Most Silicon Valley internet billionaires would have preferred Hillary Clinton to become president of the United States and she didn't so to their utter horror. It was really fascinating to watch up close they found that the network platforms they'd created could be used to achieve the opposite of what they had intended. We are in the midst of a great expose which is not over that is going to reveal the extent to which Donald Trump campaign, Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner as well as Russian intelligence worked together for his election victory.
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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