The Square and the Tower

Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

De: Niall Ferguson

Narrado por: John Sackville

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson, read by John Sackville.

Most history is hierarchical: it's about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that's simply because they create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks - leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati?

The twenty-first century has been hailed as the Networked Age. But in The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Far from being novel, our era is the Second Networked Age, with the computer in the role of the printing press. But networks have a dark side, prone to clustering, contagions, and even outages. And the conflicts of the past already have unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld.

Audio updated as of December 2017.

Awesome interesting book, but the narrator pronounced so many things wrong!

The content is as you would expect from Ferguson awesome. Anyhow the often mispronounced words make me wonder if the narrator really did his research? For example he calls Ben Bernanke „Ben Bernank“. Very distracting from the content. Pity.

Manipulative narrative

Historically biased and very politically incorrect; Ferguson doesn’t miss many chances to express his views as historical facts. Disappointing and pseudo intellectual

Not the author's best work

This book was horrible! it was nothing more than an aimless meandering through trivia that I believe was meant to be case studies but precisely what they revealed about the author's thesis was never clear. The book was also ruined by the author's TDS, complete with Russia Russia Russia and social media being presented as both good and bad. The peak TDS was how Clinton breaking the law with her private server hurting her in the election was somehow malice on Trump's part.