Facebook's future would look a lot less bright if there were large-scale defection by young users. The system is fickle but the following is true in all of these different networked markets winner takes all or winner takes nearly all Eric Schmidt puts it like zip law Z I P F zip law and in zip law the winner gets 90% some people get 9% and the rest get 0.9%. My space was invented before Facebook but its lunch got eaten so yeah it's it's a fickle volatile world.
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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