The terrifying power of the internet giants and GHGHTa chilling lesson from history
This month, 500 years ago, an obscure German theologian was working on one of the most incendiary documents in world history.
his name was Martin Luther, and legend has it that when he finished his denunciation of the Catholic Church, he nailed a copy of his Ninety-Five Theses onto the great door of All saints’ Church in Wittenberg.
Over the following few years, Luther’s Protestant ideas — criticising the Catholic hierarchy, challenging the power of the Pope and urging ordinary people to read the Bible for themselves — swept across Europe.
Thanks to his compatriot Johannes Gutenberg’s new printing press, developed only a few decades earlier, thousands of copies of Luther’s manifesto soon appeared in almost every major German-speaking city.
Faced with an unprecedented barrage of revolutionary ideas, Europe’s Catholic rulers were thrown onto the defensive.
As a result of the speed and power of mass communications, national borders crumbled before the advance of the new creed. And although governments rushed to police the printing presses, it was already too late.
As Luther’s religious ideas spread, so Europe’s political culture spiralled towards extremism.
soon, almost every major city in Europe had its own social network of Protestant radicals, locked in an increasingly bitter war of words with Catholic adversaries.
As each side retreated into its own echo chamber, and as the hysterical denunciations mounted, violent rhetoric turned to violence.
By the 1520s, the states of modern-day Germany were convulsed by religious and social turmoil, with 100,000 people slaughtered in the so-called Peasants’ War.
But this was merely a taste of what was to follow.
in France, at least 3 million people were killed in religious civil wars between the 1560s and the 1590s. in England, religious tensions escalated into the civil wars of the 1640s, when hardline Puritan Protestants, denouncing Charles i as a cryptoCatholic, executed the king and instituted a military regime under Oliver Cromwell.
Yet all this paled in comparison with the death toll in central Europe, where eight million were killed in the Thirty Years’ War between 1618 and 1648 — a decadeslong holocaust in which towns were butchered, thousands burned as witches and hundreds of thousands of people reduced to famine and cannibalism.
Not in their wildest dreams had Luther and Gutenberg imagined that their flimsy little sheets of printed paper would have such horrific results.
YET
there could scarcely have been a more chilling lesson in technology’s unrivalled power to ramp up fears and anxieties, destabilise the nation state and plunge an entire continent into a spiral of hatred.
All of this may sound like ancient history. Yet five centuries on, the parallels with the world of 2017 are only too disturbing. We, also, live in an increasingly frightening and anarchic world, destabilised by technological change.
We, too, live at a time when governments struggle to cope with the speed and spread of subversive ideas, and seem unable to rein in the over-mighty communications giants who see themselves above the nation state.
And according to one of the world’s most prominent historians, Niall Ferguson, we could be heading for a future that would make the Thirty Years’ War look like a sideshow.
At the centre of it, he argues, is the internet — a technological leviathan that is reshaping our politics, culture and society, and not necessarily for the better. having written provocative accounts of World War i and the British, Ferguson’s new book, The square And The Tower, makes for worrying reading.
in his view, much of human history can be explained as the conflict between hierarchies — embodied by the secular tower that stands at the centre of so many italian cities — and networks, symbolised by the market square in which the tower typically stands.
Today’s version of the tower is the nation state; today’s square is the internet.
in our anti- elitist age, many self- consciously metropolitan, cosmopolitan people automatically distrust the idea of hierarchy. They consider themselves citizens not of a nation, but of a nebulous ‘global community’.
if they have an allegiance at all, it is to social networks such as Facebook, which has two billion worldwide users and an annual revenue of £21 billion, or Twitter, with 320 million users and a revenue of £2.3 billion. Unregulated by nation states, unanswerable to governments (and, indeed, the taxman), these are the modern equivalent of the Protestant networks that drove the Reformation. And like the fanatical sects of the 16th and 17th centuries, they are suffused with messianic utopianism. Ferguson quotes examples of silicon Valley hubris, such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sanctimonious pieties about the conflict between ‘freedom, openness and global community’. Yet for all the high-minded rhetoric, their true motives are ruthlessly cynical. When people such as Zuckerberg talk about freedom, what they really mean is freedom for themselves to make money, while limiting the tax they pay. Theresa May was referring to this when she denounced ‘citizens of the world’ who refuse to recognise their responsibilities to the nation state and their obligations to fellow citizens.
in this respect, the parallel with Martin Luther breaks down.
his followers were genuinely pious people who believed they were building the Kingdom of God. By contrast, Mr Zuckerberg and his fellow digital oligarchs are intent on building the Kingdom of Money.
For Ferguson, though, history offers a disturbing lesson. All too often, the collision of social networks and national hierarchies produces hatred, fear, social breakdown and mass slaughter.
Of course, silicon Valley’s cheerleaders insist the internet is a force for good, with Facebook- crazed youngsters leading the world into a new age of ‘computer-aided peace’.
But you don’t need me to tell you what rubbish this is. Almost every week brings some dreadful story about terrorists finding bomb- making instructions through Google, or jihadists posting execution videos on Facebook, or Left-wing activists hurling sexist, homophobic and anti-semitic abuse on Twitter.
Whenever governments beg the vast tech companies to intervene, silicon Valley’s response is always a resounding ‘No’. They see themselves as above the law, floating above the nation state on a cloud of their own sanctimony. The effect of this on our national political life could hardly have been more toxic.
FACEBOOK and Twitter users retreat deeper into silos of the like-minded.
in Ferguson’s words, the digital global network has become a ‘device for all kinds of manias and panics, just as the combination of printing and literacy for a time increased the prevalence of . . . witch-crazes’.
how true. scarcely a day goes by without a so-called ‘Twitterstorm’, with Left-wing witch-finders falling over themselves to expose heretics, punish apostasy and cement their own place in
Jeremy Corbyn’s Kingdom of Heaven.
This matters deeply. For just as Donald Trump profited from a torrent of ‘fake news’ during last year’s U.S. presidential election, so our own General Election this year was disfigured by online abuse, distortions and lies.
It is telling that like the religious fanatics of the Reformation, Mr Corbyn’s admirers claim to represent forces of light in an existential struggle against evil.
Yet for all their talk of a ‘kinder, gentler politics’, their online activity — death threats against moderates, relentless abuse of ‘ Tory scum’, misogynistic caricatures of Theresa May — tells a very different story.
Digital utopians often claim the internet has been a great liberator, opening the door to free speech and the exchange of ideas. But even if there is an element of truth in this, I doubt any sane observer would deny it has also amplified some of the very worst aspects of human nature.
For example, the spread of pornography and the way jihadists have used social media to recruit accomplices, or the sinister online campaigns by Russia to destabilise Western democracy.
What is even more disturbing is how the internet has widened political and cultural divisions.
People no longer agree to disagree: instead, they ratchet up the abuse. We now have a young generation which has been brought up with the internet’s culture of intellectual intolerance and confected outrage.
Labour MP Laura Pidcock is one of their number. Recently, the 30-year-old said she regarded Tory MPs as ‘the enemy’ and would never knowingly befriend them. She was ‘disgusted’ by them, adding: ‘It’s visceral — I’m not interested in being cosy.’
As a child of the internet age, she perhaps embodies this new culture. I doubt I am alone in finding this development not merely ignorant and infantile, but monumentally depressing.
Niall Ferguson quotes one of Twitter’s co-founders, Evan Williams. He said: ‘I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is going to be a better place. I was wrong.’ He was indeed. Thanks to the digital revolution, our world seems to me a more anxious, conflicted, embittered and intolerant place than at any time since the Thirties.
For his part, Ferguson warns that trusting Silicon Valley giants ‘to run the world is a recipe for anarchy’, which could leave power in the hands of fanatics, extremists and revolutionaries.
You need merely look at last autumn’s U.S. election or the fawning hysteria surrounding Jeremy Corbyn to see his point.
It is time that national governments began to fight back against what Ferguson calls the ‘corrupt oligarchs’ and ‘religious fanatics’ who exploit this technology for their own ends.
No company — not Facebook, not Google, not Apple or Uber — can be above the law.
When these firms howl with protest, it is worth remembering what happened 500 years ago.
Then, as now, people lived in an age of dizzying technological change. Then, as now, fanatics proclaimed a new age of utopia. And then, as now, high hopes soon curdled into violence.
We know how this ends: crazed fantasies, hysterical witch-hunts, terrorism and bloodshed. We can hardly say that we haven’t been warned.