When the tidings are all bad and scary, its exhausting to watch the cable networks and, even,dispiriting to turn to the local news. Better, it seems, to watch documentaries on public TV, preferably nature shows featuring appealing and winsome rodents, fierce predators, amusing monkeys and ferocious insects, all of these creatures dwelling within vast and wonderful landscapes adorned with coronets of snow-capped mountains, pearl-opalescent waterfalls, and misty cloud-forests full of jagged limestone gorges with caverns inclining downward to the secret lakes and seas in the hollow earth. With coronavirus abroad, the works of man seem fragile, suspect, built on foundations readily swept away. Who wants to contemplate sickness and death?
So, with a sense of relief, I sat down to watch Niall Ferguson's Networld, a three-program series on public TV, about networks and their effects on human history. This subject would be, I thought, a welcome diversion from the accounts of plague and hysteria. Unfortunately, Networld is both very interesting and depressing -- it's no refuge from the viral storm. To the contrary, the show is almost nightmarishly alarmist. This program will inject worries into your psyche that you didn't even know you should have -- so it's part of the current typhoon of bad news, not a serene message from another less potentially tragic world.
Niall Ferguson is a conservative historian. He's front and center in this show as "presenter", the term used by the BBC for the hosts of this sort of program. (Although Ferguson is from Scotland, he was naturalized as an American citizen in 2018.) Ferguson is one of the neo-cons who supported the war in Iraq and, most notorious as an apologist for the late and great British empire. He has been an unabashed admirer of the civilization of the West and, therefore, an enemy of the caliphate in all of its forms. (He is married to the Dutch legislator and critic of the Islamic world, Ayaan Hirsi Ali) Ferguson is a good-looking fellow with the demeanor of a successful politician and he's clearly intelligent and knowledgeable on the topic of "networks", a subject that he attacks from a mathematical/scientific standpoint that morphs into a business /sociological approach and, finally, ends in the mode of chronicling a "world war" -- that is, an international conflict -- arising from competing networks. The form of the show apparently derives from Ferguson's book,The Square and the Tower.
The first hour of Networld is the best because it focuses on the mathematics of networks, an interesting subject that hasn't been previously considered in a documentary (or any other) format. Ferguson uses as his exemplars two examples of networks prevalent in the latter part of the renaissance. He begins with a glance at the Protestant Reformation which he attributes to the publishing network that arose in Europe during the generation after Gutenberg's invention of movable type. According to Ferguson, networks disseminating the printed word promoted Luther's ideas and elevated the German monk into an international celebrity -- these same mechanics underlie the "Arab Spring". But for every revolution that purports progress in human rights, there are counterrevolutions just as swiftly promulgated -- in this case, the Catholic counter-reformation and the rise of right-wing regimes in the Middle East. And, not only good ideas are spread by networks. Ferguson discusses the witch-hunting craze that arose parallel to the Protestant reformation, an example of a contagion of "fake news," as it were, infecting the web. In developing these concepts, Ferguson tells us about homophily (the tendency of networks to develop into groups of closely affiliated like-minded members), the resilience of networks as structures that provide social structure without a rigid top-down hierarchy, and the idea of contagion -- that is, the uncontrolled spread of disinformation across communication webs. In this context, Ferguson notes that gaudy memes, mostly lies, will always triumph over more sober (and truthful) assessments of the situation -- apparently, this can be mathematically demonstrated. This part of the show is illustrated with shots of flamingos (birds of a feather that flock together), whirling clouds of data, nasty social network memes, images of European cities where Luther was active, counter-reformation and baroque churches and sculptures, and, even, a description of the famous topology riddle, Koenigsberg's "seven bridges problem" -- to remind us that networks are made of nodes and connecting links (bridges). All of this is interesting, but the application to the spread of a deadly virus is also, more or less, evident, unmistakable, and disheartening.
Things get even darker in the two succeeding episodes. The early internet was designed as a completely democratic system for dissemination of knowledge and opinions. Therefore, how do we account for the fact that that internet has fostered a business system that accumulates all wealth and power in only three nodes in the West (Facebook, Google, and Amazon)? Mark Zuckerberg's smirking and curiously bland (artificial and robotic) face illustrates the extraordinary concentration of power in these network giants. Apparently, there is another mathematical truism at work here -- the so-called "Matthew effect" (from Matthew 25:29) -- for those who have much, much more will be given; for those who have little, all that they have will be taken. The principle, ultimately, requires that all wealth be concentrated into only a very few hands. And, Ferguson reminds us, that the tremendous wealth of Google, Zuckerberg, and Bezos comes at our expense -- these companies mine our data (shown as translucent streams pulsing up into the cloud); they profit even as they establish a surveillance State in which no one can have any real claim to privacy. Here, Ferguson reads dire paragraphs from Orwell's 1984. In this part of the film, other illustrations of network moguls are supplied by reference to the tycoons of the gilded age, particularly the railroad king, Jay Gould. .
The last and most depressing episode relates to China. Ferguson, who sees the world in terms of inevitable conflicts, posits a world war between the West and China, that is, a mighty clash of networlds (feuding networks). As it happens, China is ahead of the West, although its development is a crazy-bizarro world of enterprises similar to those in Silicon Valley: China's Ali Baba mirrors Amazon; Ten Cent is an internet platform like Google; and so on. Again Ferguson reads from Orwell. The most sinister and depressing aspect of this show is that the cheerful Chinese youth, prosperous and sleek, all are enthusiastic supporters of government surveillance. In one chilling episode, Chinese twenty-somethings loudly express their support for phone-apps that tell them how many "deadbeats" -- that is, persons behind in payment of their debts are around them. It seems that the Chinese all think its a good thing for the government to monitor everyone's purchases, travel, and opinions in order to serve the common good. At one point, some noxious Chinese flack notes that America is governed by lawyers -- the Chinese have chosen to trust their fate to technocrats. I had no idea that China is so repulsive -- although I sort of suspected there was something wrong with the place. On the other hand, China produces 3.6 million engineers a year -- the US is lucky if it can eke out 200,000 annually. The program ends on the merry note that Huawei, the "Chinese tech giant" as it is called, controls most of the technology infra-structure on earth. The company employs an army of engineers, all better paid than their American counterparts, and better fed as well -- they have fifty restaurants on campus to choose from when it's time for a lunch break. So Ferguson concludes the program by declaring a world war over network technology that the US has already lost.
The worst thing about this show is the sequence showing Chinese yuppies gloating about their phone apps persecuting those who don't pay their debts -- the app shows you the proximity of the dead beat, the person's identity complete with a picture (you would lose "social currency" by consorting with such a person) and, even, a helpful summary of the amount of the debt owed and to whom. The app is wonderfully popular. I hope that this sequence was deceptively edited and that more Chinese "men on the street" expressed concern about the phone app and the government surveillance -- indeed, the very vice of such a repressive system is that people are afraid to speak out against such measures. But the folks shown in the program seem so positively jolly about the phone app that the whole thing is literally terrifying -- it gave me nightmares.
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