Social networks are the new hierarchy something well that's the paradox I mean in the end let's be clear a hierarchy is just a kind of network this is not a dichotomy. If you create a giant network with two billion people which is what Mark Zuckerberg has done more than two billion people now are on Facebook. In almost all social networks there is this extraordinary phenomenon of preferential attachment when people join the network they want to be connected to some nodes much more than others. Donald Trump has way more Twitter followers than any of us and it becomes more striking the bigger they get.
Niall Ferguson is the preeminent historian of the ideas that define our time. He has challenged how we think about money, power, civilisation and empires. Now he wants to reimagine history itself. Networks, he explains, are the key to history. The greatest innovators have been ‘superhubs’ of connections. The most powerful states, empires and companies have been those with the most densely networked structures. And the most transformative ideas – from the printing presses that launched the Reformation to the Freemasonry that inspired the American Revolution – have gone viral precisely because of the networks within which they spread. Our host for this conversation is historian, author and broadcaster, Rana Mitter. The audio of this live Intelligence Squared event was recorded in London in 2017.
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