The Square and the Tower
Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power
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The Square and the Tower
Narrated by:
John Sackville
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Narrated by:
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John Sackville
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By:
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Niall Ferguson
About this listen
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson.
What if everything we thought we knew about history was wrong? From the global best-selling author of Empire, The Ascent of Money and Civilization, this is a whole new way of looking at the world.
Most history is hierarchical: it's about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that's simply because they create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks - leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati?
The 21st century has been hailed as the Networked Age. But in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Far from being novel, our era is the Second Networked Age, with the computer in the role of the printing press. Those looking forward to a utopia of interconnected 'netizens' may therefore be disappointed. For networks are prone to clustering, contagions and even outages. And the conflicts of the past already have unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld.
©2017 Niall Ferguson (P)2017 Penguin Audioits a great concept, but he really needs to allocate some editing tasks to the 20-odd researchers he employs for his books, as many are simply far too long.
whats more, he fails to draw any substantial conclusions.
poorly edited
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Interesting analysis, but quit with the accents already!
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Meh
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Excellent
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****
A central theme is that the tension between distributed networks and hierarchical orders is as old as humanity itself, it exists regardless of the state of technology, though technology may have the upper hand.
# Early Adoption Centrality
Network structure can be as important as the idea itself in determining the speed and extent of diffusion. In the process of going viral, a key role is played by nodes, that are not merely hubs or brokers, but gatekeepers. People who decide whether or not to pass information to their part of the network. Their decision will be based partly on how they think that information will reflect back on them.
# Acceptance of an idea can require it to be transmitted by more than one or two sources.
A complex cultural contagion, unlike a simple disease contagion, first needs to attain a critical mass of early adopters with high degree centrality; relatively large numbers of influential friends. in the words of Duncan Watts, the key to assessing the likelihood of a contagion like cascade, is to focus not, on the stimulus itself, but on the structure of the network, the stimulus hits. This helps explain why, for every idea that goes viral, there are countless others that fizzle out in obscurity, because they began with the wrong node, cluster or network.
# Disintegration of large systems
Conway, a systems analyst, with experience of government defense contracts, had observed that "..the structures of large systems tend to disintegrate during development, qualitatively more so than with small systems"
# The architect of the successful British Vote Leave referrendum in 2016 - Dominic Cummins
Almost uniquely in the British Political class, Cummings had long not only been interested in history, which he had studied at Oxford, but also in complexity and networks. With only a limited budget ($10 million pounds) and limited time (10 months), Cummings had to fight not only "decision makers at the apex of centralised hierarchies" who nearly all who opposed Brexit, but also the undisciplined politicians on his own side. The odds were stacked against leave.
Amongst the keys to its narrow victory, Cummings argued were "nearly a billion targeted digital adverts, experimental polling, a data science team of extremely smart physicists, and a baseball bat marked 'Turkey / NHS / $350 million pounds'" - an allusion to the nearly largely untruthful slogans that experiments had shown were the most likely to get people to vote Leave.
For Cummings Brexit was not a victory for the populist right at all, as his campaign had delivered for the combined right wing and left elements; the threat of more Muslim immigrants if Turkey joined the EU and the promise of more money for the National Health Service if Britain left.
# Networks Designed to resist breakage
An intellectual arms race is now underway, to devise a viable doctrine of cyber-security. It seems unlikely that those steeped in the traditional thinking of national security will win it. Perhaps the realistic goal, is not to deter attacks or retaliate against them, but to regulate all the various networks upon which our society depends, so that they are resilient, or better yet "Anti-fragile" - a term coined by Nassim Taleb, to describe a system that grows stronger under attack.
Those, like Taleb, who inhabit the world of financial risk management, saw in 2008, just how fragile the international financial network was. The failure of a single investment bank, nearly brought the whole system of global credit down.
The rest of us have now caught up with the bankers and traders, we are all now as interconnected as they were a decade ago. Like the financial network, our social, commercial and infrastructural networks are under constant attack from fools and knaves, and there is very little indeed that we can do to deter them.
The best we can do, is to design and build our networks, so that they can withstand the ravages of cyberia.
That means resisting the temptation to build complexity, when, as in the case of financial regulation, simplicity is a better option. Above all, it means understanding the structures of the networks we create.
"When half the nodes, of a random graph, the size of most real world networks are removed, the network is destroyed. But, when the same procedure is carried out against a scale free model of a similar size, the giant connected component resists, even after removing 80% of the nodes, and the average distance between nodes, is practically the same, as at the beginning".
That, is a vitally important insight, for those who's task is to design networks that can be 'anti-fragile' in the face of a deliberate, targeted attack.
# Optimism vs reality
"I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange ideas, the world would automatically become a better place, I was wrong about that" - Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, May 2017
# The dichotomy of network and heirarchies
The problems of 2017, are not nearly so novel, as we would like to imagine *** the dichotomy between network and hierarchies, is an ancient idea. The frescos painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico) in the Sala dei Nove ("Salon of Nine") are amongst the greatest achievements of 14th century Italian art (showing this dichotomy) *** The problems of war and peace, and of good and bad government, are nothing new. Technologies come and ago, the world remains a world, of squares and towers.
Deep insights, history and fundamental questions
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