Carl Miller in seven

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1. What’s been the most significant shift in power over the past 20 years?

The biggest shift is how power now touches us through digital technologies woven through our daily lives. Technology acts like a camouflage for power, making it weird and unfamiliar. We know less about what influences our lives today than we did in the past. 

2. Has the nature of power changed in our digital society?

Whether in forms that are dispersed or concentrated, and whether for good or bad, these new forms of power have something in common that older, visible, more recognisable forms typically do not – they are far less constrained by rules. When power operates through technology, it often breaks out of the cages we’ve built to control it. Bluntly, power in the digital age has gone wild.

3. Who has power that didn’t before, and who has lost it?

When writing the book, I met people who had found astonishing new routes to power. They were all different, but had each found power freed from its usual bindings. They had taken on, or ignored, the rules, structures and organisations that were bigger, richer and more powerful than them, and were now changing the world. On the other hand, traditional institutions and centres of authority – mainstream politics, police and the media – have been undermined. Some of these haven’t adapted quickly enough, some can’t adapt and, for others, it still isn’t clear how they should adapt to the realities they now face.

4. Society is seen as more unequal than ever. How does social media influence that?

The tech giants are the most obvious concentrations of power created by the digital revolution. Markets don’t work anymore, because now the impetus is towards the opposite: platform dominance. People joined Facebook because their friends were on it; they downloaded Skype because someone wanted to call them using it. You buy on Amazon because everything is available at a reasonable price. This creates not just inequalities of financial reward, but also of control. Google and Facebook between them account for 81% of the traffic to online news sites in the UK. 

5. What role is there for market research and evidence?

Many of the technologies at the heart of these changes are causing the ‘datafication’ of social life. Huge, real-time, rich, linked datasets are being created, capturing what society has always done. It’s the most important opportunity in social science for a generation – but the capacity to grasp this new opportunity is a form of power. Data, compute power and the talent to make sense of it tend to collect into a small number of centres – and, most noticeably, within the tech giants. 

6. You did many terrifying things in researching this book – what scared you the most?

The book begins with a knife being held to my throat, but that wasn’t the scariest. That began when I met a man called Chris in a London pub. He showed me a video – of a torch shining on a piece of paper with his name written on it, and then a car blowing up. Chris was a dark-net hacker, and had become involved in the struggle for control of an assassination market. Over the next year, I followed his journey into that surreal, hidden world. 

7. Did you end up feeling technology was a force for good or bad?

The question in the back of my mind was always: are we more powerful than before, or more controlled? I realised we are living through an onset of tremendous liberations and potent new forms of control at the same time. Technology is allowing the more perfect expression of those conflicting qualities that humans have always carried inside: the desire to dominate and control, and the potential to be brave and selfless. All these new forms of wild power are allowing liberation and control to happen more than ever. 

This article was first published in Issue 23 of Impact, as part of the In Seven series.