Excerpts: “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” (p. 48).

“The recurrent and near-universal problem of ancient history was that the citizens of warring sates generally ceded excessive powers to hereditary warrior elites, as well as to priestly elites whose function it was to inculcate religious doctrines and other legitimizing ideas. Wherever this happened, social networks were firmly subordinated to the prerogatives of the hierarchy. Literacy was a privilege. The lot of the ordinary man and woman was toil” (p. 60-61).

“The printing press has justly been called ‘a decisive point of no return in human history’. The Reformation unleashed a wave of religious revolt against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. As it spread from reform-minded clergymen and scholars to urban elites to illiterate peasants, it threw first Germany and then all of northwest Europe into turmoil” (p. 83).

“The decline in the price of a PC between 1977 and 2004 followed a very similar trajectory to the decline in the price of a book between the 1490s and the 1630s. Yet the earlier, slower revolution in information technology appears to have had the larger economic impact. The best explanation for this difference is the role of printing in disseminating hitherto unavailable knowledge fundamental to the functioning of a modern economy” (p. 94).

“The printed word had made the Reformation possible, as well as propelling forward the Scientific Revolution” (p. 101).

“Joined together in a veritable mesh of social networks, the scribblers and printers of the Western world seemed intent on writing their way out of hereditary rule. From Boston to Bordeaux, revolution was in large measure the achievement of networks of wordsmiths, the best of whom were also orators whose shouted words could rally the crowd in the square and incite them to storm the towers of the old regime” (p. 106).

“The point is that, unlike in Britain’s American colonies — but as in most revolutions since — insurrection led inexorably to anarchy and thence to tyranny, much as predicted by classical political theory” (p.125).

“The obvious question it poses is as relevant today as it was then: how can an urbanized, technologically advance society avoid disaster when its social consequences are profoundly inegalitarian?” (p.393).

“The key question is how far this network of economic complexity now poses a threat to the hierarchical world order of nation-states comparable to the threat that networks of political complexity have recently posed to established domestic-political hierarchies – notable in 2011 in the Middle East, in 2014 in Ukraine, in 2015 in Brazil, and 2016 in Britain and America. To put the question more simply: can a networked world have order? As we have seen, some say that it can. In the light of historical experience, I very much doubt it” (p. 395).

“Four competing visions of world order – the European, the Islamic, the Chinese and the American – are each on varying stages of metamorphosis, if not decay. Consequently, there is no real legitimacy to any of these visions. The emergent properties of this new world disorder are the formation of regional blocs and the danger that friction between them might escalate into some kind of large-scale conflict, comparable in its origins and potential destructiveness with the First World War” (p. 396).

“Singapore may beat Beijing in the race to introduce the first official cryptocurrency, but Beijing will surely beat Washington, D.C. If the Chinese experiments are successful, it would represent the beginning of a new epoch in monetary history, and a serious challenge to the dollar’s future as the principal international currency” (p. 418).

“Those who favour a world run by networks will end up not with the interconnected utopia of their dreams but with a world divided between FANG and BAT and prone to all the pathologies discussed above, in which malignant subnetworks exploit the opportunities of the World Wide Web to spread virus-like memes and mendacities” (p. 423).

Ferguson, Niall. (2018). The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. New York: Penguin Books.