Most history is hierarchical: it’s about popes, presidents and prime ministers. What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks– leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati? In The Square and the TowerNiall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networks who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Our era is the Second Networked Age, with the personal computer in the role of the printing press. And all networks, past and present, are prone to clustering, contagions and even outages– with the conflicts of the past having unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld.