when hierarchy is the order of the day, you are only as powerful as your rung on the organizational ladder of a state, corporation or similar vertically ordered institution. When networks gain an advantage, you can be as powerful as your position in one or more horizontally structured social groups. (Location 246)
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All of us are necessarily members of more than one hierarchical structure. We are nearly all citizens of at least one state. A very large proportion of us are employees of at least one corporation (and a surprisingly large number of the world’s corporations are still directly or indirectly state-controlled). Most people under the age of twenty in the developed world are now likely to be in one kind of educational institutional or another; whatever these institutions may claim, their structure is fundamentally hierarchical. (Location 293)
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At first, the Illuminati were tiny in number. There were only a handful of founding members, most of them students.4 Two years after its creation, the Order’s total membership was just twenty-five. As late as December 1779, it was still only sixty. Within just a few years, however, membership had surged to more than 1,300.5 In its early days, the Order had been confined to Ingolstadt, Eichstätt and Freising, with a few members in Munich.6 By the early 1780s, the Illuminati network extended throughout much of Germany. Moreover, an impressive list of German princes had joined the Order: Ferdinand, prince of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel; Charles, prince of Hesse-Cassel; Ernest II, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Altenburg; and Charles August, grand duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach;7 as well as dozens of noblemen such as Franz Friedrich von Ditfurth, and the rising star of the Rhineland clergy, Carl Theodor von Dalberg.8 Serving many of the most exalted Illuminati as advisers were other members of the Order.9 Intellectuals, too, became Illuminati, notably the polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, the translator Johann Joachim Christoph Bode, and the Swiss educationalist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.10 Though he did not join, the dramatist Friedrich Schiller based the republican revolutionary character of Posa in his Don Carlos (1787) on a leading member of the Illuminati.11 The influence of Illuminism has sometimes been detected in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (1791).12 (Location 401)
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Networks have also been blamed for the global financial crisis of 2008: specifically, the increasingly complex network that turned the world’s banks into a global transmission and amplification system for losses on US subprime mortgages. (Location 526)
‘The pervasiveness of networked communications in the social, financial, industrial, and military sectors,’ Kissinger has written: has . . . revolutionized vulnerabilities. Outpacing most rules and regulations (and indeed the technical comprehension of many regulators), it has, in some respects, created the state of nature . . . the escape from which, according to Hobbes, provided the motivating force for creating a political order . . . [A]symmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between cyber powers both in diplomacy and in strategy . . . Absent articulation of some rules of international conduct, a crisis will arise from the inner dynamics of the system. (Location 575)
For most of recorded history, hierarchies dominated networks in their scope and scale. Men and women were mostly organized into hierarchical structures, with power concentrated at the very top in the hands of a chief, lord, king or emperor. By contrast, the average individual’s network was stunted in its scale. The typical peasant – and that word roughly describes what most human beings were for most of recorded history – was stuck in a tiny cluster called a family, inside a slightly larger cluster called a village, with almost no links to the wider world. This was how most human beings lived as recently as a hundred years ago. Even today, the inhabitants of Indian villages are, at best, connected in a ‘social quilt . . . a union of small cliques where each clique is just large enough to sustain cooperation by all of its members and where the cliques are laced together’.16 A key role in such isolated communities is played by the ‘diffusion-central’ individuals commonly known as gossips.17 (Location 654)
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The word hierarchy derives from ancient Greek – ἱεραρχία (hierarchia), literally the ‘rule of a high priest’ – and was first used to describe the heavenly orders of angels and, more generally, to characterize a stratified order of spiritual or temporal governance. Up until the sixteenth century, by contrast, the word ‘network’ signified nothing more than a woven mesh made of interlaced thread. (Location 690)
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Amongst the varieties of hierarchy that proliferated in the pre-modern period were tightly regulated urban polities reliant on commerce and bigger, mostly monarchical, states based on agriculture; the centrally run cults known as churches; the armies and bureaucracies within states; the guilds that operated to control access to skilled occupations; the autonomous corporations that, from the early-modern period, sought to exploit economies of scope and scale by internalizing certain market transactions; academic corporations like universities; and the supersized transnational states known as empires. (Location 713)