Anand Giridharadas

I wonder if part of what is happening...

is in an age of network power, courage becomes harder.

Because if you think back to that person whose power came from, they were rooted in a community, they had some land, they were somebody in the town, maybe they were the deacon in the church on the weekend, they had multiple kinds of clout.

They had some money, they gave to the local civic thing,

They maybe had a bunch of different things that might make them courageous about some other thing.

So that if someone started to take over their political party who was a fascist, they would have kind of support from their church community or from the sports league they were associated with, these other things.

A lot of those things have kind of vanished now.

And your power really consists in your position and your number of connections and the density and quality and lucrativeness of those connections in the network.

And if you go to a place like TED or the Aspen Institute, you see this working.

Like no one cares about the land you have or your family name or these other things that have mattered for most of human history.

It is really about like, do you know this person?

Do you know this person?

And I just wonder if courage is a value that is suffered in a network age.

Because to be courageous is to break ties.

And the more valuable ties become, the more exponentially valuable more ties become.

the more exponentially expensive it is to cut off that tie, to burn that bridge.

And it seems to me we are surrounded by elites who are much more afraid than their parents and grandparents were to take a stand, to say this crosses a line, because maybe they fear at some deep level, you're out of the network, you go to zero very quickly.

I have been deeply myself going back to narrative nonfiction after, you know, my first two books were very much in the kind of reported and stories.

Then I did two that were more opinion advocacy.

And then I've gone back to more stories.