All governments that aspire to total control shut down free networks. Many hubs are rubbed out or consolidated into state-controlled mega-hubs. Spontaneous weak links are discouraged or crushed. Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot all did the same. Dictators multiply the number of degrees of separation between citizens, isolating them from random contact and corralling them into just a few institutions that are either part of the state apparatus or approved by it.
Now, imagine that God is standing at the beginning of time, trying to decide how to organise human society. One way would be to impose a heavy, rigid structure on the population: a monolithic, hierarchical, centralised society; at the extreme, a slave or military society. The great advantage of this society, from God’s point of view, would be that it requires only a few people–possibly just one person–to be smart enough to direct everyone else. In a world where humans are battling with nature to survive, where wealth and education are limited, the highly structured society has clear practical appeal.
At the other extreme, imagine that God is a social scientist, experimenting with a completely ‘flat’, decentralised society, where there are no structures to tell people what to do. He might well wonder: ‘How is anything going to work without structure when everyone is the equal of everyone else?’
Then God has a brainwave, perhaps inspired by reading a book on political freedom written far in the future, and proceeds to invent networks. Because God, in this scenario, is a Trinitarian, networks are composed of three constituent elements–strong links, weak links and hubs. And society is not completely unstructured, because networks do have some sort of structure, but since God has been converted to the cause of democracy by reading Thomas Paine, he decides that the networks must be spontaneously generated by the people themselves, rather than imposed on them by, well, God or other humans. God also understands that network hubs can exert gravity on their members, causing them to stay longer than they should or to revert to primitive deference to authority. To minimise these potentially harmful effects, God writes a line of computer code automatically blowing up all hubs after they have been in existence for fifteen years. The best-placed competing hub then takes over for its maximum of fifteen years of fame.
For this decentralised, relatively unstructured society to work, everyone must be able to earn a decent living based on their own skills and initiative. So God invents markets, education and rock music, to endow everyone in society with, respectively, wealth, knowledge and attitude. And God reckons the result is not too bad.
Would you expect a less structured society to be more or less connected than a highly structured one? Common sense might suggest that the less structured society would be less connected. One might expect there to be a price to pay, in terms of absence of connections, for the benefit of autonomy for individuals. But the surprise of the network society, as we have seen, is that the less structured a country or the world becomes, the more connected it becomes. Most people would prefer autonomy to slavery; and most would prefer to live in a united rather than a divided world.
Hitler proved that a move away from network society produces more structure, but less connection. This was not a peculiarity of the Third Reich–greater hierarchy always produces greater isolation. That is why totalitarian regimes strive to manufacture, through propaganda, a sense of identity between citizens who are cut off from one another by their society’s structures.
Imagine standing still and in formation with hundreds of thousands of fellow-devotees, all wearing the same smart uniform, in a huge stadium, cheering an inspirational speech by The Leader. You appear to be connected, but you cannot talk to your neighbour or step out of line. You are being choreographed. The connection is impersonal, synthetic and ultimately fraudulent. No new information is exchanged as a result of such ‘contact’, because there is absolutely no authentic or spontaneous communication.
The delight of network society–relative to a highly structured, hierarchical society–is that it offers the best of both: greater autonomy and greater connection. This happy outcome is entirely due to the superconnectors, the hubs and people that connect diverse groups and individuals. Without superconnectors, network society would not be so attractive, and might not work at all. Viewed this way, the rewards that pass to superconnectors seem entirely reasonable. We may think of Nelson Mandela, who more than anyone else was responsible for breaking down the highly structured, hierarchical, oppressive apartheid regime and replacing it with an open, liberal, democratic society. After he became the first black president of South Africa in 1994, Mandela went out of his way to bring together black and white South Africans. One seminal moment was when the Springboks–the South African rugby team, associated with white machismo and hated by many blacks–won a thrilling final in the 1995 World Cup, beating the favourites New Zealand. Mandela presented the trophy to the Springbok captain, Afrikaner Francois Pienaar, wearing a shirt with Pienaar’s number 6 on the back, and grinning so widely that he might have been the team’s sponsor.
Now we can ask the question: if the two extremes of society are highly structured and poorly connected, on the one hand, and loosely structured and well connected, on the other, is there any trend in history from one type of society to the other or is there just a random interplay between them?
One way of answering this question is to look at the history of human connection. The facilitating mechanisms were language, the alphabet and writing, and eventually printed books; stories, myths, music and architecture; and perhaps the most important single device for communication with strangers throughout human history, the city, which attracted people from the countryside, strange lands and eventually anywhere else in the world. For several thousand years, cities were the most important hubs in facilitating human connection, as well as the most fertile incubators of weak links. Civilisation and communication were, and still are, largely urban phenomena. Cities have grown ever larger, and, as we’ve seen, a greater proportion of people now live in them than at any time in human history.
Also, in the last six centuries, other communication devices have proliferated. Humanity has become sewn together by connecting technologies which are constantly being invented and reinvented, becoming ever more widespread and influential. In Chapter Six, we saw the massive psychological and practical impact of the printing press, invented around 1450–how private reading, printed books and popular journals triggered an explosion of learning, which circulated ideas ever faster, connecting individuals to useful knowledge; and stimulated trade, industry and further inventions; and allowed people to think for themselves and plan for a future where they could do more than simply take orders from superiors.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean. Less than a hundred years later, other explorers had circumnavigated the earth, shrinking the world into one single place. The eighteenth century saw the extension of road and canal networks; the nineteenth, railways, the penny post, the telegraph, steamships and the motor-car. Then came aircraft, telephones, radio, television, computers, microchips, high-speed trains, cheap international travel, fax machines, overnight courier delivery across and even between continents, connected computer systems, mobile phones, videoconferencing, fibre-optic cables, the Internet, and Internet-based communication applications and services–all of them network phenomena, all connecting more and more people, in more and more ways, to increasingly high-quality standards at ever-lower cost. These technologies have progressively linked remote people, reduced distance barriers and immeasurably boosted trade, making the world smaller, richer and less divided.