poorly edited

ive read most of Fergusons' books. His unashamed conservative views are never far from the surface, this book meanders off topic a lot of the time-usually when the author wants to propagate his own political views.
its a great concept, but he really needs to allocate some editing tasks to the 20-odd researchers he employs for his books, as many are simply far too long.
whats more, he fails to draw any substantial conclusions.

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Interesting analysis, but quit with the accents already!

I’m not sure where the mania came from among Audible readers for performing every quote in the supposed accent of its author, but it should stop. Even among gifted voice actors it serves little purpose other than to impress you with the reader’s mimicry, and is mainly just distracting. In the case of John Sackville, the accents range from passable (Scottish) to terrible (New Zealand), and it detracts from the experience. It’s a history book not a radio play. It’s a pity because Sackville has a pleasant reading voice and nothing extra needs to be added. That gripe over, the book is an interesting take on various significant historical epochs and events, examining them as it does through the lens of the “network”. This does sometimes provide novel insights, though at other times the role of the network seems rather tenuous, with the result that the book can seem a little unfocused.

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Meh

Annoying accents by narrator. Word 'network' said 56,293 times. Six words remaining to review this?

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Excellent

Ferguson ‘s best piece of writing yet. He is persuasive, entertaining and informative. He hadn’t been able to encapsulate not only recent historical events, but provides an insight to the challenge we face and also that the future of mankind may indeed be much different from its past.

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Deep insights, history and fundamental questions

Several points of this book stood out to me. I transcribed them below as verbatim from my bookmarks - the research on Stalin and that period in history really shocked / surprised me as well, though I didn't feel it relevant to include - listen to the book, there is so much more than just the below!

****

A central theme is that the tension between distributed networks and hierarchical orders is as old as humanity itself, it exists regardless of the state of technology, though technology may have the upper hand.

# Early Adoption Centrality

Network structure can be as important as the idea itself in determining the speed and extent of diffusion. In the process of going viral, a key role is played by nodes, that are not merely hubs or brokers, but gatekeepers. People who decide whether or not to pass information to their part of the network. Their decision will be based partly on how they think that information will reflect back on them.

# Acceptance of an idea can require it to be transmitted by more than one or two sources.

A complex cultural contagion, unlike a simple disease contagion, first needs to attain a critical mass of early adopters with high degree centrality; relatively large numbers of influential friends. in the words of Duncan Watts, the key to assessing the likelihood of a contagion like cascade, is to focus not, on the stimulus itself, but on the structure of the network, the stimulus hits. This helps explain why, for every idea that goes viral, there are countless others that fizzle out in obscurity, because they began with the wrong node, cluster or network.

# Disintegration of large systems

Conway, a systems analyst, with experience of government defense contracts, had observed that "..the structures of large systems tend to disintegrate during development, qualitatively more so than with small systems"

# The architect of the successful British Vote Leave referrendum in 2016 - Dominic Cummins

Almost uniquely in the British Political class, Cummings had long not only been interested in history, which he had studied at Oxford, but also in complexity and networks. With only a limited budget ($10 million pounds) and limited time (10 months), Cummings had to fight not only "decision makers at the apex of centralised hierarchies" who nearly all who opposed Brexit, but also the undisciplined politicians on his own side. The odds were stacked against leave.

Amongst the keys to its narrow victory, Cummings argued were "nearly a billion targeted digital adverts, experimental polling, a data science team of extremely smart physicists, and a baseball bat marked 'Turkey / NHS / $350 million pounds'" - an allusion to the nearly largely untruthful slogans that experiments had shown were the most likely to get people to vote Leave.

For Cummings Brexit was not a victory for the populist right at all, as his campaign had delivered for the combined right wing and left elements; the threat of more Muslim immigrants if Turkey joined the EU and the promise of more money for the National Health Service if Britain left.

# Networks Designed to resist breakage

An intellectual arms race is now underway, to devise a viable doctrine of cyber-security. It seems unlikely that those steeped in the traditional thinking of national security will win it. Perhaps the realistic goal, is not to deter attacks or retaliate against them, but to regulate all the various networks upon which our society depends, so that they are resilient, or better yet "Anti-fragile" - a term coined by Nassim Taleb, to describe a system that grows stronger under attack.

Those, like Taleb, who inhabit the world of financial risk management, saw in 2008, just how fragile the international financial network was. The failure of a single investment bank, nearly brought the whole system of global credit down.

The rest of us have now caught up with the bankers and traders, we are all now as interconnected as they were a decade ago. Like the financial network, our social, commercial and infrastructural networks are under constant attack from fools and knaves, and there is very little indeed that we can do to deter them.

The best we can do, is to design and build our networks, so that they can withstand the ravages of cyberia.

That means resisting the temptation to build complexity, when, as in the case of financial regulation, simplicity is a better option. Above all, it means understanding the structures of the networks we create.

"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 80% of the nodes, and the average distance between nodes, is practically the same, as at the beginning".

That, is a vitally important insight, for those who's task is to design networks that can be 'anti-fragile' in the face of a deliberate, targeted attack.

# Optimism vs reality

"I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange ideas, the world would automatically become a better place, I was wrong about that" - Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, May 2017

# The dichotomy of network and heirarchies

The problems of 2017, are not nearly so novel, as we would like to imagine *** the dichotomy between network and hierarchies, is an ancient idea. The frescos painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico) in the Sala dei Nove ("Salon of Nine") are amongst the greatest achievements of 14th century Italian art (showing this dichotomy) *** The problems of war and peace, and of good and bad government, are nothing new. Technologies come and ago, the world remains a world, of squares and towers.

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interesting perspective

Over simplifies some more contemporary events, perhaps necessarily to convey it's point on a macro scale. Otherwise very interesting core concept. Sheds light on the perspectives of the author who himself is likely analogious to a contemporary 'illuminatus'

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Orange Man Bad

What started as an interesting listen sadly went downhill when it came to the 2016 US election. From being a studious analyst for much of the work Fergusson falls for the usual lefy academic trap of believing that everything Trump does or says is bad. He actually appears to believe that CNN, MSNBC and the FBI are telling the truth.

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FOOTNOTE

The footnote fad = Authors intellectually wanking oneselves. Footnote, cut this shit out pompous nerds.

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Save yourself for some of his other books

Boring, arcane and accents again! Could not continue....
Would ask for refund but don't seem to be able to get one.

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Slow, dull and difficult to listen to

I've struggled through the better part of an hour through this book, but I've already decided to take up Audible on their refund policy.

They should have had the copywriter who wrote the blurb for this book actually rewrite the book itself. I was excited after reading the blurb, and wanted to get into a bit more history ... but this was a terrible place to start. The book reads more like an academic treatise than a book for reading pleasure, which is great if you're a professor I guess, but for the lay-reader of history such as I, it was not a fun experience.

Too much effort has been put into details that don't seem to matter, and adding two or three quotes or facts on a topic where one would have sufficed. And so far, I haven't had any hints that anything more interesting is coming.

But the most irritating thing about this book for me was not the book itself, but the intolerable narration. The narrator has taken it upon himself to try and impersonate the accent of every person or entity quoted in the book, and it's ridiculously irritating. He switches from his native British accent to Scottish, German, French and American — sometimes multiple times within a sentence. He even uses an American accent when quoting a line from the Harvard Business Review, for goodness' sake. I mean, come on — is that really necessary? It makes for an extremely unpleasant listening experience, and seems like he's more interested in showing off how good at accents he is (and hat off to him, his accents are pretty good) than actually making the book nice to listen to.

Sadly I cannot review anything beyond the first hour because I've already wasted enough time on this book, and I disliked it so much as to come and write this review so hopefully nobody else wastes an hour if the things above would turn them off too.

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