David Beer on the new class who have hacked the media
The Death of the Gods by Carl Miller, Heinemann, 400pp, £20
It’s tempting to think of power as something that doesn’t really change, that the world might alter but dominance, exploitation and control remain the same. Yet, as with the unsettling economic torrents of the past decade, recent social, technological and political upheavals are denting many of our established ideas about how the world works. With a transforming and complex backdrop of tech giants, cybercrime, algorithms, social media, cryptocurrencies and the like,
the mutation of power seems likely to be difficult to grasp.
It is into such deep water that Carl Miller’s highly readable book dives. Subtitled “The New Global Power Grab”, it does not seek to theorise about power on a grand scale, nor is it a synthetic view from above. Instead, it provides a set of stories about how power operates within technologically driven human relations.
In one striking section we discover how easy it is to use off-the-peg ransomware – which requires very little technical knowledge – in order to launch an attack. As Miller neatly puts it, “this is off-the-shelf, point-and-click, drop-down-menu, on-demand cybercrime”. There is even a help button, should you need some further guidance with your attack. The accessibility is unnerving.
Elsewhere Miller observes that for hackers “reality has become a sort of playground”. If someone can understand and manipulate technology, they can also manipulate or, in their own troubling terminology, “own” the world.
On the other hand, when dealing with the familiar tech giants, Miller is still able to offer striking and unusual glimpses. An encounter with a coder and their algorithm, a description of the Facebook campus, a discussion of an open-source competitor and an elaboration of targeting techniques all add fresh perspective, despite the depth of coverage that these have already received.
Miller points out that “just because a system is decentralised doesn’t mean that power is decentralised”. The governance structures of blockchain may have no centre, but this doesn’t mean that power follows suit. Miller argues that it is only those with “technical nous” (quite a small pool of people), who are in a position to take advantage. He concludes that in the battle of “centralisation versus decentralisation” it is the “architecture” of the technology that is crucial.
In the media sector, similar tensions are uncovered. Miller again brings a sense of purpose to familiar discussions of citizen journalism, in this case by exploring the new gatekeepers in these proliferating outlets. He explores how, in a context where anyone can create content, some have the power to manipulate our feeds and get their voices heard. This leads into a discussion of targeted advertising and the damage to the media industry caused by such shifts. The bigger story about media changes is further fleshed out through interviews with a self-described “embittered hack” (who doesn’t actually seem all that bitter) and a “fake news” merchant.
Miller isn’t suggesting that pre-digital media were impeccable, but rather that the way that power works within and through media is changing. Public debate, as we have seen, is changing with it.
Power is increasingly diffuse. It is dispersed via various technologies and owned by those with the right know-how. Questions of ideology and hegemony slip into the cracks of social life in this vision, with these older incarnations of power seeming to drain from sight in Miller’s account. What is left are the tech-savvy actors and their new-found prominence. This tells us something about the new possibilities but a bit less about how these new power formations interface with old and more established ones.
On occasion, it is not clear that what we are looking at is power as such, but forms of influence, manipulation, scamming and coercion that are playing out in the wreckage of social and other media. The absence of a sense of what power is (and what it is not) leaves Miller’s stories orbiting quite widely.
Yet the author’s aim is not a new theory of power. The value of his book is in how its insights might trouble such theories and extend our understanding of the emerging intricacies. The question this poses is how theories of power might cope with the verve and dynamism of the shifting power base that Miller’s book deftly illuminates.
David Beer is professor of sociology at the University of York. His new book, The Data Gaze: Capitalism, Power and Perception, will be published later in the autumn
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