name an ideology: “the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing.” On Harari’s reading, the human species becomes “a single data processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips,” and the logical endpoint is the cession of major life decisions to algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves.

Harari’s variant is the version that has spread in popular discourse. He frames it explicitly as a religion: information flow is the supreme value, connection is virtue, and human experience matters only insofar as it produces useful data — “an outdated biochemical algorithm” once a better one is available.

Why it matters

Dataism is the explicit ideological form of an attitude that is otherwise implicit in much AI discourse. Once value is defined functionally — by contribution to data processing — algorithmic displacement of human judgement reframes from loss into upgrade. The assumption sits inside both the bullish wing of the discourse (“AGI will do this better”) and the worried wing (“alignment is what matters most”), even when neither wing names it.

For the wiki’s Spectacle/Ouroboros frame, Dataism names the half-articulated metaphysics that makes the closed loop look self-justifying: if knowledge is data flow, then a system of data with no external referent does not look broken — it looks complete. That is the assumption a determinate-framings stance has to refuse, not just qualify.

Harari himself flags the two open challenges Dataism has not answered: the problem of consciousness, and the empirical question of whether organisms actually are algorithms. Both remain live, and both are why the doctrine is best treated as a description of a prevailing discourse rather than as a defended philosophical position.