Matthew Royal reviewed The square and the tower by Niall Ferguson
Review of 'The square and the tower' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
Niall Ferguson’s thesis that many conflicts in history can be understood as the conflict between power hierarchies and social networks is descriptive, but underdeveloped. His title is a knockoff of Eric S. Raymond's seminal, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and unfortunately its conceptual development is equally shallow. Most striking of this books faults is the change in tone. At the beginning of the book, he sounded like a name-dropping academic who relishes curating his collection of weak social ties to powerful people. At the end, he's the breathless alarmist of that email your mom forwarded to you in blazing red, all caps Comic Sans. In his conclusion, it's clear that Ferguson's motto is "In hierarchy we trust." It's a very heavy bias unsubstantiated by fact. He doesn't attempt to give a justification; he lists all the network transformations in politics and society that threaten the hierarchy in which he's apparently …
Niall Ferguson’s thesis that many conflicts in history can be understood as the conflict between power hierarchies and social networks is descriptive, but underdeveloped. His title is a knockoff of Eric S. Raymond's seminal, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and unfortunately its conceptual development is equally shallow. Most striking of this books faults is the change in tone. At the beginning of the book, he sounded like a name-dropping academic who relishes curating his collection of weak social ties to powerful people. At the end, he's the breathless alarmist of that email your mom forwarded to you in blazing red, all caps Comic Sans. In his conclusion, it's clear that Ferguson's motto is "In hierarchy we trust." It's a very heavy bias unsubstantiated by fact. He doesn't attempt to give a justification; he lists all the network transformations in politics and society that threaten the hierarchy in which he's apparently invested.
This last part of the book reads like the author gave up on making thoughtful statements, and completed the rest of the book by copy-pasting angry baby boomer rants. He decries the modern use of smart phones, saying that using them up to five hours a day indicates some sort of crisis of human connection. It's human connection that these people are finding in their electronic devices. He says that people are abandoning traditional institutions, but he fails to recognize that they're transitioning from “traditional" hierarchical institutions to newer, network-based institutions online. It would be far more interesting if the author were to discuss the consequences of moving from a hierarchical society to a network society, however he asserts without evidence that a network society is necessarily chaotic and unstable. Certainly, according to his own accounts, networks can be extremely effective.
Additionally, I was expecting the author to cover the political manipulations of social networks such as Facebook to the political advantage of Donald Trump in this last presidential election. However, he left the topic completely untouched other than to say Russia does it. It would be very interesting to describe attacks against social networks as attacks intended to isolate nodes in the network, or break them into small cliques of like-minded individuals that don't have the weak connections necessary to make an impact in The Wider Social Network.
There are a wonderful collection of instances throughout history where hierarchy-network conflicts occurred, but Ferguson fails to move beyond the “stamp collecting” phase of his thesis to rigorous analysis and synthesis of useful prediction. At best, it’s a rough draft; but it felt to me like bait-and-switch.