Preview | Niall Ferguson’s Networld
From the Reformation and 17th century witch-hunting, through the American Revolution and to the nightmare visions of Orwell’s 1984, Ferguson explores the intersection of social media, technology and the spread of cultural movements.
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- Many of the details being spread online are simply not true.
- Polarization, information wars, extreme views.
All of this has been made possible by one thing, the exponential growth and exploitation of online social networks.
In this series, I'm going to argue that you can't understand the vast disruptive power of modern networks without looking to the past, because there's nothing new about social networks.
The printing press was just as good at mass producing tracts about witchcraft as it was at spreading the gospel.
We'll see why understanding networks is a fundamental basis for understanding life itself.
They have the extraordinary power to unite us, to spread our ideas, to take on the established interest of hierarchical power, (group chanting) but they can also cause chaos.
- False news propagates much further, much faster.
- And that's maybe the scariest thing in all of this, is that it's so easy to just throw stuff out there.
- Most importantly, the all-enveloping reach of modern networks means that they are the new battlefields of geopolitics.
The pioneers of Silicon Valley were intent on creating a network free from all government controls.
- Now the big companies are acting as quasi-governments without the democratic legitimacy and without the transparency that we expect.
- In the new network empires, there's only one commodity that counts and that is data.
- The Chinese government is very, very savvy.
- There is a competition, enormous amount of money going in, so we shouldn't be surprised that this fight is happening now.
- When we understand these insights, we begin to understand that our present and future networld might not be the connected utopia we were promised but an increasingly polarized and unstable place where the truth itself is at a disadvantage.
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