I listened to Sam Harris talk to Niall Ferguson yesterday on Sam’s Waking Up podcast.
Niall is a historian, an author, a journalist, and an academic.
He has just published a new book on a topic that is near and dear to me, USV, and many of you; networks and hierarchies, and how these two forms of information flow and management have impacted society over the last five hundred years (or so).
The book is called The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook.
I bought it for our Kindles today and will get into it asap. But just hearing Niall talk about the ideas in the book tells me that this is going to be an important read for many of us.
We may think that the power of information networks to shape society is a new thing (Facebook, fake news, Trump, etc, etc) but Niall argues that there is nothing new here and these sorts of things have been going on in analog networks for hundreds of years. As Shakespeare said, “what’s past is prologue” and we should learn as much from the past as we can. That’s what historians are for, after all.
I plan on doing that and you may want to join me.
