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The Mythology of Dataism: A Barthesian Reading of Homo Deus

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Thesis Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus sets out to demystify some of the most influential narratives that have shaped human history. Religions, nations, money, liberal humanism, and the belief in free will are presented not as timeless truths but as historically contingent stories through which human societies have organized themselves. Yet the very discourse that dismantles these inherited myths gradually performs a comparable operation of its own. As concepts such as algorithm , data , optimization , and intelligence expand beyond their original technical meanings, they increasingly acquire the status of self-evident descriptions of reality. What begins as a historical interpretation comes to appear as the natural direction of history itself. This article argues that, although Homo Deus seeks to demystify earlier human myths, its account of Dataism increasingly operates as a modern mythology in Roland Barthes' sense. The issue is not whether Harari's predictions will...
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From Mythologies to Algorithms: Reading AI with Roland Barthes

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Introduction Artificial intelligence has rapidly become surrounded by a remarkably stable vocabulary. We are told that AI is inevitable, that algorithms know what we want, that data never lies, that machines will replace human workers, and that the future belongs to those who adapt. These expressions recur in newspaper headlines, corporate presentations, political speeches, and everyday conversation with such regularity that they have acquired the character of common sense. Public debate usually concerns whether they are true. Are algorithms genuinely objective? Can AI understand us? Will automation inevitably transform every profession? Roland Barthes approached questions of this kind differently. Rather than asking whether such statements were true or false, he asked why they appeared so self-evident in the first place. The shift may seem subtle, but it changes the object of inquiry. Instead of evaluating the factual accuracy of particular claims, Barthes directs our attention to...
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