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Book: The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
Quotes of Book: The Square and the Tower:
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  1. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    Meanwhile, as Francis Fukuyama has argued, the very legitimacy of democratic politics is being corroded because 'interest groups . . . are able to effectively buy politicians with campaign contributions and lobbying', a process that he dubs 'repatrimonialization
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  2. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    Just as global networks of communication and transportation had made the mass migrations of the late nineteenth century possible,6 so political networks of populism and nativism sprang into life to resist them.
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  3. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    American legislators scarcely rested until Chinese immigration to the United States had been altogether stopped. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration of Chinese for ten years, introduced 'certificates of registration' for departing workers {effectively re-entry permits}, required Chinese officials to vet travellers from Asia, and for the first time in US history created an offence of illegal immigration, with the possibility of deportation as a part of the penalty.
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  4. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    Rather than being a cause of the late twentieth-century crisis, the Internet appears to have been a consequence of the breakdown of hierarchical power.
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  5. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    With good reason, Joseph Goebbels described radio as 'the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state'. Stalin might have added that the telephone was God's gift to eavesdroppers.
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  6. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    When half the nodes of a random graph the size of most real-world networks are removed, the network is destroyed. But when the same procedure is carried out against a scale-free model of a similar size, 'the giant connected component resists even after removing more than 80 per cent of the nodes, and the average distance within it {between nodes} is practically the same as at the beginning
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  7. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    Systems can be fast, open, or secure, but only two of these three at a time.'51 The threat to world order can be summed up as 'very fast networks x artificial intelligence x black boxes x the New Caste x compression of time x everyday objects x weapons'.52
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  8. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    it is no longer a mere possibility that this network can be instrumentalized by corrupt oligarchs or religious fanatics to wage a new and unpredictable kind of war in cyberspace. That war has commenced. Indices of geopolitical risk suggest that conventional and even nuclear war may not be far behind.
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  9. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    There is a powerful case to be made that the innovations of the earlier industrial revolutions were of more benefit to mankind than those of the most recent one.11 And if the principal consequence of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence really is going to be large-scale unemployment,12 the chances are surely quite low that a majority of mankind13 will uncomplainingly devote themselves to harmless leisure pursuits in return for some modest but sufficient basic income. Only the sedative-based totalitarianism imagined by Aldous Huxley would make such a social arrangement viable.14 A more likely outcome is a repeat of the violent upheavals that ultimately plunged the last great Networked Age into the chaos that was the French Revolution.
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  10. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    As a result of these mistakes, the world now finds itself in the grip of an epidemic of Islamist terror. Of the last sixteen years, the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with ninety-three countries experiencing attacks and close to 33,000 people killed. The second worst was 2015, with over 29,000 deaths. In that year, four radical Islamic groups were responsible for three quarters of all deaths from terrorism: Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Taliban and al-Qaeda.38 ISIS carried out over a hundred attacks a month.39 Although Muslim-majority countries suffer the most from jihadist violence, the West is increasingly under attack.
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  11. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    The possibility exists that information and computer technology could enable Beijing to build a system of 'social credit', analogous to financial credit in the West, that would {in official parlance} 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step'.
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  12. Niall Ferguson _ The Square and the Tower:

    the European political elites now effectively rely on US companies such as Facebook to carry out censorship on their behalf, seemingly oblivious to the risk that Facebook's 'community standards' may end up being stricter than European law.
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