#117 — Networks, Power, and Chaos
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Summary
Neil Ferguson is a financial historian, the author of many books, a journalist, a professor, and now affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the lucky husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of my friends and heroes, also a former podcast guest, and he is most recently the Author of The Square and the Tower, Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook. In this conversation we talk about mostly that book, but also about Trump and other matters, and those of you who have hated me on the topic of Trump may like that part of the conversation. Neil is really one of the first people to say anything that has given me pause on the subject of Trump, and what he says is fairly simple: It makes Trump look no better. But I did find it worth thinking about. And it has, to some degree, changed my sense of how bad a outcome the election was, all things considered. So, let's let you appreciate that when it happens in the conversation, shall we? Neil, as most of you know, is a man of strong opinions and a wealth of information. And now I bring him to you. Neil Ferguson - Sam Harris - This has been a pleasure, a long time coming, and you are also a man who has had the good sense to marry one of Sam's favourite women on earth, Ayanne Hirsi-Ali? And she is more interesting than me, so, well done on both counts, I hope you enjoy the podcast! Thank you for coming on the podcast, it sure is a good problem to have it sure enough. - Mr. Fergusons - a pleasure to have a good idea of what you can do, right? - Thank you, Mr. Mclean - And I hope it s a little more than just a little bit more creative than that, you ll get a chance to listen to me in the next episode, too, right?! - Yours Truly, Sam Harris, too? - P. . - PRAISE ME, PRODUCING ME? - BECAUSE I THINK SO MUCH OF ME? -- PODCASTING ME AND A YELLOW AND AYAN THAN THAT'S A VOTING ME OUT HERE? - VOCAL CHECK OUT AND A THIRD THING AND A DOUBLE PEDCAST AND A PUNGCAST? - ETC.
Transcript
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Neil is a financial historian, the author of many books.
00:00:26.320
He is now affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
00:00:30.820
He is the lucky husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of my friends and heroes, also a former
00:00:38.460
And he is most recently the author of The Square and the Tower, Networks and Power from the
00:00:45.700
In this conversation, we talk about mostly that book.
00:00:52.340
And those of you who have hated me on the topic of Trump may like that part of the conversation.
00:00:58.320
Neil is really one of the first people to say anything that has given me pause on the topic
00:01:12.360
It doesn't take the onus off of the people who have supported him.
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And it has, to some degree, changed my sense of how bad an outcome the election was, all
00:01:29.280
So, I'll let you appreciate that when it happens in the conversation.
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Neil, as most of you know, is a man of strong opinions and a wealth of information.
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And you are also a man who's had the good sense to marry one of my favorite women on earth,
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So, your listeners will just have to make do with second best on this occasion.
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So, before we get into your new book, which is fascinating, give me a picture of how you
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view your career as an academic and a journalist.
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You are often described as an economic historian.
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You seem, from the outside at least, not to be an entirely standard academic or journalist.
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You seem far more entrepreneurial than that and have just walked a very interesting line
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Well, if one writes the history of an historian, it usually makes for rather dull reading.
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I think it was George III who said to Gibbon, scribble, scribble, scribble.
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My mother's father was a journalist, an autodidact who'd left school at a very young age.
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He'd risen to be chief sub-editor on the Glasgow Herald before World War II.
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And he encouraged me to regard writing as a vacation.
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It was something I could do easily from an early age, but it was my grandfather who made
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So, the question that any writer confronts at a fairly early stage is how to pay for the
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And the simple answer seemed to me to become an academic, because as an academic, at least
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And one's also, in some measure, being paid to teach other people to write.
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I fell in love with Oxford at first sight as a young man, thought nothing could possibly
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be more blissful than the life of an Oxford dom.
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I looked enviously at their book-line studies and assessed the job requirements.
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One spent only half the year teaching three eight-week terms, and the rest of one's time
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appeared to be dedicated to reading books and writing books.
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And I think under different circumstances in a different parallel world, I might just have
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led a life of blameless obscurity, probably in Cambridge, where I got my second job at
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I lived happily at Peterhouse in college, a bachelor don, dining at high table, and being insufferable.
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And I could probably have kept that up for decades, but then private life intervened.
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And really, from the moment I became a father, I had to be a little bit more creative about
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And I think that's when my secret hobby of journalism began to become more than just a
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hobby and actually a source of income and to end this long answer.
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Then I began to see that if I was going to communicate my ideas to a public slightly wider
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than the fellowship of an Oxbridge College, I had to not only write for newspapers, but
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And here I am at the age of 53 doing podcasts with Sam Harris, still in this quest to disseminate
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my ideas to a wider audience and pay for my children.
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Yeah, well, to repurpose the cliche, necessity being the mother of invention, it works out.
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It's good that those avenues were open to you because it's producing very creative work
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and influential work, and it's breaking down this tired notion, if it were ever true, that
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you have to be publishing in some academic journal that only 400 people will read to actually
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make your contribution to the important conversations that are happening.
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Clearly, contributions are being made in books written for a general audience now, and that's
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And your books are among both the most accessible and most comprehensive.
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And the new one is The Square and the Tower, which is about, I should give the subtitle, Networks
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and Power, from Freemasons to Facebook, and it is about the nature of networks, for good
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or for ill, really, and networks are contrasted with hierarchies.
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So maybe we should just start with some basic definitions here.
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I think everyone has an intuitive sense of what hierarchies and networks are, but perhaps
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The book really begins with a false dichotomy in its title, The Square and the Tower, and
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one's asked at the beginning to believe that there is a stark contrast between the town
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square, where social networks form informally, spontaneously, with little real leadership, and
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the tower, where hierarchical structures of authority reside.
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As the book unfolds, it becomes clear to the reader that in truth, there are just different
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forms of network, distributed networks, which are very decentralized, and hierarchical networks,
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in which one node, or perhaps one or two nodes, have a very high centrality, have a great deal
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of control or power, or are able to monopolize information or resource flows.
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So for those listeners who have done their homework on network science, that notion of a spectrum,
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of a continuum of different kinds of network architecture will be familiar.
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But I felt the general reader needed to be eased into that.
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And it's, from a heuristic point of view, I think, quite nice to suggest that there's this
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Because I think in our everyday lives, we feel there to be a distinction between the hierarchy
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that we inhabit, if we work for a corporation, or for some other traditionally pyramidally structured
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organization, and the network of our friends and family.
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I think a characteristic feature of modern life is that one alternates between the org
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chart of some hierarchical organization, even if it's only in one's role as a citizen of
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a state, and the social network that we inhabit out of the office.
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You start with this dichotomy, and then gradually it becomes clear that it's really a continuum.
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Yeah, although I think there are a few features that make the dichotomy worth keeping in mind.
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There's the verticality of a hierarchy, the fact that the top stays at the top, and that
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you can't really move out from the edge on any level, that everything has to kind of run
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through this chain, you know, from top to bottom, that classic networks, even with their
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clumping and clustering, you know, kind of, you know, hierarchies, seeming hierarchies that
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Classic networks seem to violate that principle, so it's kind of what happens at the edges that
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I think in strict terms, one shouldn't really talk about vertical and horizontal.
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I was at least discouraged from doing that when I started to hang out with the real network
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specialists at Stanford, but I think for the lay reader, this is a helpful way of thinking
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about it, that in a hierarchical structure, there's a node at the top.
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And I give the example in the book of Stalin's Soviet Union, which is perhaps the most extreme
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Stalin claimed, and in many cases was able to achieve a complete control over the lives of
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ordinary Soviet citizens, and to prohibit, or at least make very dangerous, unauthorized
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So those horizontal ties or edges, if you will, between nodes were hazardous if they weren't,
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To graph that, you would draw a tree-like structure with all the edges pointing upwards towards Stalin,
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the central node, and none really running across from peer to peer.
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So I think this is a helpful way to think about it, even if it's not, strictly speaking,
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The technical language would be that Stalin in the Soviet Union had the highest betweenness
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centrality of any node, but that's not something that one can readily say on talk radio.
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Well, happily, we're not on talk radio, though.
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But one point you make with respect to this dichotomy is that history has really tended
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to be written by the hierarchies, in the sense that, and the work of historians has so often
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been a matter of going to some archive and seeing the remnants of some regime in print and writing
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And that networks, again, classic networks, the tissue of relationships and influences that happen
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throughout an entire society, that tends to not be recorded in quite the same way.
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And we have this distorted view of what has actually happened in history as a result.
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And archives are generally produced by hierarchical entities like states or corporations.
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In my case, it was the Hamburg State Archives that I sat in.
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And I remember having a very frustrating experience trying to piece together the history of the
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German hyperinflation of the early 1920s from these official documents.
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The documents in the Hamburg State Archive essentially presented the world as it had appeared
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to a bureaucracy and an early 20th century bureaucracy that didn't really want to admit that things
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So, to my bemusement, there seemed very little trace in the Hamburg State Archives of the greatest
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monetary disaster in German history, if not in all history.
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Then one day, I bumped into a man at the British consulate.
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He listened to what I was saying about the reason I was in Hamburg.
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And he said, oh, you must come and look at my father's papers.
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So, I went to the office of the bank MM Warburg and sat in an old paneled study.
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And there were the papers of Max Warburg, who had been one of the leading bankers of 1920s
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And I entered the world of social networks and left the world of official hierarchy.
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Here was the story I'd been looking for, because here in Warburg's correspondence with his circle
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of friends, some of whom were in politics, some of whom were in finance, I found the story
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And that was really the beginning of my career as a historian of networks, though I didn't
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And it's only really with hindsight that I've realized I've spent most of my career trying
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to get away from those state archives and trying to find the records of the social networks.
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You need a bit of luck, as I did have in Hamburg.
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But when you find the archives of the networks, I think very often you find a more interesting
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story than the official record in the state archives.
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It's really the history of private life in many respects, which does such work for us.
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And of informal life, of leader's life, spontaneous life.
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I think that's part of the appeal to me of the private papers of an individual, that it's
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Of course, one needs to add that every notable person who leaves behind a collection of papers
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has probably weeded out the embarrassing ones and retained all the boring ones and retained
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So you've got to guard against some selection problems.
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But I still find, as an approach, at the very least, it's right to look outside national
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or regional government archives, because that's the hierarchical version of history in there.
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That's the version of history that the bureaucrats have constructed.
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And it's only a part of the story one needs to tell.
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And a quite different picture often emerges if you can get outside that hierarchy and enter
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So you make one observation at some point in the book that struck me as highly counterintuitive,
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And at one point, you talk about the parallel between what has happened in our information
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economy with the birth of the personal computer and the internet and what happened over the
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course of a couple of centuries, but seem to have begun to peak in the 16th century as
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a result of the printing press and the spread of books and literacy as a result.
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And you say that the time we're living in now, really the last few decades, is in many important
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respects more similar to the 16th century than it is to the 20th.
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An analogy is really the way that historians are best able to illuminate the present with
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I argue that the printing press, as it spread across Europe, beginning with Gutenberg's invention
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in the 15th century, revolutionized the public sphere as radically as the internet and the
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personal computer have revolutionized the public sphere in our time.
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And the ways in which these processes are similar are numerous.
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Number one, the printing press had the same effect on the cost of a book that innovation
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had on the cost of a computer from the 1970s until the early 2000s.
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And secondly, the consequence for the volume of information were similar with that lowering
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of the price of the unit of content production.
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The only real difference is that in the case of the printing press, the networked revolution,
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if you want to call it that, well, it spread out over 300 years, really, beginning in the
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early 16th century with the period of the Reformation and carrying on right the way through the 17th
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and 18th centuries with one networked revolution after another, the Enlightenment, the political
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revolutions that followed from that, but also the scientific revolution and the industrial
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These revolutions all were driven by the much greater ease of communication through the printed
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Whereas in our time, the same kind of revolutionary changes have been happening an order of magnitude
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So what took a century back then now takes a decade.
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And that seems like a reasonable way of thinking about this drastic change in the structure of the
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I can't think of a better analogy than the time of the Reformation 500 years ago.
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And my point is that if Luther had tried to launch the Reformation without the printing press,
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He would have been just another, you know, another burnt heretic.
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And the effects of his message as disseminated by the printing press were in many ways a startling
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to the 16th century Europeans as the effects of the personal computer and internet have
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been on messages that have gone viral in our time.
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Well, and of course, the effect in the near term was fairly bloody in Luther's case.
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Because in the end, and this is a really kind of key point, Luther expected this to have benign
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He thought that once everybody could read the Bible in their vernacular and have a direct
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relationship to God, not mediated by a corrupt clergy, we'd get that priesthood of all believers
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Instead, he got 130 years of religious strife between proponents of the Reformation Protestants
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And I think we are equally surprised today to find that creating giant online social networks
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does not produce a global community of happy people sharing cat videos, but in fact leads
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And as in the 16th and 17th centuries, it's not just good things that go viral, it's crazy
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Then it was witchcraft that went viral as a concept in the wake of the Reformation.
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In our time, of course, all kinds of fake news and extreme views go viral.
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And we're as surprised by this outcome as the Lutherans were.
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They really didn't expect to unleash more than a century of religious conflict.
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Yeah, so let's talk about the quality of our conversation as a result of these networks
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and social media in particular and the problem of fake news.
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Because I've heard you say, you say it in the book, and I've heard you say it in at least
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one previous interview, that there would be no President Trump without Facebook.
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And this effect that many people have noted of a kind of siloing of information where either
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by our own choice or some perverse tuning of the algorithms based on the advertising model
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of content now, people are becoming more polarized, that connectedness is increasing polarization
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and amplifying the signal of true information, but also false information, and in ways that
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everyone seems fairly stunned by, how do you think about what's happening now and what we
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We should never have believed Silicon Valley's promise that if everybody was connected, then
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That was a promise repeatedly made from the 90s onwards.
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It reached its zenith in the things that Mark Zuckerberg, a founder and CEO of Facebook,
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said to the effect that if Facebook could only grow to the maximum extent, there'd be a global
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community, and in that global community, we'd be able collectively to solve mankind's problems
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And I think he was sincere in that belief, I'm pretty sure, and I suspect the same was
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true of the founders of all the great network platforms.
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I don't even remember thinking very critically about this myself as a fairly early internet
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user, but we should have known better because not only did history predict that large social
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networks would be inclined towards polarization, so did network science, because network science
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has this clear proposition that even small-sized social networks will tend to self-segregate
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The term homophily is the technical one, which sounds a little strange, as it doesn't, again,
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get used much on talk radio, but it just means that birds of a feather flock together.
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And so we see this pattern even in high schools.
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Sociologists have worked on this since the 1970s when they were scratching their heads and wondering
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why the integration of schools wasn't going so well.
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It turned out that even with all the busing in the world, high school communities tended
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So we've known about homophily, we've known about the tendency for birds of a feather to
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flock together for a long time, and guess what?
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That's exactly what happens on Facebook and on Twitter.
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People congregate into clusters, mostly ideological clusters, when it comes to political issues.
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So we shouldn't have been surprised, but we were because we drank the Kool-Aid.
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We thought that if everybody was connected, then obviously everything would be great.
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I think the Trump point is a really important one because nobody in Silicon Valley realized,
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until it was much too late, that their network platforms were going to be crucial to his victory
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in the 2016 election, nor did they appreciate at all the significance of the fact that people
00:24:43.640
were paying in rubles for advertising on those platforms and opening accounts,
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a suspiciously large number of accounts in Russia.
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There was a complete underestimation of the political risk in Silicon Valley, I think because
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the culture of the computer science types of the engineers simply demoted that to a low priority.
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I think as it became clear, and I think this is a pretty clear-cut point, that without Facebook,
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and perhaps also Twitter, but I think Facebook was really crucial, the Trump campaign couldn't have won.
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Heads were exploding all over the valley, and the inquest into Silicon Valley's part in Trump's
00:25:35.140
We're only gradually being able to find out just how extensive the Russian hacking of the system was.
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But I think more importantly, we're only gradually coming to appreciate that the Facebook advertising
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tool was the key weapon that the Trump campaign used so much more effectively than the Clinton campaign,
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that it was able to overcome the massive financial disadvantage it had.
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And I think if you take away Facebook and Twitter and imagine that election playing out
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in pre-2008 technology, he would never have won.
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So Silicon Valley essentially made Trump possible, and this was definitely not part of the plan
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since most people in Silicon Valley, I can think of perhaps two exceptions, lean left.
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Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, who are friends that stand out for their...
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I think their willingness to go against the current, and the current is pretty strong in and around
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Silicon Valley, to be not just liberal, but progressive, even as you're making your millions,
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But a point from them, really, most people were more or less unthinkingly Clinton supporters.
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And I don't think it dawned on many people that the internet, which sort of had made by liberals
00:27:05.440
stamped on it, could be used to such extraordinary effect by not just conservatives, but a bunch
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This has been one of the great ironies of modern American history.
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That kind of irony is what makes history a worthy subject of study.
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Nobody anticipated that outcome, and I still think it hasn't fully been processed in Silicon
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Valley or in Washington, that the nature of the democratic process is fundamentally altered
00:27:40.380
so that in future, there will be two kinds of candidate, those who understand how to use
00:27:47.620
Everything you just said is actually agnostic as to whether or not it's a good thing or not
00:27:56.680
I want to ask you about Trump in a second, but what we're talking about here is a fundamentally
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unanticipated mechanism by which political opinion is getting swayed and the usual gatekeepers
00:28:09.260
of information, real journalists and imperfectly, though mostly properly aligned incentives in
00:28:17.400
And into that vacuum where their influence eroded, you have things like Infowars and Breitbart
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and utterly fake news being amplified on social media and for good or for ill, depending on
00:28:35.160
what outcome you want, but still the process now is it's violating every norm of civil conversation
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and truth testing when you, when you look at the details.
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The number of stories that are fake is alarming.
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The fact that the phrase fake news has been turned against real journalism by the people
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who avidly consume fake news, like, you know, real news is fake and fake news is real for millions
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It is really a breakdown of public conversation.
00:29:09.940
Before I ask you about Trump, let's talk a little bit more about just the kind of truth
00:29:14.200
testing that the norms of conversation are meant to preserve and what appears to be unraveling
00:29:25.160
Because advertising is not something that most people would have thought was a threat to democracy
00:29:30.380
or global sanity, but increasingly it seems to be one.
00:29:34.560
How, how do you see ads as driving this process?
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Just to clarify that, Neil, even if you think Trump is a much better president than Clinton
00:29:51.780
would have been, if that's your view, I'm not speaking about you, Neil, I'm speaking about
00:29:56.220
our listeners, if that's your view, there's still very good reason to be worried about
00:30:05.560
You're right to raise the issue of advertising.
00:30:08.320
In the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, when the printing press was the dominant way in which
00:30:13.240
ideas got disseminated, relatively few organs sought to make money through advertising.
00:30:20.260
Newspapers and magazines started to do it, but it wasn't really central to the business model
00:30:25.360
in the early years of the print economy, whereas from a very early stage, the network platforms
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of the internet sought to monetize the search engine, the social network through advertising.
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And this was a crucial departure, not only because it was business genius, but also because
00:30:49.860
it created an entirely different public sphere with different incentives from the old one.
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I love mentioning Jürgen Habermas in contexts like this, because it's not a name that one
00:31:04.580
But Habermas' early work, the structural change of the public sphere, was a very influential
00:31:12.940
Habermas showed how much of the 18th and 19th century political changes in Europe were consequences
00:31:19.180
of changes in the structure of the public sphere.
00:31:21.080
And I think we've lived through a tremendous change in the structure of the public sphere
00:31:24.120
because Facebook, Google, YouTube in particular, but other network platforms too, have a very
00:31:34.160
And the incentive is to demonstrate to the people to whom they sell advertising space online that
00:31:42.800
they have high user engagement, that users are looking at content on Facebook, on Google,
00:31:49.920
on YouTube, and they're looking at that content for more than a nanosecond.
00:31:59.260
That's how you persuade people to do their advertising online rather than in magazines or newspapers or
00:32:08.860
The things that cause us to linger on a web page are not its truth or beauty.
00:32:16.920
We are attracted to the fake, and we are attracted to the extreme.
00:32:23.060
So fake news and extreme views are, it seems to me, fundamentally incentivized by this particular
00:32:30.400
And I can illustrate this with an example from a paper that was published after I had finished
00:32:36.320
Now, this paper showed that on Twitter, A, things are likely to be retweeted within ideological
00:32:43.740
In other words, liberals tend to retweet liberals and conservatives retweet conservatives.
00:32:49.900
But what is surprising is that a tweet is 20% more likely to be retweeted for every moral or
00:32:59.000
So the incentive, if you want to get retweeted, is always to ramp up the language.
00:33:05.760
It seems to me that which is the real pathology here, that the social networks online, when
00:33:15.160
it comes to politics anyway, are engines of polarization, that they are designed to drive
00:33:22.160
It's not enough to talk about echo chambers and filter bubbles, because that implies a certain
00:33:31.800
It is the more extreme people on the political spectrum who are most likely to tweet about
00:33:38.040
It is the most ideologically extreme members of Congress in both the Senate and the House
00:33:45.480
So I think these are consequences of a model that incentivizes the extreme.
00:33:53.380
Now, at root of it all is our, I guess, our original sin that we can't quite resist the
00:34:01.300
Even if we probably know the minute we see it that it's fake, we linger over it and are
00:34:10.440
We have this engine of polarization and nothing that has been said or done since the inquests
00:34:19.680
into the 2016 election began has fundamentally changed this.
00:34:25.240
It's the same system and I think it will operate in similar ways in other elections in other countries
00:34:33.240
countries and indeed in this country this year.
00:34:35.960
You seem to me to be not as alarmed by Trump as I am.
00:34:40.520
How would you characterize your level of concern about his presidency?
00:34:48.880
this is within the range of normal American politics.
00:34:55.960
We've seen populism before and the constitution was set up for the eventuality of a demagogue
00:35:11.940
hmm, I wonder if it felt like this in the final years of the Roman Republic.
00:35:20.460
I think a historian needs to be very skeptical about some of the claims that have been made
00:35:25.000
by, I won't name names, by those who warn that we're descending rapidly towards tyranny
00:35:36.620
I mean, that just strikes me as a terribly inappropriate analogy.
00:35:41.460
And I'm impatient with the talk of tyranny and I will name names.
00:35:49.620
I disagree with my dear friend Andrew Sullivan about this.
00:35:52.700
And I disagree with my friend Tim Snyder about this.
00:35:58.940
And I think if one simply locates the Trump presidency in the context of American history,
00:36:05.200
leave aside the Weimar Republic, there are numerous precedents for what we're seeing.
00:36:13.700
And the most likely outcome at this point is not the collapse of the Republic.
00:36:18.720
It's the impeachment of the president after the Democrats win back the House in November.
00:36:25.100
That's pretty much the base case at this point.
00:36:27.600
However, I think it would be excessively sanguine to say that that's the outcome with 95% probability.
00:36:38.460
After all, didn't we learn in 2016 not to have too high confidence in our political predictions?
00:36:47.220
You're forced constantly to assess your expectations, make sure that you're updating your views.
00:36:52.940
And my column has blown hot and cold for the last two years between dismissing Trump as a hopeless candidate
00:37:04.800
And I veer around as I write at the moment between thinking that dreadful mistakes are being made
00:37:12.880
and then reflecting that, for example, if one just compares outcomes, comparing year one of Clinton with year one of Trump,
00:37:22.920
and leaving aside the personalities, they're not so very different.
00:37:27.160
It's a difficult line to tread for the obvious reason that in this polarized public sphere that now exists,
00:37:34.500
the man who goes down the middle is in a crossfire.
00:37:41.920
It would be easier for me to have gone fool, never Trump, as some of my friends have done.
00:37:50.000
But my sense is that that's not the correct posture for a critical thinker.
00:37:55.440
The critical thinker has to say, what is this like historically?
00:38:00.820
And it is not like the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
00:38:03.600
It is much more like the populist wave of the late 19th century, which was a backlash against globalization
00:38:10.980
and produced Trump-like figures, even if not a Trump presidency.
00:38:16.400
And I think if one takes that approach and tries one's best to be dispassionate,
00:38:22.160
one arrives in this almost uninhabited center ground.
00:38:28.880
It's not much fun because you're kind of hated by both sides.
00:38:33.000
If you go on MSNBC, you're accused of being a Trump apologist.
00:38:36.300
And if you go on Fox, you're far too critical of the president.
00:38:40.420
But this is precisely the pathology that the square in the tower is about,
00:38:44.400
that we have created this extraordinarily polarized public sphere
00:38:48.780
in which to take some balanced middle position is almost by definition
00:38:56.800
Right. You function largely, if not mostly, in conservative circles, I would imagine.
00:39:03.180
I mean, you have an appointment at Hoover, and I'm just imagining what your network looks like.
00:39:07.720
I imagine you have everyone is well represented, but you're certainly no stranger to conservatives.
00:39:13.920
What do you make of the fact that concern about Russia's influence in our election is so politicized?
00:39:22.440
And how is it that conservatives, perhaps conservatives generically, but certainly the Republican Party,
00:39:30.120
have become enamored of Russia and Putin when they were the party that a few short years ago
00:39:38.200
had congratulated itself for winning the Cold War and ending an evil empire?
00:39:44.100
What's your perception of Trump's entanglement with Russia and where the Russia investigation is likely to go?
00:39:51.180
Well, but then how do you make sense of the fact that Republicans seem like that?
00:39:57.560
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