A
statue of Martin Luther holding his translation of the New Testament into
German sits in front of the city hall in Wittenberg, Germany. (Hendrik
Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)
BY JAMES HOHMANN, with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve
| ||||||||||||||||||
THE BIG IDEA:
PALO ALTO, Calif.—When historian Niall
Ferguson moved from Harvard to Stanford two years ago, he was struck
by Silicon Valley’s indifference to history. The hubris he
saw reminded him of what he encountered on Wall Street as he
researched a book about the history of banking during the years before
the financial crisis. He became convinced the technology sector was
careening toward its own crisis and decided to write about it.
The crisis has finally arrived, thanks to
Cambridge Analytica, conveniently timed to coincide with the
publication of Ferguson’s new book on the history of social networks,
from the Freemasons to Facebook. “The Square and the Tower” is a
cautionary tale that challenges the conventional wisdom that growing
interconnectedness is inherently good for society. “Our networked
world is fundamentally vulnerable, and two-factor authentication won’t
save us,” Ferguson said at the Hoover Institution, where he is a
senior fellow.
Since President Trump’s victory, much has
been written about parallels between the present and the rise of
authoritarian leaders in the 1930s. Ferguson thinks that’s lazy
analysis. For most of the 20th century, communications systems were
amenable to central control. This was a fluke of the Industrial
Revolution, which produced telegraphs and then telephones. These technologies
had an architecture that allowed whoever controlled the hub to
dominate the spokes, which led to more hierarchical power structures.
To understand the current era, Ferguson
believes we need to look more at what happened after Johannes
Gutenberg developed the printing press. Like the Web, the use of
these presses was difficult to centrally control. “At the beginning of
the Reformation 501 years ago, Martin Luther thought naively that if
everybody could read the Bible in the vernacular, they’d have a direct
relationship with God, it would create ‘the priesthood of all
believers’ and everything would be awesome,” said Ferguson.
“We’ve said the same things about the
Internet,” he added. “We think that's obviously a good idea. Except
it's not obviously a good idea, any more than it was in the 16th
century. Because what the Europeans had was not ‘the priesthood of all
believers.’ They had 130 years of escalating religious conflict,
culminating in the Thirty Years War – one of the most destructive
conflicts ever.”
The more he studies that period, the more
echoes Ferguson sees in the 21st century. “What one can
see in the 16th and 17th centuries is polarization, fake news-type
stories, the world getting smaller and therefore contagion is capable
of spreading much faster,” Ferguson said. “These big shifts in network
structure led to revolutions against hierarchical institutions.”
Ferguson points to recent studies showing
that fake news can spread faster and farther than real news when it’s
especially sensational. “The crazy stuff is more likely
to go viral because we're kind of interested in crazy stuff, but this
is not surprising historically,” he said. “The idea that witches live
amongst us and should be burned went as viral as anything that Martin
Luther said ... Indeed, it turned out that witch burning was more
likely to happen in places where there were more printing presses.”
In a sobering 90-minute conversation, the
author said he’s driven to sleeplessness when he thinks about how some
of the dynamics on social media will play out in the future. “I'm much more
worried than a non-historian by what I see because history tells me
that the polarization process keeps going, and it doesn't just stop at
verbal violence because at a certain point that's not satisfying,”
said Ferguson.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg
meets with a group of entrepreneurs in St. Louis last November. (Jeff
Roberson/AP)
Enter Facebook. Mark
Zuckerberg is worth around $64 billion as a 33-year-old because of his
brilliance at creating an addictive social network that capitalized on
the human desire for connection. The site was already embattled for
allowing the Kremlin to use its platform to sow domestic discord. The
Russians were literally buying political ads to target American voters
with rubles. Now Zuckerberg is under growing scrutiny for the
firm’s failure to safeguard data in the wake of damning whistleblower
revelations about Cambridge Analytica, a voter profiling firm which harvested the personal information of
as many as 50 million users and earned $6 million from President
Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook broke
the law or violated a 2011 settlement agreement. A bipartisan chorus
in Congress is demanding that Zuckerberg testify under oath. His
lobbyists are negotiating the details of an appearance. Recognizing
the political risk, Facebook executives have even begun saying
publicly that they’re receptive to being more heavily regulated.
“I don’t think they have thought deeply at
all about the historical significance of their predicament, and I
blame Mark Zuckerberg for dropping out of Harvard before he took any
of my classes,” Ferguson quipped. “If he had taken my course in
western civilization, he'd know that he's become a strange amalgam of
John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst all
at once. When you look back on the experience of these figures, what's
the common characteristic? They went through a phase of deep
unpopularity.”
Niall Ferguson speaks Monday at the Hoover
Institution on Stanford's campus. (Rod Searcey/For The Hoover
Institution)
Ferguson, who like Carnegie is a native of
Scotland, believes that the American government must move aggressively
to rein in the power of companies like Facebook. “If we don't
act, the next phase of the process will be even uglier than the
current Cambridge Analytica phase -- which is the tip of the iceberg,”
he said. “Think of how many other people have downloaded the data. The
window was open for years.”
He believes Facebook should be treated under
the law more like a content publisher than a technology company. Amending the
Telecommunications Act of 1996 could increase their liability and make
them more accountable for damaging information trafficked on their
platforms. “It is an untenable state of affairs that a few private
companies know more about the citizens of a country than the citizens
themselves, much less the government,” said Ferguson. “And it is
untenable that the companies concerned are … so easily
instrumentalized by hostile foreign governments that as many people saw
Russian-originated content in 2016 as voted in the presidential
election. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, you
cannot possibly think this is okay.”
Despite all the attention paid to the ongoing
Russia probes, Ferguson thinks media coverage of the midterms needs to
emphasize how vulnerable the Internet remains to manipulation by the
forces of darkness. “It's as if people who work
professionally in politics just want to pretend that it's still
pre-2008, whereas the entire system of politics has completely
changed,” he said. “Facebook advertising is the most powerful tool in
politics. I don't think we're doing nearly enough to avoid another
legitimacy crisis around this.”
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário