Professor Niall Ferguson’s new book The Square and the Tower is, as you would expect, an absolutely fascinating read. Join us for a Reaction readers lunchtime event on Friday October 6th held in the heart of the City of London, when the leading historian will be in conversation with Reaction editor Iain Martin. Tickets are almost sold out.
Price includes a signed copy of The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power with your entry to the lunchtime event. There will also be sandwiches…
Tickets cost £30.
In The Square and the Tower 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 personal computer in the role of the printing press. Those looking forward to a utopia of interconnected ‘netizens’ may therefore be disappointed. For networks are prone to clustering, contagions, and even outages. And the conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries already have unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld.
Our event is generously hosted by the leading law firm White & Case.
