Niall Ferguson on History’s Hidden Networks

ladies and gentlemen a very good evening to all of you it's a great pleasure to be here at the Emmanuel Center this evening to welcome one of our most popular exports who we have been in a sense privileged to send over the United States but to bring back on regular occasions to talk to us about history and that is of course professor Neil Ferguson currently of Stanford University but recently of the parishes of Harvard and New York as well you will know of course that Neil Ferguson has written on a variety of topics many of them with very punchy one-word theses to start with civilization empire Colossus and then the big names of the 18th 19th 20th century's Rothschild Warburg and of course Kissinger the biography of whom Neil is currently in the middle of of writing but he is today come to us to talk about a rather different set of ideas in his new book the square and the tower which is subtitled networks hierarchies and the struggle for global power and I was struck by a story that you tell quite early on in the book Neil in which you say that you were to some extent put onto this topic by a realization perhaps at a certain age and a certain stage in the academic career that you were extraordinarily well connected and networked but you felt that as an Ivy League professor you still had no real power now as an academic myself I can sympathize with having no power even though I can't claim to be in any way well networked but I'm sure that wasn't the only reason that you chose to write this book what was the reason that this particular topic took you up so strongly well first of all can I just say what a pleasure it is to be back here on this stage where I think two years ago and Roberts and I were talking about the first volume of the Kissinger biography it was partly writing that biography that made me think about networks in a more systematic way than I'd ever done before we might talk about this later and Rana but I have a hypothesis for Volume two of Kissinger which is that he went from being a Harvard professor to being at one time perhaps the most influential perhaps the most powerful man in the world in the 1970s through his network and the hypothesis that his network really mattered is one that I've vaguely is slightly tested out in this book so I was thinking about networks then of course I moved to Stanford just about it a year ago and if you want to think about modern networks the ones made possible by the technology of the Internet there's really no better place and I should tell you a somewhat discomforting tale when I arrived at Stanford and started talking to people in Silicon Valley which is right next door about what I do they kind of looked quite bored surely not and you know the guys and the t-shirts were like looking at the phones and the Apple watches and I realized that for these people history began with the Google IPO or maybe the founding of Facebook and all the stuff that I was interested in was essentially the Stone Age as far as they were concerned and so I would kind of try these conversations out you know there's a lot that you could learn from that kind of thing and people would look completely zoned out so I was motivated to write the book partly by a sense that Silicon Valley had the Henry Ford theory of history namely that history is bunk irrelevant to them they had nothing to learn from it because their technology was so awesome what could possibly stand in its way so the book was but partly motivated I think by desire to think through hypotheses about networks but maybe more motivated by a desire to show Silicon Valley that history applies to them just as much as it applied to Wall Street ten years ago when I was writing the ascent of money males Neela that's what's behind the lot the broad claim on the back of the book where it says what if not really thought about history was wrong nobody should ever be held responsible for what is on the back of his book any more than one should be held responsible for the headline that's put above ones articles in the newspaper you know that Rana well in that case we went heard his man is not under oath when he signs off on the blurb on the dust jacket well in that case Neal we won't hold you to a quote from someone else in The Guardian that you're far too glamorous to be an academic we'll take that as being fun well it's a low bar I'm just saying Touche very much to Shane let's get to the idea and it is a big idea that underpins the book and it's not just about networks we've been using this term quite a bit already and I think we want to dig into it more deeply but also about the contrast between that and hierarchy and the point that you make quite early on and you push very hard is that historians as a profession broadly speaking have been looking at history through one particular framework too much and another framework not enough it would that be right I think that is right of course we need to be nuanced here but broadly speaking hierarchical structures like states or armies or corporations have attracted a disproportionate amount of attention from the historical profession you can see why that would happen one characteristic feature of large hierarchical structures is that there's usually an archives Department you know state even a relatively small state even a relatively poor state has an archive and that is where historians tend to converge even those historians who set out to write social history or history from below and a whole generation maybe two generations of historians have tried to do that usually ended up in the archives whether they liked it or not Richard Evans who was a pioneer of social history and labor history ended up writing the history of cholera in Hamburg from the archives of the Hamburg state so the problem with that approach is that you're tending to overlook the much more in four all structures which I'm pulling networks for short but should really call distributed networks informal organizations that are less likely to keep detailed records of their activities or if they do less likely to keep them in one place so I think there's a bias in historiography broadly speaking over not just the last 20 years but the last 200 years in favor of states and the people who run States or even just the people who are governed by States and too little attention has been paid to networks and problem which is a really important one is that that has left the field of network history to the conspiracy theorists to illustrate this point when you go home Google the Illuminati or for that matter the Rothschilds I think something they're doing it right now in fact here in the hall we're not allowed to Google while we're talking put those devices away at once but the the Illuminati are a great example of a network that for many years eluded serious scholarship would you say this is a sort of idea that in the 18th century a variety of largely enlightenment figures came together in a massive conspiracy to try and control the world and their influence in this conspiracy theory are supposedly lasted for the 200 years ever since this this is one of the most potent conspiracy theories out there has found its way into the literature of such luminaries as Dan Brown I think they're in The Da Vinci Code but it's much worse when you when you get into the websites that purport to tell the history of the Illuminati you enter the strange parallel world of conspiracy theory which we as academics are sort of repelled by we we don't really want to go anywhere near those people because they're so disreputable but that means we slightly leave the Illuminati and other similar organizations say the Freemasons in the hands of the conspiracy theorists I mean I can remember John Roberts at Oxford saying you couldn't write the history of secret societies in the 19th century you could only write the history of what people had said about them and that meant that all these different network type organizations were written about in an entirely lurid style going right back to the late 18th century which blamed them for everything you know you you name it there's a literature that blames the Illuminati for it or if not the Illuminati the Rothschilds and if not the Rothschilds the build up let's not indulge any conspiracy theories but let's say you know supposing we were frankly rather large seminar group working the professor Fergusson at Stanford and you've just made that point isn't the first thing that someone's going to come back to you if they're trained to be a historian to say well it's all very well to make this critique there's a great deal to it but what is it in terms of sources and methodologies we should be using to uncover this hidden history surely the point about that history is that it is hard to recover and that's why people haven't ridden it hard but not impossible in recent years a tremendous group of scholars in Germany have written a serious history of the Illuminati which did exist that really was a radical enlightenment secret order founded in the 1770s designed to promote the ideas of the more radical parts of the Enlightenment and it its strategy was to penetrate the existing structure of Masonic lodges they were kind of infiltrating Freemasonry that the lodges turn out to have quite extensive records but no major to the society then you're basically saying we're going back to a different sort of institution and their archives that's more a question of looking harder for archives rather than a different method I think it is bad because clearly you can't do anything without some source material the characteristic feature of network organizations is that there is source material but it's very widely dispersed because it's a network another good example which is actually going on at Stanford right now is the way in which the Enlightenment itself can be understood as a network phenomenon how do you do that well you look at the networks of correspondence and publication through which Enlightenment ideas spread and this has really become quite an ambitious project in effect to graph or map the intellectual revolution of the 18th century and in the book I I actually depict one of the products of this enterprise a map of Voltaire's correspondence I got quite excited by this tool because you can in fact plot all kinds of graphs showing how exactly the great intellectuals of the 18th century communicated their ideas to one another so it is doable to write the history of networks but you need somewhat different techniques and I want to go to a very specific example Ament and possibly one of the most important ones in the book but just to drive the point home again if we were sitting amongst your historical colleagues your historian colleagues at Stanford or Harvard or elsewhere wouldn't they tap you on the knee and say Neal in the end what you're describing actually is the kind of social history that people have been doing for decades now they're talking about trade unions forming before the training is existed suffragettes moving together illegally and not being able to record what they do these are in the end the sorts of histories of people who haven't left behind an archival record but which people have been reconstructing through oral histories to other sorts of sources for some time is there really anything different yes there is because although there were all kinds of efforts in that direction going back decades no historians until very recently understood the first thing about network science about the theory of networks and until you have some theoretical framework to think about a network it's just a term you use casually and everybody in this room will have said that they have been networking at some point in their lives we started using it as a as a verb back in the 1980s but in fact there is a complex and sophisticated theoretical framework for understanding networks including the network in this room so we could actually graph the network of people in this room with a relatively small amount of data from each of you and we could work out the structure of the network we could work out who was most closely connected with whom we could work out who was the best connected person which had used measures like betweenness centrality to figure out which person in this room in fact was the most important heart of the network of course it's me but I think that God means six degrees of Neil Ferguson this is a three point five seven degrees it turns out because it's no longer six degrees of separation so the problem with a lot of what you just talked about is social history is that unwittingly historians were writing about networks I used to do this I would talk about networks when I was writing the Rothschild book I would say well there was a network of agents of correspondents and so forth but I didn't realize that I was failing to analyze the network structure and so a really big part of the motivation for this book was to say to my fellow historians people you've been writing about networks without understanding how they work without using the tools of analysis that you need it's not enough to write social history and then say oh well they were the proletariat they were the bourgeoisie and I suppose that must have been the aristocracy which is essentially what social historians inspired by Marx did for several generations no it's much more interesting than that what's really fascinating is when you start understanding the distinctive properties of social networks through the ages the fact that their structure is not that of a lattice the people in this room are not all uniformly connected a little bit to one another any group of people will turn out to have a really quite complex network structure and that's what the book tries to do very few historians have got that in fact there's a small and growing generation of people working in this kind of way drawing on these ideas which come from not just from from social science but also from the Natural Sciences you know neural networks are an important part of where we get network theory from even physics has made a major contribution almost the best book I read about networks is by a man called laszlo barabasi brilliant book that's the stuff that historians haven't really paid any attention to well we shall now turn I think to a very specific example it's one of the most important ones in your book and that comes from the early modern period about 400 years ago around the era of the information and just a reminder of course that the Reformation is very much on our minds in the current year because it's 500 years since Martin Luther basically put pinned up his precepts on a church door opening the great rift in European Catholicism and bringing out bringing about what we now think of as the birth of processed Protestantism along with that comes a variety of changes both in messages and Technology and Neil your book does a great deal to argue that the Reformation and the technological and social and religious revolution that comes with it is actually a really important period in terms of networks yeah there's some terrific work on this which shows the ways in which the advent of the printing press in the 15th century set in to motion what became one of the greats intellectual religious revolutions of all time the Reformation if Martin Luther had did what he did in 1517 without the printing press he would have been just another obscure chargrilled heretic but because because Luther very quickly was able to get his message out about what was wrong with the the Roman Catholic hierarchy through this amazing network of printing presses all over North Western Europe they could not stop Luther going viral and this is a really important insight there haven't been many periods in history why when established hierarchical structures have really been overwhelmed by a network phenomenon it was really difficult to do in any previous century but the printing press allows Luther's message to spread with astonishing speed now there's a very good paper which I cite in the book by man Dame ditmar who compares the ways in which printing led to a dramatic decline in the cost of a page and atom attic growth in the volume of book produced and this is very similar in its shape to what you get when you map the personal computers are explosive growth in our time and the analogy I think holds very good broadly speaking what I argue is there have been two great ages of network disruption empowered by new technology one really starts in 1517 and the other gets going in our own time in the 1970s with the birth and and rapid growth of the internet and the personal computer that's really a critical argument in the book because only by reassessing the Reformation as a network driven phenomenon can we begin to understand the implications of our own network revolution and I'll just mention a couple to illustrate why this really matters Luther thought that if he could only get everybody to read the Bible in their native tongue in the vernacular they would have an immediate relationship to God that would no longer be mediated by a corrupt clergy and everything would be awesome as they now say in Silicon Valley there would be a priesthood of all believers we would all be Christians together problem solved this is so like what people in Silicon Valley have been saying for years would happen if everybody was connected in a planet where everything is connected there will be you can ask mark zuckerberg about this a global community and that vision of the global community suddenly struck me is just the same as martin luther's vision of a priesthood of all believers except that it doesn't turn out that way once you connected everybody in North Western Europe to Luther's vision of Reformation what happened no not a general agreement that he was a good guy dramatic polarization some people say yes you're right we're with you in fact we want to go further than you this guy Calvin has the right idea and then a whole bunch of other people said there absolutely no way let's do the counter-reformation Reformation and so Europe goes very rapidly into a state of polarization and in this polarized environment conflict escalates and you end up with about a hundred and thirty years of religious war so that analogy seems to me to be a really powerful one as we try to understand the polarization of our own time and this tendency for stuff to go viral not all of it good will get in a very short time to the question of whether what we're going to face 130 years of warfare in our own period and I think everyone he'll be very pleased to know what your answer is to that question sticking with Luther's time for a little longer you mentioned various things including the use of the printing press and technology to spread the Bible and of course the use of the vernacular Bible in local languages in English in German and French and so forth was an important part of that but isn't another important part of the networking the shared use of language this is also a time when there is a commonality of the use of Latin in this particular case I think also about a part of the world in which I work in terms of history and that's China where of course we'd like to point out that printing was invented rather earlier than it was in in Europe and you also have there and I know acknowledged that in the book absolutely so and China is something we'll also come come back to you but thinking about sort of the parallel period you also have there the spread of commercial and merchant culture because of the ability to print and pass out these these messages whether they're commercial or religious Buddhist texts an example of that too so how important is shared language as a driver as a motor for your network mechanism well it's it's hugely important one can see that today if one graphs the the world's online networks the reading are two one is essentially an english-based network which is run by network platforms based on the west coast of the United States and the other is a Chinese Network and they're really quite separate now because the Chinese built their own network platforms and there is remarkably little communication across the borders there's some but but not not anything like as much as there would be if we all spoke and used English and that also comes in into the case of the Enlightenment where there is a global conversation going on in in French and English and those people who are in that conversation can use both those languages so I think languages is crucial you can't have a network which is going to succeed that is that it's polyglot that's really hard to manage and one of the things that actually is an interesting content occasion in your book when you talk about the Enlightenment is that you point out that some of the networks of knowledge and I think you were thinking there at the Scottish enlightenment these thinkers like David Hume in the early 18th century who put forward a whole variety of social and economic ideas actually when you do one of these fascinating graphs that turn up over and over again in the book they have quite small networks of connection compared to some of the other ones you've talked about that's right my heroes are really the great Scottish thinkers of the Enlightenment and they turn out not to have been anything like as cosmopolitan in their reach as say Voltaire and so I think one begins to realize that the Enlightenment wasn't quite as as global or cosmopolitan or phenomenon as we had thought a lot of these networks turn out to be quite custard in in national communities most of Voltaire's correspondents were in fact French and yet we do have from somewhere coming out this idea that the Enlightenment does change the way that we think about ideas of rationality about secularism about the way the world works the Enlightenment still stands as this period of the 18th century when European thinkers recast almost a sort of post religious world so if it's not networks doing that what is the mechanism that enables that particular period to be ultimately influential and successful well the way I would think about this is that Luther had began a succession of network driven revolutions Luther himself understood that once you could print the Bible you could print anything even he even argued that the Koran should be printed in German he was against its suppression arguing that if it was printed then people could see the error of of this was a remarkably bold thing for somebody to say in the 16th century the Scientific Revolution didn't take long to happen it was the next great intellectual revolution clearly driven by an international network the Enlightenment I think follows the same pattern you can be Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and be plugged into a conversation about ideas that is happening in paris and in Edinburgh and the Industrial Revolution rather less glamorous but economically much more important revolution that began in the British Isles had the same character although it involved quite different people I'd say there was a kind of era of networked revolutions that culminated in the political revolutions in the American colonies and in France and that was the sort of high points of that networked era that had begun in 1517 but in the way the networks over reached ideas of Liberty that worked pretty well in the American colonies worked pretty badly in the case of France which plunged into a kind of bloody Anarchy near Civil War in the 1790s so in the book there's a really crucial turning point which is Napoleon Napoleon is a hierarchical figure who says the only way we sort out this mess is that I control everything and Andrew who was here two years ago has done such a terrific job on Napoleon's bunker really wonderful biography showing what a control-freak Napoleon is and the pony ins attitude is the only way we fix this is if I make every decision right then so in power of the answer to that and I imagine there may be some Napoleon fans and the audience who'd like to speak up for him during Q&A is that amongst other things yes he conquers large parts of Europe but he also introduces the code Napoleon in other words shared ideas of law shared ideas of understanding how bureaucracy and rationality work that helped create the mechanisms by which a network could operate in other words people can talk to each other in literally the same language because of Napoleon surely that helps not hinders the network but let's not get too fixated on the ideas the network structure is as important as the content of any idea passing through the network that's a really crucial point why do things go viral most people instinctively assume it's because they're just really cool things they're really kind of inherently attractive and interesting but it turns out to be the case that perfectly interesting and attractive things don't go viral and really bad things really unpleasant things can go viral witchcraft went viral as well as the Scientific Revolution Chief Thomas showed that many years ago and that's because network structure is really crucial it's as much the structure of the network that an idea or for that matter an actual virus attacks that determines how far and how fast it spreads what essentially Napoleon said was these ideas are all very well and good but the structures gone haywire we need to restructure France so that one person may is in complete control and that was the essence of the Napoleonic project enlightenment despotism and I think that seems to me like an enormous turning point in historical development the assertion that human society in fact does need a strong authoritarian and hierarchical structure in order to function and I'd say for the next 200 or so years that's a very powerful attractive ideas a attractive proposition that leads to the emergence of evermore centralized states so hierarchy basically wins somewhere around about 1800 and becomes the dominant structural form right the way through the 19th and into the middle of the 20th century and that brings us in little while to the subject of China which of course shows very interesting characteristics of both the hierarchy and the network but before we get there let me take up another thought that's driven by your mention of Napoleon and that's the link between hierarchies networks and power and that I think inexorably brings us to Henry Kissinger you probably more time than anyone in the Academy examining the life of Henry Kissinger in details that you're uniquely qualified to talk about him in the chapter on Kissinger in your book you talk about the way in which you come to discover that you think that essentially he's possibly the most not necessarily the most powerful but the most networked figure in modern politics that there has been or ever will be why that was that well this has to do with what happened in the 1970s if you think about what I said a minute ago the napoleonic notion of one man in total control keeps on repeating itself right the way down to the middle of the 20th century when you have the ultimate expression of hierarchical power in the totalitarian states that the Third Reich the Soviet Union and most people Republic People's Republic of China Stalin is so completely controlling that he knows every telephone conversation that is going on and when he hears that Isaiah Berlin has played paid a visit on the poet Anna Akhmatova he persecutes her and her family as punishment in the Soviet Union there is no social network possible that is not authorized by the state by the 1970s the great hierarchical States that had emerged in the mid 20th century were beginning to fragment they fragmented in a bunch of ways but the United States found it couldn't win a war in Vietnam and plunged into a social and cultural crisis which Americans are reliving thanked thanks to Ken Burns his documentary right now the 1970s is also the time that the Defense Department's so preoccupied with the mess in Vietnam and much else that it just kind of leaves these guys on the west coast to build something called ARPANET which is the beginning of the internet and do whatever they like with it there's there's no central control over the innovations that produce the Internet the Soviets have a project for an internet but it's shut down by the Finance Ministry so this is the scene into which Henry Kissinger enters Kazuto who had been an academic was not a promising figure in the beginning of the Nixon administration most people assumed like the aging indeed dying Dwight Eisenhower that he would be at best a cipher for Nixon within a few short years of sickness in 1969 he comes in as national security adviser to newly elected Republican President Richard Nixon within three or four years the world generally agrees that super K and that's how he's represented on the cover of news magazines is the most powerful indeed the indispensable man that phrase was used in a time profile and I try to show in this book and I'll show it again I think in volume two of the bog raphy that that's because Kissinger understood that the age of hierarchy was waning it didn't really matter where you were in the org chart you know the organization chart that says the president's there and the national security adviser is there but the Secretary of State has actually above him Kissinger didn't care about the org chart he despised bureaucracy and had done since he was a young man Kissinger realized that real influence and maybe ultimately power too came from your network and that is why he compulsively launches with journalists even hangs out with people in TV and movies and build a network that's ultimately global for me the key insight was that one could actually graph that network and establish not just journalistically but rigorously that he was the most important node in the network that word node is crucial you're all nodes I'm a node ran as a node the relationship between Nana Iran and me is an edge but that's essentially the not a sharp one I hope that's a quite soft edge of you know mutual academic respect and degree of political hostility on Runners side I imagine because all Oxford Dons think I'm a kind of wild-eyed consumer we're just jealous they were just jealous there is that so Kissinger you can show that Kissinger was the indispensable man and I've done it in the book with the help of a brilliant student of mine Manny Rincon we've graphed the Nixon and Ford administration's we looked at all the ways in which the the people within the administrations interacted and found that yes he really was after Nixon by far the most important person in those administration's so I think it's a very useful tool and to go back to something we were saying earlier other historians need to make use of this kind of thing because it's very revealing once you formally graph a network it can often turn out that the person you thought was really important wasn't that important and I give the example of the American Revolution to back that up there's a lovely paper if you're interested in the American Revolution that probably some Americans here tonight it's a great story but the story we tend to tell gives enormous importance to Washington Jefferson and of course since the musical Alexander Hamilton but Paul Revere was way more important Paul Revere than Joseph Warren were the key people in the network that made that revolution happen but that was the man who famously made the ride from Lexington to Concorde and was a sort of key figure remains an iconic figure of the American Revolution absolutely and and the connectedness of Revere is something that we can graph moreover it turns out to be crucial that these key nodes and the revolutionary network were freemasons they were already in a pre-existing network so that's the kind of thing that I find really fascinating and it's the kind of thing that you won't find in most history books of the revolution ok but let's stick with Henry Kissinger for a moment Neal because while I'm willing to absolutely admit my jealousy of you I think all dawns are much more jealous of Henry Kissinger who managed to make you from the Academy to to world domination because you talk about the way in which the world changing that enabled him to create that network but the fact is that the people who came afterwards Cyrus Vance George Shultz you know Lawrence Eagleburger other secretaries of state they were distinguished people they had networks of their own and yet the fact is that Henry Kissinger has not been in a formal American government office since 1977 and yet when anyone mentions a Secretary of State an American diplomat Kissinger is even now at the age of 94 top of the list so there must be something distinctive about him it couldn't just be the change in terror at the time so other people would have been able to do that too I think that's a great observation Rana you know China better than me he's still the most revered Western figure that's correct they're even more than Mark Zuckerberg a little bit more Xi Jinping will invite him to come for private one-on-one meetings Putin to it's extraordinary the extent to which a man in his 90s is still turned to at critical junctures such as followed the election of Donald Trump which took most international observers by surprise and I think it would be wrong for me to go to the other extreme and say it's all about network structure it's also the fact that in his relationships Kissinger has this uncanny ability almost to mind-meld to get inside the psychology and even the history of the person that he's sitting opposite and this is something I did write about him in vol 1 this ability to put yourself empathetically in the other person's shoes is a very powerful skill that he has and when you look at the relationships in his memoirs for example that he mentions most frequently there were people there with people from completely different worlds and was Sadat Cho and lie these were the people that he formed very strong relationships or the Soviet ambassador Dobrynin so I think in the end the key to to Kissinger's Network was not how many shuttle diplomacy flights did he take I think John Kerry and Hillary Clinton thought was the keys so they would always boast about how many countries they've been - no it wasn't the air miles that mattered it was the way in which he built relationships and I suppose the more I've reflected on this the more I've realized that the study of networks is the systematic study of relationships and it's the recognition that in any organization any institution there really are two maps there's the org chart which tells you who you report to and who reports to you and then there's the network which is the real map and people who work on organizational behavior some of them at Stanford Graduate School of Business routinely do this for companies they'll go in and they'll say you think you're in charge we'll show you who's really in charge so I think it was somebody who grasped that the network's more important than the org chart and I think that's generally true you've talked about the way in which different sorts of hierarchy and different sorts of network have emerged from the 1970s in an age when again technology changes very considerably you mentioned the ARPANET which of course is the predecessor of what we now think of as the world wide web and the Internet and we now live in a time when what some people have called Fang is dominant and that stands for Facebook Amazon Netflix and Google I have to say I have some doubts and no disrespect to anyone from Netflix here that Netflix may be in the list because it makes the abbreviation actually sound rather more more pronounceable but nonetheless let's include them in that you can have gaffer if you prefer and add Apple in which is better the European Commission likes gaffer but it doesn't work as well on the other hand the European Commission doesn't like many of these organizations very much but the question comes in these were organizations that started off that you mentioned Mark Zuckerberg chief executive of Facebook wearing the t-shirt in everyone's wearing their baseball caps looking very very casual in Silicon Valley making millions of dollars these are supposed networks social networks that actually are the new hierarchies aren't they well that's the paradox I mean in the end let's be clear a hierarchy is just a kind network this is not a dichotomy that you should attach too much importance to a hierarchy is just a network where key edges are missing that force most nodes to go through a central node whatever it is they want and a network a distributed network is one where there are more edges in there no such obviously dominant nodes so just to get that clear that means it the paradox is in fact resolved by network science if you create a giant network with 2 billion people which is what Mark Zuckerberg has done more than 2 billion people now are on Facebook half more than half the entire population of the United Kingdom are regular Facebook users on the Facebook page once a month minimum if you do that you are not creating a lattice like structure in which everybody is just a netizen equally sharing ideas and posting thoughts and liking stuff no the actual network structure is profoundly unequal because in almost all social networks there is this extraordinary phenomenon of preferential attachment when people join the network when new people join they want to be connected to some nodes much more than others they want to be connected to the nodes that are ready really well connected so all large social networks are characterized by in fact a hierarchical structure Donald Trump has way more Twitter followers than any of us not just a lot more just orders of magnitude more than most people in this room and that's the characteristic feature of social networks and it becomes more striking the bigger they get but so that's part one of my answer not just not just on that Neil isn't wouldn't he be the case in any modern era though that the President of the United States would say get millions more people watching him on television then will be the case with even you as you appear on television or me who hardly ever does you know is there any order of magnitude of difference in terms of the quality of that network as opposed to just simply being someone who people pay a lot of attention to well these are a very it's a very different technology in the end television networks were centrally controlled there was a very finite amount of programming that you could watch say during the Nixon presidency our networks are not like that there isn't in fact central control over what is posted on Facebook and that's part of Mark unless you're a muscle well unless you're an AW or for that matter in China where there is actually some kind of effective system of state censorship what happens with these networks is far more spontaneous all those two billion people are posting stuffs and liking stuff and it is that as it's a spontaneous outcome of those collective actions that produces what we see online algorithms decide what is going to feature most prominently not people and that's a very different thing from the big television networks of the mid and late 20th century the second part of my answer which is really crucial is that unlike the great networks created by the printing press the networks created by the personal computer the smartphone and the Internet are very concentrated in their ownership Johannes Gutenberg did not become a billionaire in fact he was bankrupt at one point and ended his life on a state pension the people who built the social networks of our time have become billionaires they own the network's you just use them and this is a very very important difference between our time at that time in our second networked age if you'll forgive me calling it that the network heightens the inequalities that already exist in our societies the richest men in the world and their men are increasingly the people who own the infrastructure and the the networks that exist on the platforms of the internet and the world wide web and this is an astonishing state of affairs because it has created a new hierarchy as you rightly say rather this is a critical argument of the book there's a new hierarchy in town and it's the hierarchy of Silicon Valley to the people who run these companies there is an astonishing sense of power but in the last 12 months there's been a realization that as they say in the spider-man movies with great power comes great responsibility and a great deal of trouble too if you don't know how to manage that responsibility so of course Neal most of those if probably all almost all of those Silicon Valley internet billionaires would have preferred Hillary Clinton have comprised the United States and she didn't so to their utter horror and it really was it was really kind of fascinating to watch up close they found that the network platforms they'd created could be used to achieve the opposite of what they had intended it was not the Clinton administration campaign that knew how to use Facebook to target advertising in order to secure the swing states it was the Trump campaign it was Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner not to mention Russian intelligence but we are in the midst of a great exposing which is not over that is going to reveal the extent to which Trump campaign in a large way and the Russian intelligence network in a small way used Facebook and to a lesser extent other platforms to achieve victory in the 2016 presidential election and I argue in the book and I stand by it that Donald Trump would not be President today if there had not been Facebook and Twitter and the other platforms that were used in a conventional traditional American election campaign he would have been defeated because he would have been outspent Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump two to one more than two to one on standard cable and terrestrial television advertising he would have lost so this was a huge significant moment in American political history I still don't think people realize the extent to which it depended on the use of Facebook in particular well I think the realization in the wider sense of the power is one of the reasons why the one market who want to call it that I think it is a market in the world that doesn't fully conform to this of course is China and there you have an Internet nitta-san population that is now about twice the population the United States as a whole about 600 million and growing there are indeed big dominant companies there Tencent Alibaba Baidu but these companies are very much hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party and make no particular secretive and it's not something that they would I think be ashamed of is that going to be the alternative model of how the networked society changes one where an authoritarian state not only is not submitted by it but actually coops it I think that's right and then in the book I aventure into your territory Ranna by writing about what's happened in China where Fang has failed to get its teeth into the market despite every effort I mean Facebook has tried Google has tried they're all struggled and ultimately ubers the most recent case they've been rebuffed and in their place the Chinese have built their own giant Internet companies the bat has beaten the Fang Baidu Alibaba $0.10 this means that there's a parallel I mentioned it earlier a parallel world of social networks which is the Chinese world that is not closely connected because there's a Great Firewall of China around it to the rest of the world which is essentially Silicon Valley's this is enormous ly important because it because as you say Rana there is an intimate relationship between the Communist Party and the giant Network platforms there is a unique opportunity here for a government a system of government than many people thought was on borrowed time certainly in 1989 to consolidate its power because never in history has a government had such access to the data of its citizens as the Chinese government now has it is something that even the most dystopian visions of the mid 20th century didn't approximate to know we shall see what comes of it but my strong impression is that the Chinese were strategically brilliant to see the threat posed by Silicon Valley and to understand that they could co-opt these technologies to strengthen their power well in a moment we're gonna go to our audience so I sure have a great deal they want to bring to the discussion but let me end if I may with a question that comes from what you've just said but goes back to the question of the way the historical framework that the book operates in because when all said and done and I mean this is a supreme compliment you are best known as a historian and historian you know who thinks big a lot of history perhaps sometimes artificially has been thought of as dichotomies so Reformation period Catholics versus Protestants in Europe in the 20th century the Cold War the Communist world versus the capitalist world are we seeing the beginning right now really the early 21st century of a world in which there may be essentially two technologically enabled networks one which is broadly the quotes liberal capitalist world driven by the United States but not wholly of the United States and then one which is essentially defined by what the Chinese are doing and will we see that dichotomy that relationship but separation operate for years or indeed decades to come as a new historical framework it's possible but one thing that's very clear is that Europe has a different vision of its future the European Commission has become increasingly aggressive in not only taxing but regulating the big American companies that is a battle that is already underway and there will be another battle coming soon which will be the battle between the Trump administration and Washington more generally and Silicon Valley so I think only the Chinese have really resolved the tension between the network platforms the new networks and their new hierarchy and the established hierarchies of the mid 20th century states and I'm more interested in at least in the short run in how those divisions within the Western world get resolved it's not clear to me who wins in the United States is it going to be Trump or is it going to be citizens of the most powerful publisher of content since William Randolph Hearst probably much more powerful than any newspaper tycoon in history there's going to be a collision there watch this space it's already beginning and I do not know because I really can't predict it how it will how it will turn out one final thought although I'm a networked kind of person I always hated hierarchies from school onwards and the more hierarchical the hierarchy the more I hated it my brief encounter with army life as a cadet from the Glasgow Academy combined cadet force was a horrible experience about which I still have recurrent nightmares I actually became an academic when I realized that there was no hierarchy and academic life in practice although there might be one on paper although I'm a kind of networks person I don't think you can run the world on networks and the vision of a world run on networks is in fact a nightmare vision so I conclude with a kind of appeal for at least some hierarchy in the world there has to be some hierarchy in the international order and that's why I point out that although you're right there is potentially a dualistic world of China V the rest there's also world in which China and the United States sit with three other powers Russia France and this country in a special place the United Nations Security Council first amongst equals permanently in a position of power over other states so the great powers Liv and another scenario which I prefer to yours is one in which increasingly those great powers realize that whatever the problem whether it's cyber warfare all potentially biological warfare or nuclear proliferation or climate change they either hang together or are hanged separately and that's the way I conclude the book with the kind of appeal to to hierarchy so I think there is a tremendous amount there for us to digest this evening I will say that you really don't know what powerlessness is Neil until you've been head of department at a British I've watched and I think that's one thing that you didn't manage to get away from your time in the in the UK right rightly so we have now very large and I think very lively audience here this evening at the Emanuel Center and we have microphones I think going round so could I please see any hands from the audience with questions please make them concise and proper questions if you could - Neil Ferguson and we'll pass them on and get his opinions I'm gonna take two or three at a time just to make sure that we get plenty in you Jim and number one over there we'll start with that and there's a three over there on the seat you must be a tuner soon and yep with one two three since they're there splendid go ahead sir thank you very much is there a tendency towards groupthink with networks very good very concise question thank you for that groupthink number two right in the other side of the wall go ahead yeah just picking up on professor Ferguson's last point do you think networks generally are corrosive of democracy in that they're not accountable or are they actually very democratic or can they be both at the same time excellent and let's take a third one and then go to the go to go back to Neil where's a number thank you very much yep yeah do the size of networks have a particular importance as in the smaller the network the rate of the premium of the network the people inside it can organize themselves better they can know each other they can act as well more effectively so for example in the 19th and 20th century the labor movement the feminist movement the gay rights movement all these network so to speak faced intense hostility by the bigger network the bigger hierarchy of the culture but because they were smaller and more organized they could win in the end great questions each and every one I'll take them order groupthink is a great term here because one of the characteristic features of large networks that I mentioned was the tendency for them to self segregate into clusters the idea that we'll all just be one big global community is fanciful because in practice what is happening on these large networks is a self segregation usually along ideological lines one can see this in some recent work that's been done on Twitter people who use Twitter and retweet tweets tend only to retweet things with which they are ideologically sympathetic and so we have these extraordinary far apart clusters of retweets liberal retweets there and conservative retweets there and the result of that is because of the way these platforms work we find ourselves in echo chambers because the algorithm keeps sending us things that it expects us to like and agree with so groupthink is endemic in large social networks it's really one of the most unhealthy aspects of the the network's world and this encourage is something that we all have innately which is our confirmation bias once you've taken a position you start wanting evidence that supports it rather than evidence that contradicts it the true scientist is Karl Popper long ago argued is looking for the opposite he wants to have his hypothesis disproved but we're only human we'd rather have the hypothesis proved so the networked world encourages confirmation bias in a way that is really quite frightening and this leads on to question two these networks and democracy they matter hugely for the democratic process I argued this evening and I mean it it decided the outcome of what happened in the United States last year and I think it also decided the outcome of the brig's that referendum it was actually Dominic Cummings who pioneered the use of targeted Facebook advertising to hone the message of the leave campaign which you say Dominic Cummings is one of the major political strata involved on the brexit side I think he was the genius if that's the word of Briggs's and he was the one who understood that you needed to use these tools to craft the message to find out what worked and then to bombard the key voters with it Facebook data allow you to do that Facebook data if you can get them allow you to exactly target your message down to the postal code so I I think beyond the postal code down to all the personal traits of individuals that Facebook has been given by your because you gave mark your data for free that's what you did on the other side of that spectrum actually Neal people have analyzed that via the left-wing side that Jeremy Corbyn Labour Party actually was much better in the recent British general election at using Facebook data than the concern fact Jeremy Corbyn has four times as many Twitter and Facebook followers as Theresa May or Boris Johnson four times now that is a bigger margin of advantage on social networks that Donald Trump had over Hillary Clinton and his advantage was pretty big so this for our democracy has enormous implications because I think it makes the probability that Jeremy Corbyn will be the next prime minister much higher than anybody in Manchester appeared to realize or maybe they did realize this week incidently isn't it lucky that these letters up here are projected so there's really no danger that one of them will fall off and turn me into eloping and keep drinking the water near we don't want your voice to give out either less I'm going to try not to descend into helpless coughing finally and nobody I hope going to give me an unemployment slip no no you're okay for the next 20 minutes wouldn't it sighs so sighs I forget where the person who asked the size matter over there I think yes so size matters I think in the opposite way from the way you thought or frame the question Metcalfe's law Metcalfe's law says that the value of a network grows with the size of the network so the more nodes you get to connect up the more valuable the network is which is why he has Mark Zuckerberg has furiously chased additional Facebook users getting to 2 billion was a major watershed they're not finished and why he's courting Xi Jinping the president of China so to the extent of jogging through Tiananmen Square which is an extra without a gassman without a gas mask very hazardous thing to do so Metcalfe's law which actually was formulated with respect to telecommunications networks it's almost a pre-internet idea says that a network is more powerful the bigger it is and this is also illustrated by what happened to small exclusive networks when they tried to wield power the Illuminati may be accused as they were from the 1790s of having caused the French Revolution actually there were way too few Illuminati to do anything much and they were very easily closed down there were a secret society membership never got even to 2,000 and the irony of the whole conspiracy theory about the Illuminati is that it wildly exaggerated s' their power here's another example al-qaeda looked like an incredibly effective Network because it carried out the 9/11 attacks and a tremendously bright man Valdis Krebs was the first person to graph the network of the 9/11 plotters a graph that I reproduce in the book because it's through his work that Mohammed Atta was a was identified as the key 9/11 plotter but you may have noticed that after that they didn't really achieve a whole lot and that was because the network really could only do that once it was too small it had been designed to be kept relatively small in order to maintain secrecy to do repeated large-scale attacks whereas Islamic state which is sought to be a big Network and constantly trying to grow itself not only on the ground but online is actually a much more formidable foe so I think small networks although they're nice to belong to if you're elected sir I don't know the Apostles in Cambridge you probably feel really rather in a secret society that engendered a lot of spies and 1930s Britain well there were some other people who weren't spies who were brilliant like let's let's not be too oxford here they were all at Cambridge I should add all right let's be Oxford so one of the fun parts of the book is the story of the Apostles Mendeley exclusive and more or less not that secret but somewhat secret at least mysterious society of intellectuals in Cambridge which produced amongst other people John Maynard Keynes Lytton Strachey both were members but in the 1930s this very exclusive network was thoroughly and successfully penetrated by the KGB Cambridge spies included least three apostles and this is another illustration of the problem with small networks maybe the problem with networks generally they're not very good at defense so the Russians of a long history of penetrating other people's networks they did it last year to both the Democrats and the Republicans let's not forget and that that I think is a really important thing to bear in mind so no I don't think small is beautiful for networks let's take another round of questions I we have noticed that the questions so far have all come from the distinguished men in the audience I mean they're that both sexes are represented here so posies maybe you have her hand up right there very good okay could we get a number and a mic to the lady there as well and we'll take another get a microphone so as may be one of the token Americans in the audience you talked about the networks that are controlled by individuals in the US and the ones that are controlled by the governments in China you also just mentioned the Russians and their involvement and I think it's apparent paraphrasing of what he said but Putin recently made a statement about those who control these networks meaning the Internet this kind of technology control the future so I would just wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you see the Russians role in all of this because they obviously have had a big impact but they're also a lot of focus on it at this point in time so thanks very much great question about the Russians Madame and we'll get a couple more points in as well do we have another number going on there yes number one okay go ahead I was just wondering if you think networks have become more fickle in this day and age it's very easy to follow and unfollow someone in Twitter and if that's had any more significant behavioral impacts on society thank you much excellent question let's take one more in this round number two right here go ahead you said earlier that smaller networks are not as powerful and that they don't achieve so much but wouldn't be let's see the East German of evolution then the East German state came down and wouldn't this be an example of smaller networks starting off like in Leipzig Avanti Nikolay church they started off and then it basically spread out at that small network achieved quite a bit didn't it explained that was the network that eventually became the German demonstrations against the contract in 1989 leading ultimately to the fall exactly start off with smaller networks in smaller cities around churches and then be connected to each other but they were not massively connected privacy but it was too dangerous deed so I got three excellent questions being terrific questions Thanks Putin has a problem in fact he has a whole bunch of problems problem one is what looked like a brilliant psychological warfare operation the meddling in the u.s. election is back fart massively on him so that relations between the US and Russia are at an all-time post Cold War low Lindsey Graham remarked that it took some real genius to unite Republicans and Democrats in Congress and they were United over tightening sanctions on Russia problem too is you know Russia's just not big enough to build its own competitive network structure it does have them but they don't have the kind of critical mass that China has so he's right to identify that he who controls the networks will control the 21st century it won't be him the the Russian networks basically outside of Russia subsist for nefarious activities so if you get booted off the the West Coast the Silicon Valley networks then you end up going to the Russian networks to do whatever skulduggery you have in mind and so the dark web is is partly a Russian Russian venture but here's the trouble in the in the world of cyber warfare which is an extraordinarily important part of our story that we haven't touched on the ongoing constant conflict on the internet between states and non-state actors and companies in that world of cyber warfare up until now the Russians have essentially behaved like poachers they have been to put it crudely outside the tent running with the bad boys the problem about that is that Russia really is as likely to be hit by cyber warfare as any major state and it was to my mind deeply satisfying to read that the one a crime malware had infected more computers in Russia than any other country and I think at some point Russia is going to have to recognize that he cannot simply be the renegade of the great powers running around with the bad actors on the internet it has to recognize it's common interest in having some kind of order in cyberspace and not what we have at the moment which is a kind of Anarchy or permanent state of war just to say nailed that wanna cry was an attack cyber attack earlier this year against software of bureaucracies of many countries including this one originated in Russia well made it's probably not actually it was actually a morphed us piece of software we think which essentially infected people who hadn't updated their operating systems and locked them out of their of their hard drives and the Russians who if you go to Russia don't necessarily always have the best of software it's a little bit like the NHS only it's a country were affected almost as much as the NHS and most of its most effective employees are foreigners as it may have a lot in common I can say this company because my father worked all his life for the National Service National Health Service and often drew a parallel between it and the Soviet Union least it didn't have nuclear weapons so networks is fickle this is a really important point the nightmare if you're Mark Zuckerberg is in the following data in the demographic under 30 more and more young people in the United States are using snapchat in preference to Facebook and that must worry him almost more than the Russia inquiry and all the attendant scandal because if there were large-scale defection by young users then Facebook's future would start looking a lot less bright so yeah the system is fickle but the following is true in all of these different networked markets winner takes all or winner takes nearly all that Eric Schmidt puts this the chairman of alphabet the parent company of Google in the following way it's zip slaw Zee IPF zips law and in zip slaw the winner gets 90 percent some people get nine percent and the rest get 0.9 percent and so at the moment Facebook's the winner-take-all just as uber seemed to be the winner take all in the ride-sharing context but that can change myspace looked like it would win social networking myspace was invented before Facebook but it's lunch got eaten so yeah it's it's a fickle volatile world and one argument that is often made by these big network companies when they are accused of being monopolies is competition is just a click away and that's become the standard defense against the antitrust suits that some people talk about bringing against these companies finally I'm very glad you asked about the revolutions of 1989 I was in Germany in 1989 and you have to remember two things one all networks by definition start small Facebook was just a bunch of Harvard students initially the key thing is not the starting size it's the rate of growth and the rate of growth of the crowds in Leipzig was exponential I know this because I did the numbers for a book I wrote I think it was civilization I even have friends who were there and in Leipzig a good journalist friend of mine was there and he said the scary thing at the beginning of the leipzig protests he was an early member of the network was that the East German security forces were there with weapons and they were deeply afraid that the the East German regime honaker's regime would give the order and there would be channel and square in leipzig but because it grew very rapidly exponentially in those few months became a point when that was no longer a viable option especially for a regime that had essentially been told not to do it by gorbachev i revisit the story of 1989 in this book 1989 was in some ways the best year of my life I look back on it and I still I still marvel that I was there and witnessed the disintegration of the Berlin Wall that that year I wasn't there on the night that it actually came down I was there during the summer I even wrote a piece with the title the Berlin Wall is crumbling because I was observing so many people crossing over into West Berlin from other East European countries where the travel restrictions had been loosened like Poland but the the newspaper that I sent it to refused to publish it and the editor this was communicated to me by the deputy editor he said well do the editor feels you've been listening to too many Ronald Reagan speeches so my peace my prophetic peace was never published and is lost to posterity because it was only on a little tandy which is the memory of the size of a Nats memory in this book I look at the way that networks of dissent formed in the country that was much more important than East Germany namely Poland and there's some terrific work on this by Polish scholar who's graphed all and reconstructed all the different networks that preceded solidarity and shown how it was that solidarity for a brief but crucial period was able to join together all the different dissident forces which range from the right devout Catholic nationalists to the left liberal leaning academics and intellectuals so bad illustrates the point well Poland got critical mass of dissident networks first and it was there that the Communists rule first folded thank you deal and we've got another round of questions now and I see hands and numbers coming up there too okay let's let's not do them in order we've got a four over there I wanna make sure of different parts of the whole get taken up so for let's take that one first and then make sure we go around all right thanks very much so I wonder how you think that we can utilize this understanding of networks specifically the Silicon Valley kind of network to combat rather than encourage Islamic terrorism okay that's a very good question thank you for that let's see is there a number that yes we have a number three on this side let's get number three go ahead how do you think about the relationship between hierarchy and regulation and what do you think is the most appropriate way to regulate networks very good question thanks for that and let's there's another for but its way of the other side now so that's good let's get that for hi you spoke earlier about the hierarchy and the network I was wondering if you had an opinion on how the network seems to almost need a hierarchy so if we look at for example Wikipedia and how originally it had no editors before becoming an organization with editors and almost peer-driven or Facebook which now has groups and group admins and various other levels of hierarchy within its tools so the last key questions both very good questions almost related to each other and then the question of course about Islamic terrorism you well let me start with the question on on Islamic terrorism and not only terrorism but the the non violent Islamic extremism which i think is a precursor of a violent action my wife ayaan Hirsi Ali has written an important analysis of this showing how Dawa frizzle at ization is the prelude to jihad at the moment we're doing a pretty terrible job of this in two respects one the networks have not been very effective at preventing their use by groups like Islamic state and Islamic state I described this in the book in fact I show a network graph of Islamic states blogging presence in 2013 prior to the the high profile executions that suddenly got everybody's attention the following year and it's clear that Islamic state continues to be able to function even on major platforms by playing whack-a-mole with the companies you closed down one account and another one opens and there isn't in fact a good way of dealing algorithmically with the way these people operate and this relates to the second and third questions I'm going to talk about were still what has happened in the last year or so has been the those who speak out against Islamic extremism are attacked online relentlessly and viciously and accused constantly of Islamophobia and this brings me to the questions of hierarchy and regulation and whether or not networks need hierarchy and indeed regulation the answer is they clearly do they clearly do the problem is how exactly do we regulate platforms with 2 billion users generating vast quantities of content that are clearly beyond any human editorial control at moments we have seen to have reached a consensus in the United States that these platforms are not publishers they are Network platforms and they continue to be regulated differently from publishers of content under the 1996 Communications Decency Act this exemption means that people at Facebook or for that matter at Google and not responsible for what appears on their platforms there's no liability there's no responsibility to warm this exemption puts them at a great advantage relative to conventional publishers who have those liabilities under the law this is an anomaly it must I think ultimately change if it doesn't change we are going to arrive in a situation at which publication is essentially monopolized or near monopolized by the Silicon Valley companies who will claim to have no responsibility for what is published and then when we scream and shout as the European Commission does and says but you're publishing terrible things they will haier fact checkers and editors and put up a show of trying to suppress whatever they're told is hate speech this is a completely dangerous path to go down by the way because I think the European Commission is giving even more power to these platforms by telling them effectively to be censors on our behalf that seems to be the German government's line I find it extraordinary but I think we ultimately need to recognize that we haven't solved this problem we're nowhere close to solving it and I think that this will be one of the major challenges not only in the United States but in Europe indeed everywhere in the free world how do we regulate such vast networks that have never existed on this scale before if we don't regulate them they clearly have power beyond the imaginings of the most powerful press baron as well as all the advertising revenue in the world the two companies Google and Facebook got 90 percent of all new online advertising in the fourth quarter of 2016 if you are not in that business if you're in the conventional publishing business you are dying at this point so we haven't figured this out and that's partly what motivated me to write this book this is a huge problem and we don't know what to do Democrats say let's break them up they're monopolies let's do antitrust like progressives used to do and that doesn't get very far because they're natural monopolies how do you break up Google it's not conceivable that you could have a sort of balkanized search engine Google Arkansas it's not gonna happen but if that's not gonna happen then I think there's some very hard thinking to be done about what regulation these should be given they are utilities the Supreme Court Ronna recently said they are the public square which was good for me since I'd called my book already the square in the tower this is the public square but who owns it a very potent question with which to leave the discussion for tonight we could go on we probably ought to go on for even longer but the clock is defeating us before we finish the formal part of the evenings though I think we should acknowledge that we've had a tremendous range of discussion not just on an immensely intriguing historical phenomenon the question of hierarchies networks and how they're related ranging from the Illuminati and the Reformation all the way through Henry Kissinger to the present day and also a variety of reflections some of them optimistic some of them frankly alarming about where we may have been going there were very few of any other historians who could put this together but Neil Ferguson is clearly very much one of those we should thank him and intelligence squared who have brought us here tonight and reminded that the book will be available for signing in the foyer immediately afterwards Neil Ferguson thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Intelligence Squared

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Rating: 4.7328386 out of 5

Keywords: Intelligence Squared, Debate, great oratory, Intelligence Squared debate, speech, top debates, best debates, most interesting debates, educational debates, intelligence2, intelligencesquared, is debate, iq2, iq2 debate, iq squared, niall ferguson, rana mitter, history, networks, the square and the tower, siena, american war of independence, hierarchies, influence, ideas, reformation, vital, freemasonry, freemasons, elies, power

Id: 4cADSlk5CHU

Length: 81min 49sec (4909 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

Have historians misunderstood everything? Have they missed the single greatest idea that best explains the past?

Niall Ferguson is the preeminent historian of the ideas that define our time. He has challenged how we think about money, power, civilisation and empires. Now he wants to reimagine history itself. In October 2017, Ferguson came to the Intelligence Squared stage to unveil his new book, 'The Square and The Tower'. Historians have always focused on hierarchies, he argues – on the elites that wield power. Economists have concentrated on the marketplace – on the economic forces that shape change. These twin structures are symbolised for Ferguson by Siena’s market square, and its civic tower looming above. But beneath both square and tower runs something more deeply significant: the hidden networks of relationships, ideas and influence.

Networks are the key to history. The greatest innovators have been ‘superhubs’ of connections. The most powerful states, empires and companies have been those with the most densely networked structures. And the most transformative ideas – from the printing presses that launched the Reformation to the Freemasonry that inspired the American Revolution – have gone viral precisely because of the networks within which they spread.

‘When we understand these core insights of network science,’ says Ferguson, ‘the entire history of mankind looks quite different.’

[u/YOUREABOT]

Ferguson is/was a Trump supporter/apologist. Hence his credibility is/should be highly diminished.... Think Milo Yiannopoulous with a degree and much better research, arguments, and polish.