Drawing on the best modern scholarship, this book seeks to rescue the history of networks from the clutches of the conspiracy theorists, and to show that historical change often can and should be understood in terms of precisely such network-based challenges to hierarchical orders.
In both the Introduction to and the Afterword following the meat of The Square and the Tower, author Niall Ferguson invokes the image of the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Tuscany – a medieval square that hosts informal and public events in the town – and the adjacent Torre del Mangia; a literal projection of secular power that looms over the townsfolk as they gather. Ferguson's thesis for this jaunt through history is that scholars have traditionally concentrated on the doings in the tower (if only because the big names in history tended to do their work there and were, therefore, recorded) but that the major upheavals always start in the square; in other words, Ferguson's goal is to concentrate on the networks that challenged and overthrew hierarchies throughout Western history. As I understand from other reviews, this isn't exactly groundbreaking historiography, but as we seem to be in a period of ever-dependent networking, and as I haven't read enough history to be bored by yet another overview of the Reformation, the World Wars, the 2008 Recession or Brexit, I found it all very interesting (if sometimes dull in jargon and repetition).
There is a lot of history in this book and I'll just record here some of the things that I found interesting. It's not surprising that Ferguson pretty much begins with Gutenberg – the printing press unleashed the first networked age, and when Luther came along, his treatises brought down the centuries-long dominance of the Catholic Church. What's interesting, to me, was the idea of the power vacuum this left – the ensuing cycles of hierarchies and the networks that took them down that has continued to our own time. We travel through the Age of Explorers and the birth of truly global trade. We learn that Paul Revere was one of several midnight riders that fateful night, but it was his superior networking (technically explained with nodes, and edges, and degrees) that has kept his personal legend alive. The French had a different kind of Revolution: networking brought down the aristocracy, allowing for the rise of Napoleon, which networking among the people brought down again. Ferguson explains how the British Empire employed networking to keep the peace amongst its vast holdings with minimal supervision. During WWI, Germany attempted to call the world's Muslims to jihad; exhorting them to drive the British out of the Middle East. And while that might have spurred the fervent defense of Gallipoli, it was the British superior gift for networking (Lawrence of Arabia, et al, on the ground) that eventually gained the local Muslims' trust and support. At the same time, German cells were trying to interfere in Russia's governance: To an extent that most accounts still underrate, the Bolshevik Revolution was a German-financed operation, though it was greatly facilitated by the incompetence of the Russian liberals. This statement is eventually followed up by the claim that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 80's began in the East European regimes that had been forced to borrow heavily from Western banks; which were by this point relying on new information technologies from Silicon Valley and international networking at Davos. In this way, German networking brought about the Soviet hierarchy (and through “blowback”, their own descent into autocracy) and the networking of international finance brought it down. From the Cambridge Apostles to Cambridge Analytica, George Soros breaking the Bank of England, the inability of the Coalition Forces to defeat al-Qaeda until they realised they would need to build a network to fight a network: there is so much history here that I can't possibly record it all.
Also unsurprisingly, Ferguson claims that the rise of the internet has brought about a networking revolution on par with Gutenberg and his printing press – and he doesn't necessarily find that to be a positive in our modern age. Not only have we made ourselves incredibly vulnerable to cyberattack, but we've created new and powerful hierarchies by transferring all of our money to the internet billionaires who don't answer to anyone, and we spend our networked time communicating with each other uncivilly and untruthfully. Developing countries are more likely to use the internet to spread terrorism than autocracy-busting revolution, and developed countries use the internet to confirm that we're missing out on the good life. In response to a decline in perceived quality of life, President Obama brought in measures (from ACA to Dodd-Frank) that strengthened the administrative state and added untold layers of bureaucracy and lawyer-fattening compliance regulations, leading to:
Intergenerational inequity in public finance, hypertrophic growth of regulation, deterioration in the rule of law and corrosion of educational institutions – taken together these lead to a “great degeneration” of both economic performance and social cohesion. In short, the administrative state represents the last iteration of political hierarchy: a system that spews out rules, generates complexity, and undermines both prosperity and stability.In addition, the American government used anti-terrorism legislation and the ubiquity of the internet to spy on its own citizens (as proved by WikiLeaks, Assange, Snowden, etc):
To an extent that disturbs libertarians on both left and right, the US government exerts control and practises surveillance over its citizens in ways that are functionally closer to contemporary China than to the America of the Founding Fathers.With this oppressive overreach of the hierarchy, how could the networks in the fringe corners of the internet not respond? Ferguson calls Brexit “a dress rehearsal for the US presidential election of 2016”; both cases in which networks of opposition took down entrenched hierarchies – the Leave vote thwarting the will of the elected government in London, and both Bernie Sanders shaking up the Democrats and Donald Trump opposing the will of the Republican Party; Trump himself prevailing over (the hierarchy's choice) Hillary Clinton with a superior network of supporters who could take his message from the internet to the pub. (Although he didn't have confirmation at the time of the book's release, Ferguson presciently suggests that Cambridge Analytica probably had as much of a role in targeted advertising via Facebook in America as it had in Britain.) So, all of this would seem an argument in favour of networks further disrupting the oppressive hierarchies, no?
The lesson in history is that trusting in networks to run the world is a recipe for anarchy...unless one wished to reap one revolutionary whirlwind after another, it is better to impose some sort of hierarchical order on the world and to give it some legitimacy.From the Pentarchy of nations that kept a stable peace in Europe after the Thirty Years War to the UN's Security Council that has so far prevented a third World War, Ferguson argues for the efficacy of a truly global hierarchy (instead of our current, dangerous, opposing spheres of influence) because, after all, a hierarchy is just a special kind of network in which nodes communicate up and down but never connect laterally. And while Ferguson might be right in this conclusion, I don't know if he proved it. Still: I really enjoyed the history lesson; this felt quite long, sometimes dull, but somehow vital.
