The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (Ferguson, Niall)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
Ferguson, Niall. The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. Penguin Publishing Group, 2018.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Preface: The Networked Historian
Yet it seems unlikely that conspiracy theories would be so persistent if such networks did not exist at all.
when hierarchy is the order of the day, you are only as powerful as your rung on the organizational ladder of a state, corporation or similar vertically ordered institution. When networks gain an advantage, you can be as powerful as your position in one or more horizontally structured social groups.
When academic life turned out to be rather less well remunerated than the women in my life seemed to expect, I strove to earn without submitting to the indignity of real employment.
Is it better today to be in a network, which gives you influence, than in a hierarchy, which gives you power?
Its central thesis is that social networks have always been much more important in history than most historians, fixated as they have been on hierarchical organizations such as states, have allowed–but never more so than in two periods. The first ‘networked era’ followed the introduction of the printing press to Europe in the late fifteenth century and lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. The second–our own time–dates from the 1970s,
from the late 1790s until the late 1960s, saw the opposite trend: hierarchical institutions re-established their control
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 an eclectic network of relationships,
I: Introduction: Networks and Hierarchies
1: The Mystery of the Illuminati
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Illuminati played an unintended role as Ur-conspirators in what Richard Hofstadter memorably called the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics,
half of the American population agree with at least one conspiracy [theory] .
nowhere in the world can match the Muslim world, where ‘conspiracism’ has been rampant since 9/ 11.
also challenges the confident assumptions some commentators make today that there is something inherently benign in network disruption of hierarchical order.
2: Our Networked Age
‘The alternative to networking is to fail,’ we read in the Harvard Business Review.
key reason why women lag behind in leadership,’
The world described by Sandra Navidi in Superhubs may seem glamorous to some. In her words, a ‘select few’–she names just twenty individuals–‘preside over the most exclusive and powerful asset: a unique network of personal relationships that spans the globe’.
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Goldman Sachs, the World Economic Forum, three philanthropic entities, among them the Clinton Global Initiative, and the Four Seasons restaurant in New York.
network to which Trump himself had once belonged, as the Clintons’ presence at his third wedding attested.
Joshua Ramo has called it ‘the Age of Network Power’.
new discipline–‘Connectography’
Anne-Marie Slaughter, it makes sense to reconfigure global politics by combining the traditional ‘chessboard’ of inter-state diplomacy with the new ‘web . . . of networks’,
has, in some respects, created the state of nature
There are those (not least in Silicon Valley) who doubt that history has much to teach them at a time of such rapid technological innovation.
5: From Seven Bridges to Six Degrees
three most important measures of importance in formal network analysis are degree centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality.
6: Weak Ties and Viral Ideas
‘the strength of weak ties’.
But weaker ties–to the ‘acquaintances’ we do not so closely resemble–are the key to the ‘small world’ phenomenon. Granovetter’s initial focus was on the way people looking for jobs were helped more by acquaintances than by their close friends, but a later insight was that, in a society with relatively few weak ties, ‘new ideas will spread slowly, scientific endeavours will be handicapped,
Weak ties, in other words, are the vital bridges between disparate clusters that would otherwise not be connected at all.
strong ties matter more to the poor than weak ties,
classified networks in terms of two relatively independent properties: the average closeness centrality of each node and the network’s general clustering coefficient.
role of business networks in generating social capital
managers are more likely to be networkers than non-managers;
brokers are more likely to succeed in spanning structural holes if they ‘fit culturally into their organizational group’, while those who are ‘structurally embedded’ fare better when they are ‘culturally distinct’. In sum, ‘assimilated brokers’ and ‘integrated nonconformists’ tend to do better
greater the number of nodes in a network, the more valuable the network to the nodes collectively.
9: Seven Insights
For the historian, then, the insights of network theory, in all its forms, have profound implications. I have tried to sum them up here under seven headings:
· No man is an island.
· Birds of a feather flock together.
· Weak ties are strong.
· Structure determines virality.
· Networks never sleep.
· Networks network. When networks interact, the result can be innovation and invention. When a network disrupts an ossified hierarchy, it can overthrow it with breath-taking speed. But when a hierarchy attacks a fragile network, the result can be the network’s collapse.
· The rich get richer. Because of preferential attachment, most social networks are profoundly inegalitarian.
When we understand these core insights of network science, the history of mankind looks quite different: not so much ‘one fucking thing after another’, in the playwright Alan Bennett’s droll phrase, nor even one thing after another fucking, but billions of things linked to one another in myriad ways
On the basis of historical analogy, as will become clear, we should probably expect continued network-driven disruption of hierarchies that cannot reform themselves, but also the potential for some kind of restoration of hierarchical order when it becomes clear that the networks alone cannot avert a descent into anarchy.
IX: Conclusion: Facing Cyberia
57: Metropolis
Fritz Lang’s silent 1927 cinema classic Metropolis depicts the downfall of a hierarchical order at the hands of an insurgent network.
can a networked world have order?
58: Network Outage
Mahatma Gandhi was once asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilization. He replied that he thought it would be a good idea.
Contrary to those who claim (on the basis of a misreading of statistics of conflict) that the world is steadily becoming more peaceful and that ‘wars between states . . . are all but obsolete’, Kissinger argues that the contemporary global constellation of forces is in fact highly flammable. First, whereas ‘the international economic system has become global . . . the political structure of the world has remained based on the nation-state’.* Second, we are acquiescing in the proliferation of nuclear weapons far beyond the Cold War
Finally, we also have the new realm of cyberspace,
Kissinger has outlined four scenarios
· deterioration in Sino-American relations,
· breakdown of relations between Russia and the West,
· collapse of European hard power,
· escalation of conflict in the Middle East
world today frequently resembles a giant network on the verge of a cataclysmic outage.
In the same week, the Chinese government was reported to be relaxing its censorship of social media, but only because unfiltered blogposts would make it easier for the authorities to monitor dissent.
technology has enormously empowered networks of all kinds relative to traditional hierarchical power structures–but that the consequences of that change will be determined by the structures, emergent properties and interactions of these networks.
few analogues in history better than the impact of printing on sixteenth-century Europe.
Indeed, the trajectories for the production and price of PCs in the United States between 1977 and 2004 are remarkably similar to the trajectories for the production and price of printed books in England from 1490 to 1630
1998 only around 2 per cent of the world’s population were online.
The pace of change is roughly an order of magnitude faster than in the post-Gutenberg period: what took centuries after 1490 took just decades after 1990.
Google started life in a garage in Menlo Park in 1998.
2005 YouTube was a start-up
A generation mostly removed from conflict–the baby-boomers–had failed to learn the lesson that it is not unregulated networks that reduce inequality butçwars, revolutions, hyperinflations and other forms of expropriation.
corporations will pursue monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly if they are left free to do so.
when networks and markets are aligned, as in our time, inequality explodes as the returns on the network flow overwhelmingly to the insiders who own it.
delusion as Martin Luther’s vision of a ‘priesthood of all believers’.
Russian hackers and trolls pose a threat to American democracy similar to the one that Jesuit priests posed to the English Reformation: a threat from within sponsored from without.
one must imagine an attack that could shut down a substantial part of the US power grid. Such a scenario is not far-fetched. Something similar was done in December 2015 to the Ukrainian electricity system, which was infected by a form of computer malware called BlackEnergy.
However, the most striking development of 2016 was the rise of Cyberia.
During the 2003 Iraq invasion, US spies penetrated Iraqi networks and sent messages urging generals to surrender. Seven years later it was the United States and Israel that unleashed the Stuxnet virus against Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities.
exploiting the ‘wide asymmetrical possibilities’ that the Internet offers for ‘reducing the fighting potential of the enemy’. They learned the ropes in attacks on Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine.
Moscow was undeterred.
Joseph Nye of Harvard’s Kennedy School, deterrence may be salvageable, but that may be true only if the United States is prepared to make an example of an aggressor.
Cyber defence lags ten years behind cyber-attack,
‘Systems can be fast, open, or secure, but only two of these three at a time.’
NSA cryptographer Robert Morris Sr.: ‘RULE ONE: Do not own a computer. RULE TWO: Do not power it on. RULE THREE: Do not use it.’
‘anti-fragile’, a term coined by Nassim Taleb to describe a system that grows stronger under attack.
59: FANG, BAT and EU
arguing that Google and Facebook should do the censoring is not just an abdication of responsibility; it is evidence of unusual naivety.
Confronted with this American network revolution, the rest of the world had two options: capitulate and regulate, or exclude and compete.
European political elites now effectively rely on US companies such as Facebook to carry out censorship on their behalf,
Beijing would simply try to ‘control the Internet’–an endeavour President Bill Clinton famously likened to ‘trying to nail Jell-O to the wall’.
The core of the strategy has been, by fair means and foul, to limit the access of the big American IT companies to the Chinese market and to encourage local entrepreneurs to build a Chinese answer to FANG.
Yet it is hard not to be impressed by the way China took on Silicon Valley and won. It was not only smart economically; it was smart politically and strategically,
The Chinese Communist Party itself is a sophisticated network, in which nodes are interconnected by edges of patronage and peer or co-worker association.
China is better understood in terms of such networks of mentorship than in terms of factions. Other important networks include the one formed by members of Xi’s leading small groups and the one connecting corporations to banks via the bond market.
network of ‘tigers and flies’ (i.e. big and small offenders) whose misconduct has become a key target of Xi Jinping’s government.
build a system of ‘social credit’, analogous to financial credit in the West, that would (in official parlance) ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’.
At the same time, China’s leaders seem much more adept at ‘webcraft’ than their American counterparts.
People’s Bank of China and a number of provincial governments are close to launching an ‘official crypto-currency’–‘Bityuan’, perhaps–in one or two provinces in the near future. Singapore may beat Beijing in the race to introduce the first official cryptocurrency, but Beijing will surely beat Washington,
60: The Square and the Tower Redux
At times, it seems as if we are condemned to try to
understand our own time with conceptual frameworks more than half a century old. Since the financial crisis, many economists have been reduced to recycling the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, who died in 1946. Confronted with populism, writers on American and European politics repeatedly confuse it with fascism, as if the era of the world wars is the only history they have ever studied. Analysts of international relations seem to be stuck with terminology that dates from roughly the same period: realism or idealism,
Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ was despatched just two months before Keynes’s death; Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Last Days of Hitler was published the following year.
Is our age likely to repeat the experience of the period after 1500, when the printing revolution unleashed wave after wave of revolution? Will the new networks liberate us from the shackles of the administrative state as the revolutionary networks of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries freed our ancestors from the shackles of spiritual and temporal hierarchy? Or will the established hierarchies of our time succeed more quickly than their imperial predecessors in co-opting the networks, and enlist them in their ancient vice of waging war?
2017 Harvard Commencement, Mark Zuckerberg called on the new graduates to help ‘create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose: by taking on big meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue purpose, and by building community across the world’. Yet Zuckerberg personifies the inequality of superstar economics. Most of the remedies he envisages for inequality–‘universal basic income, affordable childcare, healthcare that [isn’t] tied to one company . . . continuous education’–cannot be achieved globally but are only viable as national policies delivered by the old twentieth-century welfare state.
more likely outcome is a repeat of the violent upheavals that ultimately plunged the last great Networked Age into the chaos that was the French Revolution.
‘I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,’ said Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter in May 2017. ‘I was wrong about that.’
The lesson of history is that trusting in networks to run the world is a recipe for anarchy: at best, power ends up in the hands of the Illuminati, but more likely it ends up in the hands of the Jacobins. Some today are tempted to give at least ‘two cheers for anarchism’. Those who lived through the wars of the 1790s and 1800s learned an important lesson that we would do well to re-learn: unless one wishes to reap one revolutionary whirlwind after another, it is better to impose some kind of hierarchical order on the world and to give it some legitimacy.
In the wake of the 2017 WannaCry episode, even the Russian government must understand that no state can hope to rule Cyberia for long: that malware was developed by the American NSA as a cyber weapon called EternalBlue, but was stolen and leaked by a group calling themselves the Shadow Brokers. It took a British researcher to find its ‘kill switch’, but only after hundreds of thousands of computers had been infected, including American, British, Chinese, French and Russian machines. What could better illustrate the common interest of the great powers in combating Internet anarchy?
Conveniently, the architects of the post-1945 order created the institutional basis for such a new pentarchy in the form of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, an institution that retains the all-important ingredient of legitimacy.
When the first great towers were built in New York, they seemed to be appropriately imposing accommodation for the hierarchical corporations that dominated the US economy. By contrast, today’s dominant technology companies eschew the vertical. Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, designed by Frank Gehry, is a sprawling campus of open-plan offices and play-areas
Silicon Valley prefers to lie low, and not only for fear of earthquakes. Its horizontal architecture reflects the reality that it is the most important hub of a global network: the world’s town square.
On the other side of the United States, however–on New York City’s 5th Avenue–there looms a fifty-eight-storey building (Trump Tower) that represents an altogether different organizational tradition. And no one individual in the world has a bigger say in the choice between networked anarchy and world order than the absent owner of that dark tower.