Niall Ferguson, "The Square and the Tower"

 Penguin Books 2017

Read from February 23^rd to May 4^th 2019

My rating: 

I received Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower as a gift from my best friend and I have to confess that  when I first read the title, I thought it was a checkers metaphor - but no, actually it is inspired by two architectural designs, one medieval and the other contemporary. 

The medieval one is a landscape from fourteenth century Siena with its Torre del Mangia of the Palazzo Pubblico shadowing a popular market and meeting place named Piazza del Campo. The tower’s height, matching the height of the city Cathedral on the hill was meant to symbolize “the parity of temporal and spiritual hierarchies”. 

The second one is an imaginary juxtaposition eliminating the distance between Silicon Valley and New York City’s 5^th Avenue, to re-enact the same symbolism of the market shadowed by a tower that Trump has always falsely claimed it has 68 floors, instead of 58: 

Silicon Valley prefers to lie low, and not only for fear of earthquakes. Its horizontal architecture reflects the reality that it is the most important hub of the global network: the world’s town square. 

On the other side of the United States, however – on New York City’s 5^th Avenue – there looms a fifty-eight-storey building that represents an altogether different organizational tradition. And no one individual in the world has a bigger say in the choice between networked anarchy and world order than the absent owner of that dark tower.

The central theme of the book is therefore the ancient rivalry between two orders, hierarchy and networking: when, how and why one of them had the upper hand at one point or another of the history. The author stresses that social networks have always been far more important than historians gave them credit for, dominating especially two historical periods: from Gutenberg revolution to eighteenth century, and from Silicon Valley revolution to nowadays. Before and in-between we have the hierarchical institutions that ruled by shutting down or co-opting the social networks. 

The book has a very inciting beginning, with an analysis of the network of the Illuminati, that secret fraternity founded in the 18^th century Germany, whose objective was, according to the founder, Brother Spartacus, “to give reason the upper hand”. The group developed quickly, from a mere 60 members, to over 1300, among who Goethe and Herder, together with a lot of German princes. Even though by the end of the century they ceased to exist, banned by the Bavarian government as hostile to religion, their notoriety grew and conspiracy theories began to rise, inter alia that they had links with the Rothschilds, the Round Table and of course George Soros. In the author’s opinion, the Illuminati became notorious only because they were infiltrated by the Germanic mason lodges. They were not an important movement nor omnipotent, and, despite some theories, they did not cause the French Revolution: 

But they became significant because their reputation went viral at a time when the political disruption precipitated by the Enlightenment – the achievement of a hugely influential network of intellectuals – was reaching its revolutionary culmination on both sides of the Atlantic.

After this promising start, however, the book becomes a little too technical for a profane reader like me 😊, a little too inflexible in its emphasis on the idea of the historical impact of networking, and the narrative rhythm is sometimes broken. Moreover, many of the diagrams that accompany the text are difficult (literally) to read because of the editorial choice to reduce them in order to gain space I suppose. 

However, there are many interesting (or funny, or both) facts and information that make the book worth reading, some of them listed below:

• in the casta classifications of the 18^th century, together with the mestizo and mulatto you could find the moorish (a person born from a Spaniard and a mulatto woman) and the calpamulatto – (a person born from a mulatto and an Indian);
• even though the printing had been used in China long before its discovery in Europe, they hadn’t been able to create a new economic sector from it;
• during the World War II a group of highly educated, rich and powerful English men became what was called in Moscow The Magnificent Five, an elite network (more than five) who put themselves in the service of Russian intelligence (and were so successful the Soviet paranoia began to doubt of them) and were never tried for treason;
• Mafia’s name derives from the adjective mafiusu (swagger or bravado, etymology unknown) used first in an obscure play I mafiusi di la Vicaria (The Mafiosi of the Vicaria). The Sicilians preferred however the term Onorata Società (The Honored Society);
• FANG is the investors’ (so meaningful!) acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

Finally, there are at least two quotes with no comment needed, one about George Soros and the other about Facebook.

That George Soros is a hub in a large and powerful network has often been claimed by conspiracy theorists. According to one breathless account, he ‘is the visible sight of a vast and nasty secret network of private financial interests, controlled by the leading aristocratic and royal families of Europe, centred in the British House of Windsor… and built upon the wreckage of the British Empire after World War II’. This network allegedly extends from the Queen and the Rothschilds all the way down to ‘indicted metals and commodity speculator and fugitive Marc Rich of Zug, Switzerland and Tel Aviv, secretive Israeli arms and commodity dealer Shaul Eisenberg, and “Dirty Rafi” Eytan’. This is nonsense. The real network Soros belongs to – the ‘larger and more intricate economic web’ he alluded to in an interview – is a network of hedge funds seeking to make money in similar ways.

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Like anything that is very popular, Facebook has its detractors. ‘Facebook sells the attention of users to advertisers all over the world’, the journalist Jonathan Tepper wrote, shortly before deleting his account, ‘and Facebook knows almost everything about their lives, their families and their friends… It is also a platform built on exhibitionism and voyeurism, where users edit themselves to exhibit a more flattering side and they quietly spy on their friends…’ Far from increasing friendship, Tepper argued, it actually cheapens and displaces genuine friendship. Certainly, the economics of Facebook are a far cry from its utopian ideology. It has been likened to a sharecropping economy, ‘which provides the many with the tools for production, but concentrates the rewards into the hands of the few’. Put more crudely, on Facebook ‘the user is the product’.

One of the prophecies the book ends with is similar to the one formulated in Harari’s excellent Homo Deus (I wrote about it here ): that artificial intelligence would eventually save the planet by eliminating the humans. Other is that our civilization will crumble because network has been infested by a corrupt hierarchy and a new war is being prepared in the cyberspace. One way or another, I suppose we will get what we truly deserve since we have already chosen to inhabit the missing floors of the dark tower.