It’s easy to look at our social networks and think that they’re completely unprecedented. After all, it wasn’t like Abraham Lincoln could see how many likes he was getting on Facebook. But according to Niall Ferguson, that’s a narrow view of history. Ferguson, author of the new book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, explores how networks have altered the course of human events, and tells us what we can learn about our own social networks by examining the networks of the past.