Facebook Fantasies: A Selection from Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower (2019)
“A libertarian utopia of free and equal netizens—all interconnected, sharing all available data with maximum transparency and minimal privacy settings—has a certain appeal, especially to the young. . . . The masters of Silicon Valley have every incentive to romanticize the future. Balaji Srinivasan conjures up heady visions of the millennial generation collaborating in computer ‘clouds’, freed from geography, and paying each other in digital tokens, emancipated from the state payment systems. Speaking at the 2017 Harvard Commencement, Mark Zuckerberg called on the new graduates to help ‘create a world where everyone has a sense of purpose: by taking on big meaningful projects together, by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to pursue purpose, and by building community across the world’. Yet Zuckerberg personifies the inequality of superstar economics. Most of the remedies he envisages for inequality—‘universal basic income, affordable childcare, healthcare that [isn’t] tied to one company . . . continuous education’—cannot be achieved globally but are only viable as national policies delivered by the old twentieth-century welfare state. And when he says that ‘the struggle of our time’ is between ‘the forces of freedom, openness and global community against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism,’ he seems to have forgotten just how helpful his company has been to the latter. . . .
An intellectual arms race is now under way to devise a viable doctrine of cyber security. It seems unlikely that those steeped in the traditional thinking of national security will win it. Perhaps the realistic goal is not to deter attacks or retaliate against them but to regulate all the various networks on which our society depends so that they are resilient—or, better still, ‘antifragile’, a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe a system that grows stronger under attack. Those, like Taleb, who inhabit the world of financial risk management, saw in 2008 just how fragile the international financial network was: the failure of a single investment bank nearly brought the whole system of global credit tumbling down. The rest of us have now caught up with the bankers and traders—we are all now as interconnected as they were a decade ago. Like the financial network, our social, commercial and infrastructural networks are under constant attack from fools and knaves, and there is very little indeed that we can do to deter them. The best we can do is to design and build our networks so that they can withstand the ravages of Cyberia. That means resisting the temptation to build complexity when (as in the case of financial regulation) simplicity is a better option.”—Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (2019)
