Making Sense with Sam Harris - #117 — Networks, Power, and Chaos

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Niall Ferguson about his new book "The Square and the Tower." They discuss his career as a writer, networks and hierarchies, how history gets written, the similarity between the 16th century and the 21st, the role of social media in the 2016 Presidential election, the influence of advertising on the public sphere, Trump, the Russian investigation, Islamic extremism, counterfactuals, what would have happened if Clinton had won the presidency, immigration in Europe, conspiracy theories, capitalism, globalization, communism, wealth inequality, universal basic income, Henry Kissinger, the prospect of a US war with China, cyberwar, and other topics.  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Today, I am speaking with Neil Ferguson. Neil is a financial historian, the author of many books. He's also a journalist. He's a professor. He is now affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the lucky husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of my friends and heroes, also a former podcast guest. And he is most recently the author of The Square and the Tower, Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook. of The Square and the Tower, Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook. In this conversation, we talk about mostly that book. We talk about Trump and other matters. And those of you who have hated me on the topic of Trump may like that part of the conversation.

Neil is really one of the first people to say anything that has given me pause on the topic of Trump. And what he says is fairly simple. It makes Trump look no better. It doesn't take the onus off of the people who have supported him. But I did find it worth thinking about. And it has, to some degree, changed my sense of how bad an outcome the election was, all things considered. So, I want you to appreciate that when it happens in the conversation. Neil, as most of you know, is a man of strong opinions and a wealth of information. And now I bring him to you. Please enjoy, Neil Ferguson. I am here with Neil Ferguson. Neil, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure, Sam. This has been a long time coming. You are one of my

most requested guests, and you are also a man who's had the good sense to marry one of my favorite women on earth, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. So well done on both counts. That is the most interesting thing about me. And she is more interesting than me. So your listeners will just have to make do with second best on this occasion. Yeah, well, it's a good problem to have. It sure is. So before we get into your new book, which is fascinating, give me a picture of how you view your career as an academic and a journalist. You are often described as an economic historian.

You seem, from the outside at least, not to be an entirely standard academic or journalist. You seem far more entrepreneurial than that and have just walked a very interesting line through the media and academia. So how do you describe your job to yourself? Well, if one writes the history of an historian, it usually makes for rather dull reading. I think it was George III who said to Gibbon, scribble, scribble, scribble. And my life is really type, type, type. I decided at some point to become a writer. And that was the starting point. I think I was influenced by my grandfather. My mother's father was a journalist, an autodidact who'd left school at a very young age.

He'd risen to be chief sub-editor on the Glasgow Herald before World War II. And he encouraged me to regard writing as a vocation. It was something I could do easily from an early age, but it was my grandfather who made me consider it a profession. made me consider it a profession. So the question that any writer confronts at a fairly early stage is how to pay for the rent and the heating. And the simple answer seemed to me to become an academic because as an academic, at least one has a steady revenue stream. One's expected to write. That's part of the job. And one's also, in some measure, being paid to teach other people to write.

I fell in love with Oxford at first sight as a young man and thought nothing could possibly be more blissful than the life of an Oxford Don. I looked enviously at their book-line studies and assessed the job requirements. One spent only half the year teaching, three eight-week terms, and the rest of one's time appeared to be dedicated to reading books and writing books. So that was a relatively easy decision. And I think under different circumstances in a different parallel world, I might just have led a life of blameless obscurity,

probably in Cambridge, where I got my second job at Peterhouse. I lived happily at Peterhouse in college, a bachelor don, dining at high table, and being insufferable. And I could probably have kept that up for decades. But then private life intervened. And really, from the moment I became a father, I had to be a little bit more creative about what I did. And I think that's when my secret hobby of journalism began to become more than just a hobby and actually a source of income. answer. Then I began to see that if I was going to communicate my ideas to a public slightly wider than the fellowship of an Oxbridge College, I had to not only write for newspapers, but go on television. And here I am at the age of 53 doing podcasts with Sam Harris, still in this quest to disseminate my ideas to a wider audience and pay for my children.

Yeah, well, to repurpose the cliche, necessity being the mother of invention, it works out. It's good that those avenues were open to you because it's producing very creative work and influential work. And it's breaking down this tired notion, if it were ever true, that you have to be publishing in some academic journal that only 400 people will read to actually make your contribution to the important conversations that are happening. Clearly, contributions are being made in books written for a general audience now, and that's been true for quite some time. And your books are among both the most accessible and most comprehensive. And the new one is The Square and the Tower, which is about, I should give the subtitle, networks and power from Freemasons to Facebook. And it is about the nature of networks for good or for ill, really, and networks are

contrasted with hierarchies. So maybe we should just start with some basic definitions here. I think everyone has an intuitive sense of what hierarchies and networks are, but perhaps you want to differentiate them for us. The book really begins with a false dichotomy in its title, The book really begins with a false dichotomy in its title, The Square and the Tower. And one's asked at the beginning to believe that there is a stark contrast between the town square, where social networks form informally, spontaneously, with little real leadership, and the tower, where hierarchical structures of authority reside. So the image is that of an Italian town. Siena is the one I chose in the book. But as I said, it's a false dichotomy. As the book unfolds, it becomes clear to the reader that in truth, there are just different forms of network, distributed networks, which are very decentralized, and hierarchical networks, in which one node or perhaps one or two nodes have a very high centrality, have a great deal of control or power or are able to monopolize information or resource flows. So for those

listeners who have done their homework on network science, that notion of a spectrum, of a continuum of different kinds of network architecture will be familiar. But I felt the general reader needed to be eased into that. And it's, from a heuristic point of view, I think quite nice to suggest that there's this distinction. Because I think in our everyday lives, we feel there to be a distinction between the hierarchy that we inhabit if we work for a corporation or for some other traditionally pyramidally structured organization, and the network of our friends and family. I think a characteristic feature of modern life is that one alternates between the org chart of some hierarchical organization, even if it's only in one's role as a citizen of a state, and the social network

that we inhabit out of the office. So this is the way the book proceeds. You start with this dichotomy, and then gradually it becomes clear that it's really a continuum. Yeah, although I think there are a few features that make the dichotomy worth keeping in mind. There's the verticality of a hierarchy, the fact that the top stays at the top and that you can't really move out from the edge on any level, that everything has to kind of run through this chain from top to bottom, that classic networks, even with their clumping and clustering, kind of hierarchies, seeming hierarchies that happen within the network, classic networks seem to violate

that principle. So it's kind of what happens at the edges that seems very different. I think in strict terms, one shouldn't really talk about vertical and horizontal. I was at least discouraged from doing that when I started to hang out with the real network specialists at Stanford. But I think for the lay reader, this is a helpful way of thinking about it, that in a hierarchical structure, there's a node at the top. And I give the example in the book of Stalin's Soviet Union, which is perhaps the most extreme case imaginable. Stalin claimed and in many cases was able to achieve a complete control over the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens and to prohibit or at least make very dangerous

unauthorized social networking. So those horizontal ties or edges, if you will, between nodes were hazardous if they weren't, so to speak, authorized or approved. To graph that, you would draw a tree-like structure with all the edges pointing upwards towards Stalin, the central node, and none really running across from peer to peer. This is a helpful way to think about it, even if it's not, strictly speaking, the technical language one should use. The technical language would be that Stalin in the Soviet Union had the highest betweenness centrality of any node, but that's not something that one can readily say on talk radio.

Well, happily, we're not on talk radio, though. It could sound just like it. But one point you make with respect to this dichotomy is that history has really tended to be written by the hierarchies in the sense that, and the work of historians has so often been a matter of going to some archive and seeing the remnants of some regime in print and writing the story of what has happened in those terms. And that networks, again, classic networks, the tissue of relationships and influences that happen throughout an entire society, that tends to not be recorded in quite the same way. And we have this distorted view of what has actually happened in history as a result. That's right. Most historians cut their teeth in archives. I did that as a 20-something graduate student. Archives are

generally produced by hierarchical entities like states or corporations. In my case, it was the Hamburg State Archives that I sat in. I remember having a very frustrating experience trying to piece together the history of the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s from these official documents. The documents in the Hamburg State Archive essentially presented the world as it had appeared to a bureaucracy and an early 20th century bureaucracy that didn't really want to admit that things were spinning out of control. So to my bemusement, there seemed very little trace in the Hamburg State Archives of the greatest monetary disaster in German history, if not in all history. Then one day I bumped into a man at the British Consulate. I was having afternoon tea

and his name was Eric Warburg or Warburg. He listened to what I was saying about the reason I was in Hamburg and he said, oh, you must come and look at my father's papers. So I went to the office of the bank M.M. Warburg and sat in an old paneled study and there were the papers of Max Warburg, who had been one of the leading bankers of 1920s Germany. And I entered the world of social networks and left the world of official hierarchy. And here was the story. Here was the story I'd been looking for, because here in Warburg's correspondence with his circle of friends, some of whom were in politics, some

of whom were in finance, I found the story that I'd been looking for. And that was really the beginning of my career as a historian of networks, though I didn't quite appreciate it at the time. And it's only really with hindsight that I've realized I've spent most of my career trying to get away from those state archives and trying to find the records of the social networks. They are harder to find. You need a bit of luck, as I did have in Hamburg. But when you find the archives of the networks, I think very often you find a more interesting story than the official record in the state archives. It's really the history of private life in many respects, which does such work for us.

And of informal life, of leaders' life, spontaneous life. I think that's part of the appeal to me of the private papers of an individual, that it's all there in all its messiness. Of course, one needs to add that every notable person who leaves behind a collection of papers has probably weeded out government archives, because that's the hierarchical version of history in there. the bureaucrats have constructed. And it's only a part of the story one needs to tell. And a quite different picture often emerges if you can get outside that hierarchy and enter the realm of networks. So you make one observation at some point in the book that struck me as highly counterintuitive, but it's fairly arresting. At one point, you talk about the parallel between what has happened in our information economy with the birth of the personal computer and the internet and what happened over the course of a couple of centuries, but seemed to have begun to peak in the 16th

century as a result of the printing press and the spread of books and literacy as a result. And you say that the time we're living in now, really the last few decades, is in many important respects more similar to the 16th century than it is to the 20th. Can you say more about that? Yes, this is the central analogy in the book. An analogy is really the way that historians are best able to illuminate the present with the help of the past. I argue that the printing press, as it spread across Europe, beginning with Gutenberg's invention in the 15th century, revolutionized the public sphere as radically as the internet and the personal computer have revolutionized the public sphere

in our time. And the ways in which these processes are similar are numerous. Number one, the printing press had the same effect on the cost of a book that innovation had on the cost of a computer from the 1970s until the early 2000s. And secondly, the consequence for the volume of information were similar in that with that lowering of the price of the the unit of content production the volume of of content grew exponentially the only real difference is that in the case of the printing press the the networked revolution if you want to call it that, took, well, it spread out over 300 years, really, beginning in the early 16th century with the period of the Reformation and carrying on right the way through the 17th and 18th centuries with one network revolution after another, the Enlightenment, the political revolutions that followed from that, but also the scientific

revolution and the industrial revolution. These revolutions all followed from that, but also the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution. These revolutions all were driven by the much greater ease of communication through the printed word, but also the written word. Whereas in our time, the same kind of revolutionary changes have been happening an order of magnitude faster. So what took a century back then now takes a decade. And that seems like a reasonable way of thinking about this drastic change in the structure of the public sphere. I can't think of a better analogy than the time of the Reformation 500 years ago. And my point is that if Luther had tried to launch the Reformation without the printing press, we'd never have heard of him. He would have been just another,

you know, another burnt heretic, whereas he was able to go viral. And the effects of his message as disseminated by the printing press were in many ways a startling to 16th century Europeans as the effects of the personal computer and internet have been on messages that have gone viral in our time. Well, and of course, the effect in the near term was fairly bloody in Luther's case. Near and far, because in the end, and this is a really kind of key point, Luther expected this to have benign consequences. He thought that once everybody could read the Bible in the vernacular and have a direct relationship to God, not mediated by a corrupt clergy, we'd get that priesthood of all believers that the Bible talks about. that the Bible talks about. Instead, he got 130 years of religious strife between proponents of the Reformation Protestants and opponents. And I think we are equally surprised today to

find that creating giant online social networks does not produce a global community of happy people sharing cat videos, but in fact leads to polarization. And as in the 16th and 17th centuries, it's not just good things that go viral, it's crazy stuff. Then it was witchcraft that went viral as a concept in the wake of the Reformation. In our time, of course, all kinds of fake news and extreme views go viral. And we're as surprised by this outcome as the Lutherans were. They really didn't expect to unleash more than a century of religious conflict, but that's what happened. Yeah, so let's talk about the quality of our conversation as a result of these networks and social media in particular and the problem of fake news?

Because I've heard you say, you say it in the book, and I've heard you say it in at least one previous interview, that there would be no President Trump without Facebook. And this effect that many people have noted of a kind of siloing of information where either by our own choice or some perverse tuning of the algorithms based on the advertising model of content now, people are becoming more polarized, that connectedness is increasing polarization and amplifying the signal of true information, but also false information, and in ways that everyone seems fairly stunned by. How do you think about what's happening now and what we should try to change? We should never have believed Silicon Valley's promise that if everybody was connected, then everything would be awesome. That was a promise

repeatedly made from the 90s onwards. It reached its zenith in the things that Mark Zuckerberg, a founder and CEO of Facebook, said to the effect that if Facebook could only grow to the maximum extent, there'd be a global community, and in that global community, we'd be able collectively to solve mankind's problems, or words to that effect. And I think he was sincere in that belief, I'm pretty sure. And I suspect the same was true of the founders of all the great network platforms. I don't even remember thinking very critically about this myself as a fairly early internet user. But we should have known better because not only did history predict that large social networks would be inclined towards

polarization, so did network science, because network science has this clear proposition that even small-sized social networks will tend to self-segregate into clusters. The term homophily is the technical one, which sounds a little strange as it doesn't, again, get used much on talk radio, but it just means that birds of a feather flock together. And so we see this pattern even in high schools. Sociologists have worked on this since the 1970s when they were scratching their heads and wondering why the integration of schools wasn't going so well. It turned out that even with all the busing in the world, high school communities tended to self-segregate

along racial lines. So we've known about homophily. We've known about the tendency for birds of a feather to flock together for a long time. And guess what? That's exactly what happens on Facebook and on great. I think the Trump point is a really important one because nobody in Silicon Valley realized until it was much too late that their network platforms were going to be crucial to his victory in the 2016 election, nor did they appreciate at all the significance of the fact that people were paying in rubles for advertising on those platforms and opening accounts, a suspiciously large number of accounts in Russia. There was a complete underestimation of the political risk in Silicon Valley, I think, because the culture of the computer science types of the engineers simply demoted that to a low priority. I think as it became clear, and I think this is a pretty clear-cut point, that without Facebook, and perhaps also Twitter, but I think Facebook

was really crucial, the Trump campaign couldn't have won. Heads were exploding all over the valley. And the inquest into Silicon Valley's part in Trump's victory is still ongoing. We're only gradually being able to find out just how extensive the Russian hacking of the system was. But I think more importantly, we're only gradually coming to appreciate that the Facebook advertising tool was the key weapon that the Trump campaign used so much more effectively than the Clinton campaign that it was able to overcome the massive financial disadvantage it had. I mean, she outspent him two to one and lost. And I think if you take away Facebook and Twitter

and imagine that election playing out in pre-2008 technology, he would never have won. So Silicon Valley essentially made Trump possible. And this was definitely not part of the plan since most people in Silicon Valley, I can think of perhaps two exceptions, lean left. Yeah, well, and Peter Thiel is one. Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, who are friends that stand out for their... Yeah, I know Joe as well. Their willingness to go against the current, and the current is pretty strong in and around Silicon Valley, to be not just liberal, but progressive, even as you're making your millions,

if not billions. But apart from them, really most people were more or less unthinkingly Clinton supporters. And I don't think it dawned on many people that the internet, which sort of had made by liberals stamped on it, could be used to such extraordinary effect by not just conservatives, but a bunch of populists. This has been one of the great ironies of modern American history. And that's part of why I'm a historian. That kind of irony is what makes history a worthy subject of study. Nobody anticipated that outcome. And I still think it hasn't fully been processed in Silicon Valley or in Washington. The nature of the democratic process is fundamentally altered so that in future, there will be two kinds of candidate, those who understand how to use Facebook advertising and those who lose. Everything you just said is actually agnostic as to whether

or not it's a good thing or not that Trump is president, right? This is just what we're talking about here. I want to ask you about Trump in a second, but what we're talking about here is a fundamentally unanticipated mechanism by which political opinion is getting swayed, and that usual gatekeepers of information, real journalists and imperfectly, though mostly properly aligned incentives in that community, and into that vacuum where their influence eroded, you have things like InfoWars and Breitbart and utterly fake news being amplified on social media. And for good or for ill, depending on what outcome you want, but still the process now is it's violating every norm of civil conversation and truth testing, when you look at the details, the number of stories that are fake is alarming. The fact that the phrase fake news has been turned against real journalism by the people who avidly consume fake news, like, you know, real news is

fake and fake news is real for millions and millions of people. It is really a breakdown of public conversation. Before I ask you about Trump, let's talk a little bit more about just the kind of truth testing that the norms of conversation are meant to preserve and what appears to be unraveling here. How do you view the role of advertising here? Because advertising is not something that most people would have thought was a threat to democracy or global sanity, but increasingly it seems to be one. How do you see ads as driving this process? Sam, you used the phrase for good or ill. This is definitely for ill.

Yeah. Let's not be agnostic about that. Just to clarify that, Neil, even if you think Trump is a much better president than Clinton would have been, if that's your view, I'm not speaking about you, Neil, I'm speaking about our listeners. If that's your view, there's still very good reason to be worried about this mechanism that got him elected. Absolutely. You're right to raise the issue of advertising. In the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, when the printing press was the

dominant way in which ideas got disseminated, relatively few organs sought to make money through advertising. Newspapers and magazines started to do it, but it wasn't really central to the business model in the early years of the print economy. Whereas, from a very early stage, the network platforms of the internet sought to monetize the search engine, the social network, through advertising. And this was a crucial departure, not only because it was business genius, but also because it created an entirely different public sphere with different incentives from the old one. I love mentioning Jürgen Habermas in contexts like this, because it's not a name that one gets to talk about on talk radio or TV. But Habermas's early work, The Structural Change of the Public Sphere, was a very influential work in my thinking. Habermas showed how much of the 18th and 19th century political changes in

Europe were consequences of changes in the structure of the public sphere. And I think we've lived through a tremendous change in the structure of the public sphere. And I think we've lived through a tremendous change in the structure of the public sphere because Facebook, Google, YouTube in particular, but other network platforms too, have a very clear incentive. And the incentive is to demonstrate to the people to whom they sell advertising space online that they have high user engagement, that users are looking at content on Facebook, on Google, on YouTube, and they're looking at that content for more than a nanosecond. They're engaged by it. It is sticky. That's how you persuade people to do their advertising online rather than in magazines or newspapers or on TV. But here's the problem. The things that cause us to linger on a webpage are not its truth

or beauty. We are attracted to the fake and we are attracted to the extreme. So fake news and extreme views are, it seems to me, fundamentally incentivized by this particular business model. I could illustrate this with an example from a paper that was published after I had finished The Square and the Tower. This paper showed that on Twitter, A, things are likely to be retweeted within ideological clusters. In other words, liberals tend to retweet liberals and conservatives retweet conservatives. Not really that surprising. But what is surprising is that a tweet is 20% more likely to be retweeted for every moral or emotive word that it uses. So the incentive, if you want to get retweeted, is always to ramp up the language. So the incentive, if you want to get retweeted, is always to ramp up the language.

It seems to me that, which is the real pathology here, that the social networks online, when it comes to politics anyway, are engines of polarization, that they are designed to drive us apart. It's not enough to talk about echo chambers and filter bubbles, because that implies a certain static quality. These clusters are growing further apart. It is the more extreme people on the political spectrum who are most likely to tweet about politics. It is the most ideologically extreme members of Congress in both the Senate and the House who have the most followers on Facebook. So I think these are consequences of a model that incentivizes the extreme. Now, at root of it all is our, I guess, our original sin that we can't quite resist stories like the Pope endorses Donald Trump. Even if we probably know the minute we see it that it's fake, we linger over it and

are even tempted to forward it. But that's the problem. We have this engine of polarization and nothing that has been said or done since the inquests into the 2016 election began has fundamentally changed this. It's the same system, and I think it will operate in similar ways in other elections in other countries, and indeed in this country this year. You seem to me to be not as alarmed by Trump as I am. How would you characterize your level of concern about his presidency? Five days a week, I wake up and I say, this is within the range of normal American politics. He's a populist. We've seen populism before. And the Constitution was set up for the eventuality of a demagogue in the White House. and it's working, he's constrained,

so chill. And two days a week, I wake up and I think, hmm, I wonder if it felt like this in the final years of the Roman Republic. And I think that's about the proportion. I think a historian needs to be very skeptical about some of the claims that have been made by, I won't name names, by those who warn that we're descending rapidly towards tyranny by analogy with the Weimar Republic. I mean, that just strikes me as a terribly inappropriate analogy. And I'm impatient with the talk of tyranny and I will name names. I disagree with my dear friend Andrew Sullivan about this. And I disagree with my friend Tim Snyder about

this. I don't think we're descending into tyranny. And I think if one simply locates the Trump presidency in the context of American history, leave aside the Weimar Republic, there are numerous precedents for what we're seeing. And the most likely outcome at this point is not the collapse of the republic. It's the impeachment of the president after the Democrats win back the House in November. That's pretty much the base case at this point. However, I think it would be excessively sanguine to say that that's the outcome with 95% probability. After all, didn't we learn in 2016 not to have too high confidence in our political predictions. I write a weekly column. That's a good discipline. You're forced constantly to assess your expectations, make sure that you're

updating your views. And my column has blown hot and cold for the last two years between dismissing Trump as a hopeless candidate to recognizing that he might very well win. And I veer around as I write at the moment between thinking that dreadful mistakes are being made and then reflecting that, for example, if one just compares outcomes, comparing year one of Clinton with year one of Trump, and leaving aside the personalities, they're not so very different. It's a difficult line to tread for the obvious reason that in this polarized public sphere that now exists, the man who goes down the middle is in the crossfire. It's very much easier. It would be easier for me to have gone fool never Trump, as some of my,

you know, my friends have done. But my sense is that that's not the correct posture for a critical thinker. The critical thinker has to say, what is this like historically? And it is not like the collapse of the Weimar Republic. It is much more like the populist wave of the late 19th century, which was a backlash against globalization and produced Trump-like figures, even if not a Trump presidency. And I think if one takes that approach and tries one's best to be dispassionate, one arrives in this almost uninhabited center ground. It's a lonely place, I have to say. It's not much fun because you're kind of hated by both sides. If you go on MSNBC, you're accused of being a Trump apologist. And if you go on Fox, you're far too critical of

the president. Drives me crazy. But this is precisely the pathology that The Square and the Tower is about, that we have created this extraordinarily polarized public sphere in which to take some balanced middle position is almost by definition to be dismissed by everybody as a trimmer. Largely, if not mostly, in conservative circles, I would imagine. You have an appointment at Hoover, and I'm just imagining what your network looks like. I imagine you have everyone that's well-represented, but you're certainly no stranger to conservatives. election is so politicized? And how is it that conservatives, perhaps conservatives generically, but certainly the Republican Party, have become enamored of Russia and Putin when they were the party that a few short years ago had congratulated itself for winning the Cold War and ending an evil empire. What's your perception of Trump's entanglement with Russia and where the Russia investigation is likely to go? But then how do you make sense of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

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