Niall Ferguson’s “The Square and the Tower”

I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas one of the cofounders of Twitter said recently the world would automatically be a better place I was wrong about that the response of our guest today if the Twitter co-founder had known his history he would not have been surprised historian Neil Ferguson on uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson now a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford Neil Ferguson has taught at institutions including Oxford Cambridge the Stern School of Business the London School of Economics and Harvard the author of a dozen major works on economics military history and diplomacy professor Ferguson has just published the square and the tower Neil Ferguson welcome to explain why this book is called it's the square in the tower the reader must come with me to Siena explain that Neil well this is a book about networks and hierarchies but I wasn't allowed to call it networks in hierarchies because hierarchies is one of those words publishers don't like on sells books and so I thought what can I call a book that is about the relationship between informal network social networks and hierarchical structures of power and I suddenly remembered Siena a beautiful town in Tuscany that reached its zenith in the century before the Black Death if you go to Siena and I urge all viewers to do this you will see the most perfect juxtaposition of a square and a tower that's all it's a manga which is this extraordinary beautiful Tower casts a great shadow of the main Piazza in the centre of Siena and and that's the the symbol I was looking for I hadn't been there since I was in my 20s but I've always thought of Siena when I've been trying to understand the relationship between government in the sense of hierarchical power structures and informal social networks of the sort that you find in town squares hmm we'll come to Luther in a moment but to quote again from that week it's big themes first the square in the tower this book distinguishes the long II pox in which hierarchical structures dominated human life from the rarer but more dynamic eras when networks had the advantage so explain that when we think of networks often we think of Silicon Valley you are taking a much longer view so give us give as I say Wellcome to Luther in just a moment but the longer view hierarchies tend to tend to predominate well what do I moved out to be a full-time Hoover fella at Stanford I became a next door neighbor of Silicon Valley and I was amazed this is just over a year ago now by how utterly indifferent to history people in that world are in fact in their view history began with the Google IPO of the founding of Facebook and everything before that is the Stone Age so part of the point of this book is to explain to the world of Silicon Valley you did not invent networks social networks go back to the very dawn of human history we are designed by evolution to network but for most of history in formal social networks have been subordinated to hierarchical power structures and there's a good reason for that a lot of human histories to do with conflict and early human structures but even before States simple villages had always to be concerned with defense and so a great deal of early human history is essentially about command and control networks informal networks are not very good at defense we can explore the significance of that for modern times in a minute but but back in the day if we go all the way back to prehistory somebody has to be in charge somebody has to give the orders and the foot soldiers have to obey so for most of history the tower overshadows the square deed that's part of Siena's symbolism the towers nearly always casting a shadow over the square there are just occasional periods in history we are in one of them now when technology and other factors empower the networks and weaken the hierarchies and one more of the major themes of the book you're a professional historian quote this book is an attempt to atone for sins of omission explain that well if Silicon Valley's ignorant of history I'm afraid historians are very ignorant about Network science and I plead guilty to having spent much of my career writing about networks without understanding the first thing about how networks function I've always been drawn temperamentally to study social networks I didn't quite know that about myself until quite recently but when I look back over 25 years of writing I've written relatively little about kings and queens and indeed governments I've written a lot more about networks like for example the network of Jewish bankers that was so important in 19th and 20th century or book there's a Rothschild the House of Rothschild and in the book I wrote about Sigmund Warburg yeah and I wrote a book about the British Empire which was really look about social networks and globalization okay good it's stop and explain all three of those the banking international banking networks why is a banking system and network instead of a hierarchy well a credit system by its very nature is a distributed network and whether it's a bank sort of simply borrowers and lenders there's not really that much hierarchical structure in a credit system now we invented relatively recently central banks to preside over financial systems but in practice when you look at the international financial system in the 18th 19th 20th centuries and into the 21st it's more readily intelligible as an enormous network and it became a much more complex network with the advent of Technology in the 1980s 90s and into the 2000s we ended up with an astonishingly complex financial network so complex that the people who thought they were running it the central bank's completely lost control of it for a time they didn't realize in 2008 there was one single node in the network called Lehman Brothers was so important to the network that if you let it fail the entire network of international credit would come crashing down that was an aha moment for me and indeed for some central bankers and I talked about this in the book in some ways the financial system became networked before everybody else did 2008 it was mostly people in finance who were truly networks the rest of us hadn't quite got there the network platforms that made social networks like Facebook possible came later now we're all as networked as the financial system was a dimension empire you get what I'm trying to do is draw out a clear distinction between networks and hierarchies yeah so I - my my if you say British Empire the first thing that comes to my mind is a almost a great chain of being Queen Victoria's at the top and the lowly sergeant major in some godforsaken village and India's at the bottom and there's taking orders all the way up and all the way down and you're saying that now that's the wrong way to look at the British Empire as a general statement I think it is true that most organizations have a kind of pyramidal structure and there's an org chart on the CEOs wall or indeed the Prime Minister's office wall that shows that the CEO or Prime Minister is at the top and everybody else is in a sense reporting to that person right and that was true of the British Empire - there are lots of lovely wall charts that put Queen Victoria at the top of a great chain of being that extends down to the lowliest Indian peasant but in all these cases there is another way of graphing the institution graphing the organization and that is its network structure who is really talking to whom who is really in a close relationship with whom that network whatever institution you're talking about will look different from the org chart and in the British Empire's case although officially Queen Victoria was the empress of all she surveyed that wasn't really how the British Empire worked it wasn't as if she issued orders that were then carried out in lowly villages actually the British Empire was built by networks of traders and networks of missionaries and networks of oxford-educated orientalists it was very decentralized it's pretty hard to control what's happening in India from London even today and in that sense I think you're right to point out there is not a perfect distinction between networks and hierarchies to be absolutely clear but a hierarchy is a special kind of network it's a kind of network where there are missing edges the nodes are not all connected most nodes can only get to the other nodes through a central node that's what a hierarchy really is whereas a distributor network is one in which most nodes are connected to most other nodes there isn't one single central node through which all the others have to go now that's the network science partner I can even understand when I was writing about networks 10 years ago but now do so it's a kind of summary opening statement is this fair that I'm trying to relate this to experiences that almost all of us have I'm thinking of my kids now who are just reaching at the age where they're getting their first jobs and here's the difference between a hierarchy and a network the hierarchy is the organization chart which is visible to every employee on his first day of his or her first day of work the network is composed of a series of those aha moments when you say oh so this is the way it really are exactly and that's the person you really need to talk to if you want to get that done right okay water cooler is in a place that reveals who really calls the shots I remember having that experience at Oxford University as an undergraduate discovering that really the college Porter expertly oh yeah thief yes the man who was president of madlyn had leased power of altar and in fact the university's a good introduction to this world because they're not really very hierarchical institutions at all formally there are people called Dean's residents and vice chancellors but they're really quite weak relative to all those impossible academics and yet impossible academics think of themselves as members of a republic of letters I think that's what attracted me to universities as a young person I always hated a command structure I loathed the military I didn't really like corporate life either I don't like having a real boss and so temperamentally I'm a networks person and one way of thinking about this which your viewers might find helpful is yes ask the question am i a hierarchy person or a network person do I instinctively think first of all of the chain of command I report to him and they report to me or do I more instinctively think of that network informal network of friends acquaintances and indeed family that that's the thing that a networker naturally gravitates towards and then real net don't believe in the org charts or at least they regard them as a kind of facade behind which the real past structures my as networks right alright now we come to Martin Luther five hundred years ago and even five hundred years ago because you're writing here about tension between hierarchy by the way I better stipulate the book is full of one historical example after another you've got you bring in Rome you bring in John Buchan novel green man I mean there it's amazing how your mind finds connections across a kind of vast compendium of his history this is a little television chat program and we won't get very far we will get to Luther 500 years ago he presents his 95 theses to the Archbishop of Mainz setting in train a series of events that you argue would anticipate the rise of Silicon Valley five centuries later Luther was his motive Luther was as much of a utopian as the pioneers of Silicon Valley in our own time utopian but the true upshot of the Reformation was not harmony but polarization and conflict alright give all of that to us but if we had to understand our own time we need to use the right analogies and I don't think our own time is much like the 20th century a time when very hierarchical states were an almost total control of social networks you need to go much further back in time to find a period when the networks really could challenge the hierarchies and that time was the 16th and 17th century a time when a new technology which was very network friendly called the printing press allowed the message of a heretic critic of the church Martin Luther to go viral if Martin Luther had done what he did in 1517 in 1417 he would just to be burned at the stake and we never have heard of him but Luther's message in 1517 could go viral not just in Germany but all over Europe because of the printing press so for me this is a really powerful analogy and there's some excellent academic work that shows the the impact of the printing press on say the cost of the printed were the cost of the page of the book and the volume of books produced was very like the impact of the personal computer in our time thus the same drastic fall in the price of information and increase in the volume of information it's very much the same pattern and it's had similar consequences I think now Luther as you said was a utopian he thought that if everybody could read a printed version of the Bible and have a direct relationship to God then everything would be awesome well he didn't quite put it like that he said there would be something like the priesthood of all believers yes which is a vision and early Christianity too except that's not what was produced by the Reformation in fact the Reformation produced polarization some people agreed with Luther some people wanted to go even further than Luther and Calvin for example but other people said no this is completely wrong and we need to fight this and then the counter-reformation adopted some of the techniques that Luther had pioneered and turn against the Protestants so we had a hundred and thirty years of religious conflict in Europe extending right into the middle of the 17th century in our time I think something very similar happened a new technology beginning in around the 1970s hugely transformed the public sphere in ways that we're only still gradually beginning to understand then as in the Reformation it was a utopian vision everybody would be connected there would be a global community Mark Zuckerberg phrase the founder of Facebook right do we have a global community today I don't think so what we have is the same phenomena polarization and crazy stuff going viral in the 17th century belief in witchcraft went viral as much as Martin Luther's sermons had in the 16th century in our time it's not just cat videos that get shared online it's fake news and extreme views and you also argue that the dream that the one component of this Mark Zuckerberg the Facebook motto used to be make the world more open and I've already quoted the Twitter co-founder Evan Williams who said once we're all connected the world will simply be a better place just because it will be alright one component of that hopeful vision was in one way or another we'd all be equal everyone would have access to information education would be and in one way or another incomes would tend to level out to the contrary we've got stagnation of middle-class wages in this country and vast fortunes tens of billions to Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Jeff Bezos the the moguls of of the networked world and you argue what that this is a temporary anomaly that more competition and more tech technology will come along and incomes will tend to be equalized or that inequality is a direct artifact output of the networked world the latter there's a reshuffle book-y well the dream it was a dream wasn't it we were all gonna be netizens and everybody was going to be as it were on a level playing field in a giant Network but in fact that's not what Network science predicted at all as social networks grow they don't grow in a kind of equal way where new nodes attach themselves randomly to the existing nodes in the network the new nodes have a preference to be attached to the well-connected nodes and so the already well-connected become even more connected the rich get richer the fit get fitter but connected get more connected so when you look at networks from the vantage point of a physicist like the great laszlo barabasi what you find is that the networks are the least egalitarian of structures as they grow the returns connectedness gets me get more and more concentrated in a few hands we who use social networks who are the users should be distinguished clearly from those who own them and the ownership of the giant network platforms incredibly concentrated and as you mentioned it has made billionaires of a relatively small number of people in Silicon Valley so one of the I think unintended consequences and there have been many but one of the most important unintended consequences of the Internet age has been to amplify to reinforce inequality by allowing connectedness to become an incredible source of wealth as well as influence dr. Kissinger the square in the tower it was as I reached the halfway stage of my biography of Henry Kissinger with volume one finished brilliant book we've spoken about it on this program and volume two half researched hurry up if you wouldn't mind that an interesting hypothesis occurred to me did Kissinger owe his success fame and notoriety not just to his powerful intellect and formidable will but also to his exceptional ability to build a network close quote I'm gonna come to the answer but first the question what was it about Kissinger that made you suspect there was something exceptional going on here that the network was unusual this is really why the book came to be written one book leads to another and Volume one of Kissinger left me with a puzzle how had this pre-academic individual become so influential so quickly after he entered government right in 1969 as Richard Nixon's national security adviser and the hypothesis was that's quite deliberately Henry Kissinger built a network not just of people in the administration with whom he works in fact he was kind of dismissive of the old chart of the federal government but more importantly with people outside it in the media particularly but even more eclectically to Hollywood and then of course to other countries to the leaders foreign ministers and ambassadors of other countries so my hypothesis and this will be a big part of volume two is that Kissinger understood that the world was moving away from mid 20th century hierarchies from the days of totalitarian leaders and imperial presidents into a new world in which networks would really be crucial and perhaps by instinct or perhaps by design he very rapidly became the most networked man in the world so that by 1973 this was being acknowledged I came across a terrific profile I think in Newsweek which makes this point about him that he is the most connected man in the world with the help of a very brilliant former student of mine Manny Rincon Cruz we actually graph the kissinger network which i which i actually going to display for you which i i glad you are showing because it's one of my favorite bits of artwork from the book and this was quite a labor of love looking at all the connections between all the people who served in the nixon or ford administrations and wrote memoirs that's the that's the set of people that I looked at so talk us through this network there's Richard Nixon right in the middle that's what you'd expect but what would you what is what is unexpected what is especially telling about Henry Kissinger is Network this is what's known in the trade as an ego Network it shows all the most important relationships that Kissinger has this is derived from his memoirs right so the number of times he mentioned someone's directly so we can see who the the important people were at least in Kissinger's memory of his time and government and what you find is not surprisingly that Nixon himself is the most important and Ford is also pretty important proximity and size of the of the node tell you those things but then you notice that that foreign leaders are as important as Americans in this network graph whether it's Brezhnev or the North Vietnamese negotiator Lee ducked oh so I think what you can do with the graph like this is be precise about which relationships mattered most to Kissinger now and this is a good illustration of why the network approach is helpful because he usually kind of casually makes statements about important relationships but this is a way of seeing who really mattered to him at least in retrospect it's fascinating to Bremen the Soviet ambassador to the United States looks as important maybe even a little bit more important than Gerald Ford right who became president exactly after Richard Nixon left office which is telling you that because annuity talks more about des Breen in the Soviet ambassador than he does about one of the two presidents he served and you could you could also make the point that foreign sector Secretary of State William Rogers is a very unimportant inode in this grave despite the fact that in the org chart of the Nixon administration was superior he was spirit and he was national security on the square in the tower you contrast you-you-you contrast Henry Kissinger is ego chart with Richard Nixon's Nixon's inner circle was that of a man confined within the walls of the White House he's talking to his staff and that's about it Kissinger by contrast mentions key foreign leaders almost as much as the presidents he served okay so that tells us Kissinger what does it tell us I mean there's almost a sense in which you want to just say he was a good schmoozer well a good schmoozer is a kind of disparaging words of pushing ears and and you could also say but of course he was Secretary of State he had a lot of relationships with foreign leaders but the next step was to look at the ways in which the different members of the Nixon and Ford administration related to one another like who mentions whom if you take the entire universe of memoirs written from that time and turret to be larger than I'd expected lots of memoirs from that period it's very striking how many people talk about Henry Kissinger in fact Henry Kissinger is the second most important node in that graph after Nixon himself and that's an important piece of evidence for the argument that Kissinger really was the second most powerful man in that period of American government and I think that's why this technique is useful it it it forces you to be rigorous when you're talking about relationships what you can't show in the graphs like this very easily is the quality of relationships it just shows you that people were connected doesn't tell you if they loved one another or hated one another or were in different to one another but I think this is a way that historians can be more rigorous in their analysis of social networks of relationships and after all that's what a lot of politics is about so in principle at least if we had enough letters if enough documents and letters survived you could do an ego chart for every member of the court of Henry the eighth's absolute and it would be very revealing and if that work is being done how is it done it'd be really some of the most enjoyable parts of writing this book where the reading of researched by often young scholars looking at network analysis of the court of Henry the eighth all for that matter of the Protestant martyrs who lost their lives under his daughter Bloody Mary Mary the first so I think this this tool is being deployed more and more part of what the square in the tower does is to introduce this quite academic and quite technical literature to the general reader and say you know what this is happening a lot of different places think of the Enlightenment Benjamin Franklin is a well known figure but did you know anything about his network of Correspondence you begin to see where Franklin fits into the Enlightenment Network well the network of the American Revolution which I got very excited about which reveals that Paul Revere really was one of the crucial figures in the revolution by measures of networks and trauma T now we can show that he was the connector in the network that made the American Revolution in Boston the reason Paul Revere's ride as famous is partly because it was Paul Revere people believed when Paul Revere said because they were connected to him they knew him I see the squashing of networks you know the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the founding of the Soviet state and the question is did the USSR have anything to teach us about hierarchies and networks and in your hands the answer is it most certainly did tell us the story of Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova Berlin an AK Matt over met a handful of times the most memorable of their meetings was in Leningrad in her apartment one night shortly after the end of World War two or 1945 November I think right immediately after this was a meeting of minds of kindred spirits the philosopher political thinker Berlin who himself had been born in Russia were born in the Russian Empire and Akhmatova one of the great poets of the 1920s who had been cast into outer darkness by Stalin because her her poetry was not in conformity with socialist realism it was an encounter between two intellectuals they spent the night talking about poetry reading poetry and and talking about art when Stalin got wind of this encounter he was furious and began to persecute Akhmatova again and her family it it led to her son being consigned to prison to the labor camps again and I tell this story because it illustrates that there have been times in human history when to network to be in a social network was itself a criminal offense that could even lead to death Stalin above all other leaders distrusted any kind of networking that did not go on with his or at least the Communist Party's approval his paranoia extended to eavesdropping even on a poet and and this is perhaps the quintessence of the hierarchical order that Wars totality rien ism the Soviet Union was set up in the mid 20th century so that nobody could network with impunity and you did is at your peril networking with that Stalin's approval could get you sent to the gulag and even get you shot a contrast and a tentative conclusion which i think is probably a little bit wrong but adjusted contrast with the Soviet Union is the United States and one of the things that Tocqueville writes about he visits the United States in the year 1830s and he is struck by the richness of private associations churches neighborhoods voluntary associations of all kinds and of course reading your book I think to myself Tocqueville is seeing networks he's seeing networks does the richness and variety of private networks in a nation represent a useful rough index of Liberty should it be should it be in some way an aim of policy to provide the kind of government that most easily permits networking yes and yes yes and yes really it was right the civil society was what made the United States successful as a democracy and the lack of it the lack of a vigorous associational life was why France kept making a mess of democracy in his time and I think that observation is one of the most profound of his career what he was seeing when he traveled in in early 19th century America was a networked society with a lot of very decentralized local decision-making being taken by citizens without reference to central government and Tocqueville was a great critic of the centralization of the French state going back to the 18th century and into his own day his constant warning was centralization is the enemy of Liberty associational life and decentralization is the friend of Liberty this turns out to be true unfortunately we didn't really heap Tocqueville in this country in fact if Tocqueville came back to the United States today and looked around he would conclude that the French must have taken over the United States at some point and created a very powerful central government in Washington DC where were having this conversation which increasingly resembles the Paris that Tocqueville wrote so critically about in the in the 19th century so we've we've lost that magic that made the United States different we've lost that vital associational life we've lost that default setting that Americans used to have when confronted with a low problem let's solve this together ourselves let's not call in the federal government to solve it for us Donald Trump China and what comes next this the the square in the tower candidate Donald Trump completely dominated Hillary Clinton on both Facebook and Twitter if the social media platforms had not existed Trump would have been forced to conduct a more conventional campaign in which case the greater financial resources of his opponent who outspent him by more than two to one would surely have been decisive close quote Donald Trump is president today because his campaign is networked while the Clinton campaign was hierarchical true that is the argument of my book and indeed it's something I've revisited in in recent columns more and more I think the Facebook and Twitter these social networks or network platforms were crucial to Trump's victory in 2016 and if they have not existed he would not have won now everybody has their own pet theory right as to why the election turned out the way it did but I think people who on the eve of that election called it right may be in a stronger position than the people who said that Hillary Clinton had a 90% probability of winning and then subsequently retrofitted their theories to the facts I think the decisive variable must have been the social networks because he gave Trump tools which were available to the Clinton campaign but simply weren't used so effectively to target advertising at key voters with great precision precision and at very low cost it is much cheaper to do this and more effective than to go for old-style commercials paid for on TV which I'm afraid the Clinton campaign was still heavily reliant so this all of this sounds very odd not wrong but odd the Democratic Party is the party of youth Hypnose call Hillary Clinton won by a large margin among those Millennials who chose to vote and you're saying that she was outmaneuvered by a septuagenarian real estate executive from queens so we simply have to say the association of youth and networking is superficial at best this is our home to anybody who wants to grab it it's more rich in irony than even you suggest because Silicon Valley itself if you'd asked nearly all the senior executives and software brought a lot of Trump supporters were all completely on board with Clinton the campaign contributions overwhelmingly went to her Eric Schmidt of Google was one of her campaign advisors there was only really a handful of people in Silicon Valley who backed Trump Peter Thiel being the bravest so what's amazing here is that the tools created by a liberal elite and they don't come much more liberal than Mark Zuckerberg were the key to the success of the populist candidate and tools that were thought to be the property of youth turn out to be a very powerful instrument to mobilize middle-aged and aging Americans in support of the populist candidate this is the great irony of 2016 but we shouldn't be so surprised exactly the same thing that happened just a few months before in June 2016 in the brexit referendum in Britain where Facebook was very effectively used by the leave campaign to get predominantly older provincial voters to turnout in massive numbers ninety percent turnout for voters aged 65 and older in the brig's that referendum percent really I hadn't heard that so some that the irony of all of this and I think it was it was Brad Pascale who was Trump's digital media director who observed just the other day that they had designed these networks never imagining that they could be used to advance the cause of a populist right-wing candidate and this brings us back full circle to your your Twitter found a quotation beginning you know we never thought that if we connected the world it would turn out this way Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook said not so long ago we never thought our tools could be used in this way you know history's great because it's full of irony this is Edward Gibbon class irony Silicon Valley built the tools that propelled Donald Trump a man they nearly all report into the White House Neal things concluding the square in the tower you write about national great the great nation states and the the tensions the rivalry between the United States and China but you also make the point that there is now there are now networks of economics and technology that extend across national borders and I'm going to quote you the key question is how far this network of economic complexity now poses a threat to the hierarchical world order of nation-states can a networked world have order in the light of historical experience I very much doubt it close quote explained well the typical utopian view is that it would be great to have a networked world anne-marie slaughter has written a whole book about this but in fact we should see that what happened the national level in the 2016 election can also happen at the global level if we leave it to the networks my argument is that a networked world is a dangerous world networks in the 18th century ran out of control in France produced a revolutionary eruption that turned Europe on its head what was the solution to the problem of the rampant revolutionary networks Napoleon Napoleon Bonaparte I'm I'm in charge of the return of hierarchy and then an even more elegant solution the pen turkey of five great powers that established themselves as the guardians of order at the Congress of Vienna now this seems to be very instructive because they said explicitly we five great powers are dominant the rest of you are subordinate to and we will establish the rules of international order my argument the conclusion of the square in the tower is that we need some similar order some similar hierarchical structure to the international order because if we just leave it to the network's if we leave it to Facebook and Twitter we were not going to end up with the global community of netizens all sharing cat videos we're going to see the polarization the viral manias happening on a global scale and not just in national elections plus we know from 2016 that bad actors whether it's Isis or Russian intelligence can very easily hack the networks I don't think Russia decided the election but Russia certainly did nothing to hurt Donald Trump's chances with its interventions on Facebook and Twitter so a networked world is not a stable world at all there needs to be some hierarchical order I think it's not yet clear what kind of order can emerge certainly with Donald Trump as president I don't see a strategic plan in place yet some people say it'll just be a to power world order the g2 or chai America China and the United States maybe that will be the outcome my own preference is that we take the existing pen turkey on the United Nations Security Council the five permanent members and make that the Congress of Vienna of the 21st century doesn't that can can we can we put up with France for another century well what's the alternative if you restructure yeah the UN permanent members you're going to end up with even more awkward partners the great thing about you don't want the Germans I have what I wasn't going to name any names but if you did it on the basis as population you'd be getting rid of France and and and bringing on India Indonesia we can get very complicated if you go by population the thing about the UN Security Council and those viewers are skeptical about the UN need to listen carefully here is it it does have legitimacy globally despite the fact that it's really quite an arbitrary remnant of past history that the five permanent members are who they are the five are proven title States Russia China Britain and France right the winners as it were of World War two just happen to have a privileged position than losers don't call us we'll call you Germany Japan this is a very interesting set up to me because it reminds me of the Congress of Vienna five powers that outrank the others permanently on the UN Security Council and it has legitimacy when the UN Security Council issues a resolution the world pays a lot more attention to an issue than when it doesn't take North Korea so I think one of the interesting paradoxes of our time is that an opportunity exists today to use the UN Security Council in a way that wasn't possible at all in the era after it was created because in the Cold War either the Soviets vetoed our resolutions or we vetoed theirs so one possibility here is that international order could be based on a pre-existing institutional structure that just hasn't worked before it's a long shot but if you think that China plus America is a better idea I've got bad news for you that's not enough I don't think that creates nearly enough legitimacy for the rest of the world to buy in a couple last questions where do you stand does the argument does your argument militate in the directness as much in the news lately in Silicon Valley where you and I both live these days where do you stand on the antitrust issue the notion that somehow or other the the legal framework doesn't seem to be adapted to it just now but one way or another it would be better for America if Facebook and Google maybe Amazon maybe Apple but the Giants were broken up in one way or at least constrained well this is an idea that's gaining ground on the left of the Democratic Party because they look back to the glory days of trust-busting and they want to bring antitrust back into their political vocabulary after appeared when it's been more or less non-existent I think it's going nowhere frankly I don't I don't think the law is going to be very helpful certainly the the tradition as the courts interpreted it in recent decades has been you have to show that consumers are worse off and try that with Jeff Bezos he'll show you that amazon has made consumers much better off I don't think that's where the big tech companies are vulnerable they're natural monopolies I don't think you can break them up the way Standard Oil was broken up but I think they are vulnerable to increased regulation and I will be amazed if there is not a significant change in the regulation in the course of 2018 because the status quo just seems indefensible right now Facebook is the biggest media publishing company in American history and yet it is regulated as if it is not one it's regulated as a network platform with no liability for anything that appears on the platform if that is still the case a year from now I'll be stunned and it will I think be a major mistake on the part of lawmakers because that's an indefensible anomaly and every time I hear Facebook executives say we're not a Content company we're a tech company we're a network platform I say pull the other one it's got bells on you are bigger now than William Randolph Hearst at the height of his power which leads to no I keep thinking this is going to be the final question I am adding one more what's the what's the longer-term prospect not even that good five years from now we now have a situation in which news is gathered and paid for by one set of entities the traditional news organizations and yet overwhelmingly the profits accrue to Facebook actually those to Facebook and Google advertising is shifted dramatically to Facebook and Google Facebook alone earned as much in advertising last year as all the other media companies all the traditional media companies in America combined and Google earned a multiple of what Facebook earned in advertising they don't pay for their news they just take it do we are we old-fashioned enough to believe that investigative journalism and pretty good commentary inform commentary remains essential to democracy and if we do believe that is the current situation tenable now the current situation is not just plain isn't it it's worse than you say ah because what happens when cheering me up what what 45% of Americans at the last can't get their news from the Facebook newsfeed right that is not some random aggregation of data what happens in the news feed is that the algorithm tries to decide what news the user will like or share and pay attention to literally trying to tell you what you want to exactly and what you like to hear and what you like to share because that's how Facebook gets paid by advertisers by showing that people are stuck to the content that they go to so we we've created filter bubbles echo chambers whatever you want to call them that completely disaggregate the old public sphere so that people have their own personalized news feeds there no longer is a common conversation in America everybody is in his or her own little bubble and I that's the most dangerous part of it look at my heart bleeds for the traditional publishers but what's happening to them happen to music publishers years ago it's just the latest internet disintermediation or disruption whatever term you prefer to befall a traditional business and I feel equally sad for the traditional advertising agencies that are being given the same treatment but we as citizens should be much more worried about what's happened to the public sphere in the age of Facebook and Twitter we've talked about how it's been polarized we've talked about how fake news and extreme views are more likely to go viral but I think the ultimate threat to the stability of democracy is the disappearance of a national conversation and the creation of multiple personalised filter bubbles that can't be until the first draft at a solution something I think a lot about well I do think that there needs to be at least a level playing field in terms of regulation you can't stop you can't go on pretending that Facebook's not publishing content right it's the biggest publisher of content reserve a being secondly I think that therefore has to be liability for that content thirdly that imposes a whole bunch of new costs on these companies because the sheer scale of the volume of content appearing on these platforms remember there are more than two billion people using Facebook all using it to post stuff and comparable large numbers of advertisers using it to sell stuff this is beyond editorial control and whenever they try to reassure us that they're going to hire ten thousand people to look out for bad content fake news or Russian propaganda my response is the same as I already gave you our pool the other one it's got bells on this is far far larger as a problem than ten thousand editors can possibly address so I think what we'll see is a level playing field increased liability for the the network platforms and a huge problem for them which is how do you curate and edit content in such vast volumes that we have never seen anything like it before we need to make that their problem and not our problem as citizens near last question it is in the nature of these programs that one really wants to end on and so I'm going to say to you Neil I hereby command you Neil Ferguson author of the square on the tower what's what's the most hopeful aspect of the development of this networked world for the United States of America the good news is that if you empower networks there are good things that happen to the printing press produced not only religious conflict it produced the Scientific Revolution it produced the Enlightenment it produced the American Revolution it produced the Industrial Revolution these great leaps forward in human understanding happened because intellectuals and innovators were able to exchange freely publish them or just correspond with one another in an enormous network that was global at its maximum extent and we have something very similar today the best thing about the Internet is that it enables innovation and creativity to happen without any central control nobody is calling the shots on how we try to solve the great problems that face us today and so when I'm being optimistic I tell myself it's all gonna be fine there may be disruption there may be polarization and crazy stuff may go viral that happened in the 17th century but remember what happened in the 18th century the greatest breakthroughs in our political understanding and the foundation of the greatest republic perhaps the greatest polity in all of history the United States of America I don't believe China ends up owning this technology and therefore the 21st century they're trying to because essentially the Chinese have their own network platforms that are under state control that won't be better than what we got here so the creativity of Facebook the creativity of Google these ultimately are assets to the United States if they as companies thought a bit more nationally and a bit less globally I think that would be good for them and good for us what is good for Facebook should be good for the United States and vice versa you could say that about General Motors in the 1950s you can't yet say it about Silicon Valley and it's high time that we did Neil Ferguson author of the square and the tower thank you I'm Peter Robinson for uncommon knowledge and the Hoover Institution thank you [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 184,964

Rating: 4.8562369 out of 5

Keywords: The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson, Network, Hierarchy, Power, History, Facebook, Twitter, Trump, Siena, Hoover Institution, Uncommom Knowledge, Stanford University

Id: iAWmWBm2TkY

Length: 51min 19sec (3079 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2018