Just as global networks of communication and transportation had made the mass migrations of the late nineteenth century possible,6 so political networks of populism and nativism sprang into life to...

American legislators scarcely rested until Chinese immigration to the United States had been altogether stopped. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration of Chinese for ten years,...

Rather than being a cause of the late twentieth-century crisis, the Internet appears to have been a consequence of the breakdown of hierarchical power.

With good reason, Joseph Goebbels described radio as 'the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state'. Stalin might have added that the telephone was God's gift to eavesdroppers.

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...

Systems can be fast, open, or secure, but only two of these three at a time.'51 The threat to world order can be summed up as 'very fast networks x artificial intelligence x black boxes x the New...

it is no longer a mere possibility that this network can be instrumentalized by corrupt oligarchs or religious fanatics to wage a new and unpredictable kind of war in cyberspace. That war has...

As a result of these mistakes, the world now finds itself in the grip of an epidemic of Islamist terror. Of the last sixteen years, the worst year for terrorism was 2014, with ninety-three countries...

The possibility exists that information and computer technology could enable Beijing to build a system of 'social credit', analogous to financial credit in the West, that would {in official parlance}...

the European political elites now effectively rely on US companies such as Facebook to carry out censorship on their behalf, seemingly oblivious to the risk that Facebook's 'community standards' may...

You will look in vain for a European search engine, a European online retailer, a European social network. The biggest EU-based Internet company is Spotify, the Stockholm-based music and video...

arguing that Google and Facebook should do the censoring is not just an abdication of responsibility; it is evidence of unusual naivety. As if these two companies were not already mighty enough,...

Brexit was a dress rehearsal for the US presidential election of 2016. As in Britain, so in the United States, the political establishment took it for granted that the old ways would suffice.

In most history, success is over-represented, for the victors out-write the losers. In the history of networks, the opposite often applies. Successful networks evade public attention; unsuccessful...

Even if, as seems likely, Islamic State is defeated in Iraq and Syria, its network in cyberspace and in the West will live on, a toxic milieu where the memes of dawa can breed, converting one loser...

Intergenerational inequity in public finance, hypertrophic growth of regulation, deterioration in the rule of law and corrosion of educational institutions – taken together, these lead to a 'great...

Complexity is not cheap; on the contrary, it is very expensive indeed. The administrative state has found an easy solution to the problem of increasing the volume of public 'goods' without making...

The torrent of verbiage comes about because professional politicians are more concerned with spin than substance, the media never cease to howl for 'something' to be done after every mishap, the...

a better explanation may be the fundamental deterioration of standards in both legislation and governance that we see in nearly every democracy, regardless of their different twentieth-century...

government had degenerated into what has been called an 'administrative' or 'managerial' state, hierarchical and bureaucratic in its mode of operation, dedicated to generating ever more complicated...

Stalin's power consisted of three distinct elements: total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication – with the Kremlin telephone network as the central hub –...

To an extent that most accounts still underrate, the Bolshevik Revolution was a German-financed operation, though it was greatly facilitated by the incompetence of the Russian liberals.1 Lenin's goose...

propinquity to power is perceived to matter, especially in a time of crisis.

The essence of policy is its contingency; its success depends on the correctness of an estimate which is in part conjectural. The essence of bureaucracy is its quest for safety; its success is...

The spirit of policy and that of bureaucracy are diametrically opposed

Some of the network graphs that Able Danger produced were twenty feet long and almost wholly unintelligible because the print was so small.8 Krebs himself concluded that there would be no substitute...

A generation mostly removed from conflict – the baby-boomers – had failed to learn the lesson that it is not unregulated networks that reduce inequality but wars, revolutions, hyperinflations and...

technology has enormously empowered networks of all kinds relative to traditional hierarchical power structures – but that the consequences of that change will be determined by the structures,...

Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. Technology meanwhile marches inexorably ahead, threatening to render most human beings redundant or immortal...

Above all, the Trump campaign, like the British Vote Leave campaign, made full use of Facebook's ad-testing capability, trying tens of thousands of variants to establish what worked best on the voters...