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Welcome to The Spectator Podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman. On this week's episode, we'll be discussing Trump v. Technology, the new normal with Calamity May and where the jargon is polluting the English language.

First up, in this week's magazine cover piece, Neil Ferguson writes on the battle between networks and hierarchies for supremacy in a digital world.

The biggest fight is between the American president and the social networks like Facebook and Twitter,

who still exist in the unregulated frontier of the wild, wild west of the

World Wide Web. Neil joined Freddie Gray, host of the Spectators Americano podcast, to discuss.

So Neil, in your excellent piece this week, you suggest that the battle of the next millennium

is going to be between social media, Silicon Valley, and, let's say, a hierarchy as represented by someone like Donald Trump.

Can you explain a bit what you mean?

Well, I don't think it'll quite be the next millennium.

I'll settle for the next few weeks.

Yes.

As my time horizon.

The battle between networks and hierarchies is age old, as I say in my new book, The Square and the Tower available in old

good bookstores. But what we're seeing at the moment is a new phase of it. And in this phase,

the giant social networks created by Silicon Valley, Facebook, Twitter and the rest, come into collision with the most powerful hierarchy in the world,

which is the federal government of the United States.

And the way this is going to happen is as follows.

Slowly Republicans are going to wake up to the fact that Silicon Valley is stacked against them.

It will never be 2016 again.

In other words, there will never be another Republican candidate who can use Facebook and Twitter

the way Donald Trump did in a way that I think was decisive in the 2016 election,

...