The Square and the Tower Quotes

“In a time of chaos, it is the micro-manager who ascends”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“we shall quickly find ourselves about as important to the algorithms as animals currently are to us.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“intellectual diversity is the form of diversity that seems to be least valued in universities,”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Because of preferential attachment, most social networks are profoundly inegalitarian.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“The great thinkers of the eighteenth century were also pioneering tourists”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“the Internet is merely ‘the modern public square’,”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“the state of the future will need to function more like the human immune system”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Ha megértjük a hálózattudomány ezen alaptételeit, az emberiség története mindjárt másként fest: nem "az egyik elbaszott dolog jön a másik után", ahogy Alan Bennett drámaíró kissé trágáran megfogalmazta, és nem is úgy jön az egyik a másik után, hogy aztán együtt basszák el, hanem milliónyi dolog függ össze milliárd szállal (és ezek közül csak egy a szexuális kapcsolat).”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“There is a powerful case to be made that the innovations of the earlier industrial revolutions were of more benefit to mankind than those of the most recent one.11 And if the principal consequence of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence really is going to be large-scale unemployment,12 the chances are surely quite low that a majority of mankind13 will uncomplainingly devote themselves to harmless leisure pursuits in return for some modest but sufficient basic income. Only the sedative-based totalitarianism imagined by Aldous Huxley would make such a social arrangement viable.14 A more likely outcome is a repeat of the violent upheavals that ultimately plunged the last great Networked Age into the chaos that was the French Revolution.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Unlike in the past, there are now two kinds of people in the world: those who own and run the networks, and those who merely use them.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Facebook knows almost everything about their lives, their families and their friends . . . It is also a platform built on exhibitionism and voyeurism, where users edit themselves to exhibit a more flattering side and they quietly spy on their friends.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“In most history, success is over-represented, for the victors out-write the losers. In the history of networks, the opposite often applies. Successful networks evade public attention; unsuccessful ones attract it, and it is their notoriety, rather than their achievement, that leads to their over-representation.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“biggest changes in history are the achievements of thinly documented, informally organized groups”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Is it better today to be in a network, which gives you influence, than in a hierarchy, which gives you power?”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content in relation to some vaguely specified context. We must now acknowledge, however, that some ideas go viral because of structural features of the network through which they spread. They are least likely to do so in a hierarchical, top-down network, where horizontal peer-to-peer links are prohibited.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Sometimes, as in the case of the American Revolution, crucial roles turn out to have been played by people who were not leaders but connectors.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Technologies come and go. The world remains a world of squares and towers.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“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.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“After 1500 not all roads led to Rome”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“networks tend to be more creative than hierarchies”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“the secret of our success as a species ‘resides . . . in the collective brains of our communities”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Some problems can only be resolved by network analysis.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“The first paradox of Illuminism, then, was that it was a network that craved an elaborate hierarchical structure, even as it inveighed against existing hierarchies. In his 1782 ‘Address to the newly promoted Illuminati dirigenti’, Weishaupt set out his worldview. In the state of nature, man had been free, equal and happy; division into classes, private property, personal ambition and state formation had come later, as the ‘great unholy mainsprings and causes of our misery’. Mankind had ceased to be ‘one great family, a single empire’ because of the ‘desire of men to differentiate themselves from one another’. But Enlightenment, spread by the activities of secret societies, could overcome this stratification of society. And then ‘princes and nations would disappear from the earth without any need for violence, the human race would become one family, and the world would become the habitation of rational beings”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“When half the nodes of a random graph the size of most real-world networks are removed, the network is destroyed. But when the same procedure is carried out against a scale-free model of a similar size, ‘the giant connected component resists even after removing more than 80 per cent of the nodes, and the average distance within it [between nodes] is practically the same as at the beginning”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Brexit was a dress rehearsal for the US presidential election of 2016. As in Britain, so in the United States, the political establishment took it for granted that the old ways would suffice.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“When we speak of ‘populism’ today,1 we sometimes mean nothing more than a politics that is audible as well as intelligible to the man in the street – or, to be precise, the man and woman slumped on their sofa, their attention skipping fitfully from flat-screen TV to laptop to smartphone to tablet and back to television, or the man and woman at work, sitting in front of desktop PCs but mostly exchanging suggestive personal messages on their smartphones.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“The torrent of verbiage comes about because professional politicians are more concerned with spin than substance, the media never cease to howl for ‘something’ to be done after every mishap, the lobbyists ensure that the small print protects the vested interests they serve, and the lawyers profit from the whole sorry mess.5”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy are diametrically opposed,”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“Outlandish ideas stand a better chance of success if they come with royal approval.”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook

“The task assigned to the RAND* researcher Paul Baran in 1964 was to develop a communication system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. Baran suggested three possible structures for such a system. It could either be ‘centralized’, with one central hub and multiple spokes, ‘decentralized’, with multiple components linked loosely together by a number of weak ties, or ‘distributed’, like a lattice or mesh. In theory, the last option was the most resilient, in that it could withstand the destruction of numerous nodes, and that was indeed”
― Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook