Society in the Network Era
A relentless wave of fear and anger has engulfed the United States, Europe and much of the rest of the world, as tyrants and oligarchs rush in to fill a void created by an unraveling liberal order. The breakdown of democratic institutions is pervasive, volatile and synchronized around the globe as well as across the political divide. Every major democracy is beset with its own version of the same crisis. To me – a longtime analyst of markets, technologies and networks – synchronization, accelerating volatility and lack of countervailing power are the hallmarks of a long-running boom spiraling toward a spectacular crash: in this case, the Postwar Order itself. Making matters worse, the establishment is too invested in old tools and positions, while insurgents can’t see beyond grabbing and institutionalizing Power.[1]
Networked technologies including smartphones, social media, deep data and artificial intelligence are able to send key components of Power – like money, stories and images – away from mediating institutions directly into the hands of people. However, technologies change their character as they mature.[2] What was once connective tissue for the many – like the great ships that discovered “new worlds” – eventually become weapons to exploit, extract and enslave those they “discovered.”
While liberals, capitalists and socialists argue over collective government versus private business, a new generation of libertarian technologists, communist dictators and far-right autocrats are adopting powerful network tools that transcend old notions of public and private property, to advance a singular goal: ruthless mastery over Earth’s people and resources.[3]
Western democracies are richer, stronger and technologically more advanced than the forces aligned against them, but they’re divided and out of date. To survive, they will have to retool their leaderships, institutions and ideologies to harness the infinite creativity and productivity of what sociologist Manuel Castells calls network society.[4] Defeating the autocratic tide would be democracy’s crowning achievement, relieving a hot and ageing planet of the industrial age’s toxic debris while unleashing the infinite diversity of its communities. Otherwise, it stands to suffer a prolonged and devastating abdication to weaker but determined tyrants.[5]
Present-day events are incomprehensible without mapping them to the forceful changes that network technologies are inflicting on a feeble system.
First, today’s digital technologies are different from the underlying computer age that gave birth to them 40 years ago because they are distributed across more than 10 billion devices and 130 trillion web pages.[6] Consequently, people are able to quickly work around traditional institutions like governments, multinationals, parties and the media by posting to social networks and mining incalculable troves of information across borders.
Second, digital networks create lots of noise: feedback loops that amplify both truths and lies. Stories can be told quickly and viscerally; they can be promoted cheaply and instantaneously.
Third, network growth isn’t like industrial growth. It’s largely self-organizing, which means that seemingly innocuous experiments like indexing web pages or connecting family and friends can quickly grow into dominant powerhouses.
Fourth, the underlying technologies are all progressing rapidly, but their interaction is growing even faster than earlier models of a technological society. This superlinear network growth is volatile, adaptive and blindingly fast.[7] It means democracies, like companies, have to retool their complicated, disjointed and slow processes for planning, voting, regulating, taxing and spending.
Most importantly, the basic geometry of networks automatically increases inequality by favoring incumbents, insurgents and gatekeepers who have better connections.[8] As industrialism’s mass markets and communications are systematically unmasked, network Power laws empower new elites who often behave worse than the old bosses they depose.[9]
Tailwinds from technological disruption, even outsized ones, are generally absorbed by growing orders. But when a social order becomes old and frayed, memories of mighty unifying struggles for freedom fade and corruption becomes progressively legalized as monopolies.[10] The anxiety – after failed wars, economic dislocation and an unravelling unifying narrative – that a social order no longer protects citizens leads to a collapse of social capital and inter-group empathy.[11] Historian Arnold Toynbee observed this “state of feeling” as an irreconcilable “schism in the body social” that demolishes mighty empires.[12] It is made infinitely worse by the incomprehension and contempt of entitled elites in the face of spiraling suicides, addiction and other signs of social stress.[13]
The network paradigm would see today’s decades-long march of inequality not as bloated arguments over sovereignty, tax or social justice, but as a massive failure of network inclusion: elites hoarding access to vital connections, information and decision-making forums that drive wealth, health, liberty and creativity.[14] The collision of fast-moving commerce with overburdened communities creates fertile ground for failed revolutions, autocraticies, wars and epidemics that reshape societies.[15]
Addressing network-driven inequality requires a major leap in basic concepts of property, citizenship and nationhood. That is why the times are so unsettled. Similar challenges to citizenship, nationhood and property led to multigenerational catastrophes like the 17th century reformation’s 30 Years’ War, the revolutionary wars of Europe’s 18th century, and the industrial-age World Wars of the early 20th century.[16] [See Chart 1.]
During major transitions, social historian Barrington Moore argues, the wrath of an unsettled mainstream plurality is decisive because its members can commandeer parties, institutions, money and propaganda against larger but more fractious majority coalitions. An angry right and a fractured and punitive left split workers, opening the door to a self-annihilating “revolution from above” – fascism.[17]
In this way, a seemingly indestructible middle-class identity is atomized into warring particles, amplified by the centrifuges of technological media. The unspeakable is repeated incessantly, and eventually the unthinkable is committed on a massive scale.[18]
Networks’ basic tendency toward inequality and autocracy can be mitigated by activating their other essential properties. Peer-to-peer networks make the world small by enabling people, information and stories to find shortcuts in their travels, creating so-called small world effects.[19]Those effects are built up through weak ties, which enable massive numbers of people to collaborate through loose affiliations.[20] Feedback – the volatile interaction of data, people and particles – dramatically amplifies the reach of ordinary citizens by digitally spreading the dialogue around their stories.[21]Finally, digital networks create responsive institutions by enabling communities to self-organize through constant communication, experimentation and adaptation.[22]
The network worldview turns industrial ideologies of every stripe upside down: knowledge is wealth, and money is the commodity chasing it. Innovations arise from adapting and recombining content, culture and data that come from communities. Hoarding access to these vital network connections through monopolies is rightly seen as institutional corruption that eventually suffocates societies.[23]
As a result, while it may be ideologically more exciting to attack “millionaires and billionaires,” the network paradigm sees things differently: social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg and financial workstation king (and former US presidential candidate) Mike Bloomberg would both be seen as rent-extracting monopolists to be taxed and regulated. Meanwhile, investors and innovators in competitive businesses like legacy investor Warren Buffet and auto inventor Elon Musk would be encouraged rather than scorned.
Monopoly buyers and sellers distort market prices including for paid and unpaid work, user-generated content and digital footprints.[24] These footprints are claimed as trillions of dollars’ worth of intangible assets by tech platforms, which makes them the world’s richest companies.[25]But that work, data and content has to be seen as the property of people and their communities, entitled to earn vast royalties the way writers and performers have for decades. Having a vital financial stake in their own data and content would also sharpen people’s sensitization to the lies promoted to them or said about them.
Digital royalties should be invested into flexible Universal Capital Accounts to enable enhanced education, housing, healthcare, childcare, creativity and entrepreneurialism. These accounts, potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars per household, would be infinitely more valuable and productive than libertarian payoffs like universal basic income.[26] They would create a mechanism to streamline strapped municipalities, siloed government departments and politicized treasuries while keeping self-interested corporations at arm’s length.[27] The process need not be financially complex; rich families routinely set up trust funds for their children and calculate community property for their spouses.[28]
Against monopoly power, the network paradigm would use technologists’ own growth hack to pry them open; interoperability means opening up dominant platforms to competitors and making users’ content and data fully portable. This would quickly transform rigged businesses including technology and healthcare, turning dominant platforms into utilities instead of spending often futile decades trying to rip them apart.[29]
In media, paid speech – in which money buys or amplifies a point of view – would be regulated for truth and attribution rather than protected as often anonymous “free” speech. Following the same logic, social networks would rightly be viewed as media companies, bound by the same rules.
Far from being feared or resisted, innovations would be embraced, with guardrails: What economist Carl Benedikt Frey calls worker-enabling technology – which makes workers more productive – should carry an economic premium including tax breaks and subsidies, while labor-replacing technology would be taxed and regulated to reflect its social cost.[30]
Computer programs that make smart guesses under the guise of artificial intelligence would, as computer scientist Stuart Russell puts it: “learn more about what we really want … defer to humans … ask permission … act cautiously when guidance is unclear; and … allow themselves to be switched off.”[31]
Opening up closed systems is the ecological way of mobilizing energy and resources so that the entire organism can thrive. The network economy offers boundless alternatives to industrialization’s winner-take-all sweepstakes that favor a handful of rich cities.[32] Regional value chains can replace dehumanizing supply chains by linking universities, specialized businesses and unique cultures, giving communities decisive advantages over domineering megacities.[33] [See Chart 2.] For example, the US Midwest can leverage its manufacturing and agricultural prowess, and Southern Europe stands to flourish as a media and culture powerhouse. Businessmen already eye these zones, but governments have to cut through barriers.[34]
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s regional “levelling up” plan for Britain’s neglected North is a prime example of nimble populists, unrestrained by norms, seizing the center ground through network initiatives while their adversaries dither.[35]
More broadly, governments can no longer operate through campaign promises that are mostly hollowed out over an election cycle, or laws diluted through decades of litigation. Much of their work has to be mediated in real time through new agencies that are relevant, inclusive and credible, like Wikipedia’s dispute resolution system.[36]
While all of these mechanisms come with downsides, managing surges and disruptions of Power while distributing energy to all organs so that the organism can thrive is network management.[37]
Silicon Valley ushered in the Network Era some 40 years ago when I was a young technology analyst. Ubiquitous personal computers and relational databases that could be accessed in real time felled giants like IBM and AT&T, laying the groundwork for today’s internet and artificial intelligence. Some 10 years later, after the Soviet collapse and Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, China was forced to reinvent its communism as an entrepreneurial ideology.[38] Russia, having been devastated by Western invasions from Napoleon to Hitler, saw the same territory being devoured legalistically by the European Union and adopted the KGB’s asymmetric network warfare as its state ideology 20 years ago.[39]
Around the same time, the US’s far right embraced what Harvard’s Yochai Benkler calls network propaganda in the face of an increasingly diverse nation and globalizing planet. Echo chambers of online blogs and social media posts interact with conventional radio and TV to amplify overlooked voices as well as paranoid fantasies long derided by cosmopolitan media.[40]
All of these regimes use artificial intelligence’s basic feedback mechanism to manipulate people: observe prejudices, amplify and exploit them, use those inflamed passions to convince and coerce people into doing what the masters of these tools want them to do.[41] [See Chart 3.] Mining this rich circuit forms the basis of alliances between monopolistic capitalism, propaganda and paranoid surveillance states. That lethal connection is the foundation of national socialism – the original name of fascism.[42]
US Trump voters who care about history should heed its dire warning: the project is doomed to fail. While small-time dictators can hide in the shadows of world conflicts, diverse empires that subjugate their own citizens – including mainstream middle classes who thought they were free[43] – squander their strength by overextending themselves. Eventually they’re torn to shreds through interminable wars, plagues, revolutions, and ultimately collapse.[44] Those who deplete their people’s resources and alliances are invariably exiled like Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm, shot with their own revolvers like Hitler, assassinated like Julius Caesar, or impaled by mobs like Mussolini, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.[45]
One of biology’s rich contributions to network science is to understand how immune systems as well as herds of animals fight off attackers by swarming around them.[46] Similarly, democracies will have to bodily envelop the tide of authoritarian dictators, draining them of energy, the way Russia absorbed, at great cost, Napoleon’s army in the early 19th century. This is a long and painful process.[47] Since the upcoming US elections will likely shape much of the impending reality for network democracy, this essay’s remaining remarks will center on that vast republic, leaving European and British discussions for later.
Network societies need more experimentation than the one-size-fits-all, top-down industrial projects of the nationalist, capitalist or socialist varieties. Networks are akin to fishing nets: pulling one knot in any direction immediately affects all the other knots in the net. Emergent projects need lots of trial and error, laser surgery and careful physical/digital integration.[48] The factory model of society is being replaced by the interlinked campus design of successful tech companies, quickly rotating ideas and experiments while fiercely protecting their franchises and environments.[49]
This means that social and environmental activists will have to unravel the ideological rigidities within Bernie Sanders’ movement with smarter solutions. In the words of management strategist Richard Rumelt, they must embrace policies that have proximate objectives, “close enough at hand to be feasible.”[50] Upending an unfair healthcare system, for example, might be a signal accomplishment, but it is not a proximate win if it undoes today’s insurance, health and medical care for millions of people.
To avoid a war on all fronts that typically undermines the radical left in rich democracies – battling against businesses, moderates, their own factions and entire regions – the Sanders insurgency will have no choice but to embrace tactical alliances the way Franklin Roosevelt embraced the Jim Crow wing of his Democratic party, progressive industrialists and communist dictator Joseph Stalin to defeat the Great Depression and fascism.[51]
The progressive establishment, now rallying around former Vice President Joe Biden, has an even greater responsibility. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt spelled it out nearly a century ago, chronicled by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin: “The struggle would not be worth winning if the old order of things prevailed. Unless democracy were renewed at home … there was little merit in fighting for democracy abroad.”[52]
Goodwin observes the same urgency throughout US history. Men of humble origins – Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson – or patricians, like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, all recognized that the establishment paradigm of their times was untenable for the crises at hand.[53]
None accepted revolution – rich democracies have little appetite for that kind of upheaval. Nor would the times sustain muddling through. During civilizational inflection points, enraged populations won’t stand for incremental reform because they realize the system is broken.[54]
For democracies to withstand existential crises, their coalitions have to be genuinely expansive and transformative in intent, rhetoric and policy. Otherwise they stand to repeat the catastrophic fractiousness and indecisive coalitions of the 1930s in France, Germany, Italy and Spain that turbocharged fascism.[55]
History, military and corporate strategy, and network science all align around what has to happen next: progressive realism has to combine with radical transformation. Goodwin summarizes the challenge: “Draw an immediate sharp line … between what has gone before and what is about to begin”; “Infuse a sense of shared purpose and direction”; “Address systematic problems. Launch lasting reforms”; “Be open to experiment. Design flexible agencies to deal with new problems”; “Strike the right balance between realism and optimism.” [56]
Today’s worldwide coronavirus pandemic is the epitome of a network crisis.[57] Like fake news and the tyrants who deploy it, epidemics spread by exploiting weaknesses in the connections between people and their environment. [58] The ruptures will not subside until industrialization’s outdated top-down ideologies, that feed off of dirty BTU-based industrial fossil energy, are replaced by democracies powered by participatory, clean and efficient CPU-driven smart network Power.[59]
The changing times call for a radically novel program: efficient surgical strikes in health, finance and community care instead of disruptive collectivizations; flexible and well-endowed Universal Capital Accounts funded by monopoly taxes while encouraging fairly earned wealth; open interoperable utilities that allow competitors onto platforms and let users opt out of being sold as data; and cohesive, competitive and intelligent regional networks of universities, businesses and cultures.
Society will adapt to the Network Era one way or another, either via what economist Walter Scheidel calls history’s perennial four horsemen of revolutions, wars, plagues and collapse, or through by winning the fight for democracy and inclusive transformation.[60]
The new paradigm, as science historian Thomas Kuhn put it, creates “a whole new way of regarding the problems.” [61] It is neatly summarized by network scientist Duncan Watts: “… the first great lesson of the connected age: we may all have our own burdens, but like it or not, we must bear each other’s burdens as well.”[62] The admonition echoes Christianity’s fundamental teaching: “… if you go on biting and devouring one another, beware that you are not consumed by one another.”[63]
Late Rome, Ming China and the Ottomans doomed themselves and their heirs to decay, humiliation and poverty by grinding in the opposite direction of exclusion and equivocation, thus turning their backs to the new paradigms that would ultimately destroy them. We should resist that fate and embrace the Network Era for the sake of our children and the planet.
[note: this draft was finalized on Friday, March 6, and circulated for publication 5 days before the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a worldwide pandemic. Epidemics and pandemics are the epitome of network hazards in that they arise out of the contacts between humans and their environments. A revised version explores the Covid–19 pandemic’s roots and game-changing consequences for the collision of old and new communities, civilizations and paradigms.]
Footnotes
[1] This essay capitalizes the word “Power” to separate its use here from general understandings of strength, speed, size or energy. The specific notion of Power used in this context means the asymmetric use of words and actions in social relations, enabling a person or group to impose their will on others; https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/06/democracy-and-its-discontents/; https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/11/08/trump-xi-putin-and-the-axis-of-disorder/
[2] Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition (p. 159), Free Press, Kindle Edition: Socioeconomic Status, Equality, and Innovation-Development.
[3] Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, The Saturday Essay, September 14, 2014, “Competition Is for Losers: If You Want to Create and Capture Lasting Value, Look to Build a Monopoly”; https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2013-07-04/good-riddance-to-brotherhood-s-fake-democrats; https://www.ft.com/content/670039ec-98f3-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36
[4] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Information Age Series),(Kindle location 353-903), Preface to the 2010 Edition, Wiley, Kindle Edition.
[5] Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition (p. 522), Penguin Publishing Group, Kindle Edition.
[6] James L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart, Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/mobile-white-paper-c11-520862.html; https://searchengineland.com/googles-search-indexes-hits-130-trillion-pages-documents-263378
[7] Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West, Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities, 2007; https://www.pnas.org/content/104/17/7301/
[8] See Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: The New Science of Networks (p. 65), Basic Books, Kindle Edition: The Sixth Link (pp. 65-78).
[9] Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: The New Science Of Networks (p.208), Basic Books, Kindle Edition: The Fourth Link: The Network Economy.
[10] Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Kindle Edition (Kindle location 1584): “… widening inequality has become baked into the building blocks of the ‘free market’ itself. Even without globalization and technological change, and even absent the tax breaks and subsidies, the share of total national income going to corporations and to the executives and investors whose incomes largely depend on corporate profits would still be rising relative to the share going to labor. The vicious cycle would achieve this on its own.”
[11] Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence (p. 113), Random House Publishing Group, Kindle Edition.
[12] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, op. cit. (p. 371), Chapter XVIII, Schism in the Body Social (1) Dominant Minorities), Oxford; Joan C. Williams, White Working Class, Harvard Business Review Press, Kindle Edition.
[13] Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, op. cit. (p. 371), Chapter XVIII, Schism in the Body Social (1) Dominant Minorities), Oxford; Joan C. Williams, White Working Class, Harvard Business Review Press, Kindle Edition.
[14] Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition(p. 42): Power in the Networks.
[15] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/06/how-epidemics-have-changed-world/; Frank M. Snowden, Epidemics and Society (p. 420). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition; Urbanization and Poverty;
[16] Thomas Piketty, Capital et Idéologie (French Edition) (p. 19), Le Seuil, Kindle Edition, See Chart 1: https://medium.com/@paradigmlostproject/paradigm-lost-d38d1dc9176f
[17] Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (p. 228), Beacon Press, Kindle Edition, Chapter Five, Revolution from Above: The Response of the Ruling Classes to Old and New Threats; also, Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Royal Institute of International Affairs) (p. 377), Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition.
[18] Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (p. 140), Open Road Media, Kindle Edition, Chapter 5, Mechanisms of Escape: 1. Authoritarianism.
[19] Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, W. W. Norton & Company, Kindle Edition, Chapter 3, Small Worlds.
[20] Barabasi, The Fourth Link, op. cit., pp. 41-44.
[21] Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, Penguin Books, p. 415.
[22] Scott Camazine, Jean-Louis Deneubourg, Nigel R. Franks, James Sneyd, Guy Theraulaz, Eric Bonabeau, Self-Organization in Biological Systems, Chapter 3, Characteristics of Self-Organizing Systems.
[23] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/03/26/too-much-of-a-good-thing
[24] Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Kindle Edition (Kindle location 1584): “… widening inequality has become baked into the building blocks of the ‘free market’ itself. Even without globalization and technological change, and even absent the tax breaks and subsidies, the share of total national income going to corporations and to the executives and investors whose incomes largely depend on corporate profits would still be rising relative to the share going to labor. The vicious cycle would achieve this on its own.”
[25]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/11/amazon-beats-apple-and-google-to-become-the-worlds-most-valuable-brand.html; https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-future-b5f29b1b-f274-4876-87b9-493a924d4529.html
[26] https://www.ted.com/talks/darrick_hamilton_how_baby_bonds_could_help_close_the_wealth_gap/transcript
[27] https://medium.com/@paradigmlostproject/paradigm-lost-d38d1dc9176f
[28] https://www.wsj.com/articles/equality-for-women-must-start-at-home-even-the-gates-home-11554478210; https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/wir2013_en.pdf; http://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocumentpdf/?cote=ECO/WKP(2019)16&docLanguage=En https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-community-property-3505226
[29] Martin Zelm, Enterprise Interoperability: Smart Services and Business Impact of Enterprise Interoperability, Wiley, Kindle Edition 8: Platforms for the Industrial Internet of Things: Enhancing Business Models Through Interoperability.
[30] Carl Benedikt Frey, The Technology Trap, Princeton University Press, Kindle Edition (Kindle location: 386): “Enabling technologies, in contrast, make people more productive in existing tasks or create entirely new jobs for them.” Also: ttps://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insights/future%20of%20organizations/what%20the%20future%20of%20work%20will%20mean%20for%20jobs%20skills%20and%20wages/mgi-jobs-lost-jobs-gained-report-december-6-2017.ashx; “…today’s robots can work intelligently and safely alongside humans … Successfully rethinking organizational design will ensure that work is not only more productive … but that it will become more meaningful and rewarding for people.”
[31] Stuart Russell, Human Compatible (p. 247), Penguin Publishing Group, Kindle Edition.
[32] https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-future-d4880e02-dcc0-4865-9ccc-9bc8014dd126.html
[33] Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization, Random House Publishing Group, Kindle Edition (Kindle Location 6969): Beyond the Fifty States: America’s Next Map.
[34]https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/08/universities-and-legacy-industries-are-giving-rise-to-the-midwests-ai-startups/; https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesmarketplace/2018/02/21/meet-8-tech-companies-proving-theres-more-to-the-midwest/#7094de7a18cb
[36] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Kindle Location 1103), Kindle Edition; Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution, Hyperion Books, Chapter 5: Community At Work (The Piranha Effect); also: Jeremy Heimans,, New Power (p. 269), Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Kindle Edition: “New power triangle.”
[37] See Mani Subramanian, Network Management: Principles and Practice (p. 601), Pearson India, Kindle Edition: 16.1.2 Status of Current NM Technology.
[38] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-shattered-dreams-of-1989-11546013916
[39] George Soros, Guardian, Putin Is A Bigger Threat to Europe’s Existence Than Isis, February 11, 2016: “The most effective way [Russian President] Putin’s regime can avoid collapse is by causing the EU to collapse sooner.”
[40] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html; Yochai Benkler, Network Propaganda (p. 271), Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition, Chapter 11: The Origins of Asymmetry.
[41] François Chollet, Medium, Mar 28, 2018, What Worries Me About AI: “When you have access to both perception and action, you’re looking at an AI problem.”
[42] William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp (p. 344), Little, Brown and Company, Kindle Edition, Chapter 14: Vierzehn: We’ve Hired Hitler!
[43] Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (p. 56), University of Chicago Press, Kindle Edition.
[44] The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) (p. 11); Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Volume 1, Palatine Press, Kindle Edition (Kindle location 1173), Chapter II, Part II.
[45]Matthew White, Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History (p. 532-534). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. What I Found
[46] Self-Organization in an Ecological Setting, D. G. Green, S. Sadedin, T. G. Leishman, Ecosystem Ecology, Sven Erik Jorgensen, ed., Elsevier Science, Kindle Edition (p. 103).
[47] Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Cambridge World Classics), Critical Edition (Annotated) (Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy/Complete Works of Leo Tolstoi Book 2) (Kindle location 24550), Cambridge World Classics, Kindle Edition.
[48] Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies (p. 101), Penguin, Kindle Edition.
[49] https://theconversation.com/the-rise-of-the-corporate-campus-84370
[50] Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy (p. 105), The Crown Publishing Group, Kindle Edition, Chapter Seven: Proximate Objectives.
[51] Jonathan Fenby, The General (Kindle Locations 4692-4693), Simon & Schuster, Kindle Edition, Chapter 16: Witches’ Brew – The Problems of Peace.
[52] Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (pp. 10-11), Simon & Schuster, Kindle Edition.
[53] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, Simon & Schuster, Kindle Edition: Forward.
[54] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership, op. cit., p. 233.
[55] Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Kindle Edition, Chapter 8: What Is Fascism?; Hanson Victor Davis, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won (p. 47), Basic Books, Kindle Edition, Chapter 3: Old, New, and Strange Alliances; Steven H. Strogatz, Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life (p. 53), Hachette Books, Kindle Edition.
[56] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times (p. 276, 277, 278, 291,293), Simon & Schuster, Kindle Edition; Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy, op. cit., Introduction: Overwhelming Obstacles (Kindle location 144); Steven H. Strogatz, Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life (p. 40), Hachette Books, Kindle Edition: Chapter Two: Brain Waves and the Conditions for Sync.
[57] Barabasi, Albert-laszlo. Linked: The New Science Of Networks (p. 142). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
[58] J. N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (p. 305). Kindle Edition
[59] “BTU” is an abbreviation for “British Thermal Unit,” a commonly used measure of heat from energy corresponding to the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 lb. of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit. “CPU” is an abbreviation of “Central Processing Unit,” which is the part of a computer in which operations are controlled and executed. Source: Oxford English Dictionary. For more detail on each initiative, see https://medium.com/@paradigmlostproject/paradigm-lost-d38d1dc9176f
[60] Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler, op. cit. (p. 444) Chapter 16: What Does Tthe Future Hold? Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, op. cit., Chapter 11, The Virtuous Cycle.
[61] Thomas S. Kuhn, op. cit., kKindle location 2282.
[62] Duncan J. Watts, op. cit. (p. 301).
[63] New American Bible, Galatians 5:14-15.
