Great series by Niall Ferguson, one of the most insightful thinkers of the last decades.
In this series, Ferguson elaborates on the concepts he stated in his book “The Square and the Tower”.
Networks have been an important tool to shape human societies throughout history. In our globally connected world, understanding network theory is fundamental to make sense of modern society.
Main conclusions:
As the world becomes dependent on superfast 5G… it’s China that’s winning the networked war.
That should worry us for a net world dominated by China’ techno-totalitarism is very unlikely to be a world where individual freedom is a top priority.
… the all-enveloping reach of modern networks means that they are the new battlefields of geopolitics.
The war of the future will be waged not on land but in cyberspace.
In this new Cold War there is absolutely, no guarantee that the democratic side will win.
Excerpts:
The reasons why China is challenging the US for technology leadership:
Each year China gets 3.6 million graduates in the area of science, technology and engineering out of 8.2 million college graduates each year.
In the US by my calculation is maximum 200 thousand.
Chinese leadership overall has a culture of science technology. In contrast many of the leaders in the US and Europe are lawyers.
There’s another difference and it’s a crucial one – in China the relationship between the government and the network platforms. It’s very different indeed from that in the West. Whereas in the West we might recoil in horror of the idea of a state controlled media in China. It’s a very different story. It’s just a cost of doing business.
China’s social credit system:
China seems to have come up with something even worse than all Orwell’s worst nightmare in 1984: techno totalitarianism.
Yet despite coverage of all this in the West as sinister, dystopian and Orwellian, the idea of social credit seems quite popular with the Chinese public.
How difficult it is for the US to maintain its leadership:
Mark Zuckerberg admits that Facebook has made its share of mistakes. But he’s come up with a new and ingenious argument. If his company is too heavily regulated or even broken up it won’t be able to compete effectively with its Chinese rivals.
In some countries, the Chinese model of a state monitored internet has a good deal of appeal to authoritarian rulers. For others, it just makes sound business sense to buy Chinese.
Niall Ferguson’s Final remarks:
In this series we’ve discovered how networks have the extraordinary power to unite us to spread our ideas to take on the established interests of hierarchical power. We’ve also seen how they’re prone to polarization and vulnerable to exploitation by malign forces.
Most importantly the all-enveloping reach of modern networks means that they are the new battlefields of geopolitics.
The original Cold War was all about nuclear brinkmanship thrill propaganda and bloody proxy wars waged all over the so-called third world.
The new cold war will be waged in a borderless battlefield quite unlike the days of the Iron Curtain. The war of the future will be waged not on land but in cyberspace.
In this new Cold War there is absolutely, no guarantee that the democratic side will win
I have finished seeing this remarkable series. I highly recommend it.
There are 3 episodes:
Episode 1 – “Disruption” With the help of experts in network theory and precedents from history, Ferguson argues that the printing press had similar consequences for 16th-and 17th-century Europe as the personal computer and the Internet have for the world since the 20th century, leading to polarization and the dissemination of fake news.
Episode 2 – “Winner Takes All” Niall Ferguson tells the story of how a decentralized, not-for-profit worldwide web shape-shifted to become a highly profitable network controlled by a tiny elite selling our attention for billions of dollars to the world’s advertisers.
Episode 3 – “Networld War” Looking at the fight against terrorist networks in Iraq, Russian attempts to divide Americans through social media and the rise of an Internet-powered surveillance state in China, Ferguson shows how our democracies are under threat from outside forces that seek to weaponize the social networks that we invented. He warns of a coming “networld war” that the West may not win.
Episode 1:
https://www.pbs.org/show/niall-fergusons-networld/
From the Reformation and 17th century witch-hunting, through the American Revolution and to the nightmare visions of Orwell’s 1984, Ferguson explores the intersection of social media, technology and the spread of cultural movements.