The power of networks over the years
New book analyzes history through different eras, hierarchical structures and technology
The influential British historian Niall Ferguson is the sort of polymath intellectual prone to painting historical narratives with broad-brush strokes. His new book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook, is an opus whose central thesis will appeal to millions of global “netizens” hard-wired to Facebook, Instagram and countless other social-media networks
The book’s big idea is simple: history is characterized by long stretches of time when hierarchical structures dominate human life, interspersed with more dynamic eras when smaller, looser networks have the advantage, thanks in large measure to changes in technology.
Ferguson argues that, sometime in the 1970s, we entered a new “networked age” with the advent of the internet — although it wasn’t until 1996 that, Ferguson notes, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow’s famous Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force or station of birth.”
Such idealistic cant is characteristic of revolutionary eras when a socially stratified state loosens its iron grip. Still, as Ferguson points out, “For most of human history, life has been hierarchical. A few enjoyed privileges that come with monopolizing power. Everyone else has dug.” But two events in the 15th century — the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg and the discovery of “new worlds” by European explorers — launched the world’s first “networked era” and changed human history forever. Europe modernized; Asia did not. From Ferguson’s perspective, “This ‘great divergence’ ... is the most striking feature of economic history from the fifteenth to the late twentieth century.”
The first networked era eventually flamed out in the wake of the chaos unleashed by the French Revolution. But “order” was restored with a new hierarchical “balance of power” between a “pentarchy” of five great powers — Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Austria — after Waterloo. This equilibrium collapsed in 1914 but was restored, ghoulishly, in the 1930s and 1940 with the rise of the most centrally controlled states of all times: Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China.
Complementing Ferguson’s big-theme tour d’horizon are profiles of private networks whom conspiracy theorists believe were secretly pulling the strings behind the scenes. For the most part Ferguson debunks such claims.
For those who believe humanity makes its greatest strides when the hierarchical shackles weaken, however, Ferguson concludes with a stark rejoinder — and brings us to the here and now.
“Those who favour a world run by networks will not end up with an interconnected utopia of their dreams but rather with a world prone to pathologies in which malignant sub-networks exploit the opportunities of the World Wide Web to spread viruslike memes and mendacity.”
That’s dark. But it bears consideration given current concerns with issues such as the interference in elections by state and non-state cyberbullies.