Location: Peers’ Dining Room, House of Lords
‘The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab’ won the 2019 Transmission Prize. It describes Carl’s ground-breaking journey to track down and expose one of the most important things that shapes, guides and limits each of our lives: power.
The journey brought him face-to-face with face with a fake news merchant in Kosovo, cyber-pranksters in Berlin, hikikormori – ‘the departed’ – in South Korea, who only live online.
Amongst the rolling hills of Berkshire, he met British Army information warriors and in Las Vegas the largest gathering of hackers in the world.
He has gone on a cyber-crime raid with the police, peered into the mechanics of secret algorithms, built a bot to keep the peace on Twitter, lived in a political-technology commune (twice) and bcome involved in a struggle for control of an online assassination market.
He traces how a new, digital form of power has chipped away at the old, familiar places where power used to sit; scaring CEOs, forcing politicians to resign, swallowing up newspapers, eclipsing experts, and pulling down companies.
For centuries, writers and thinkers have used power as a prism through which to view and understand the world at moments of seismic change.
As power escapes from its old bonds, he shows us where it has gone, the shape it now takes and how it touches each of our lives.
…and the rise of power in the digital age.
About our speaker:
Carl Miller – Research Director, CASM at Demos
Carl is the Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) at Demos.
Carl Miller is an award-winning author and researcher who has thrown himself into some of the most scary, hidden, weird and important parts of the digital age to understand how all of our lives are changing. His work combines data and analysis with immersive, first-hand reporting.
He is particularly interested in how social media is changing society, and how researching it can inform important decisions. This includes:
- Digital politics and digital democracy
- Cybercrime, and the hacking community
- Cyber-bullying, hate crime, misogyny and abuse online
- Information warfare and online disinformation
- ‘Fake news’, digital and citizen journalism
- Automated decision-making, Internet governance and digital addiction
- Building new methods and technology to study social media data
He is the co-founder and Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos the first UK think tank institute dedicated to studying the digital world and is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London.
His debut book, ‘The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab’, an examination of the new centres of power and control in the twenty-first century was published in 2018 by Penguin RandomHouse, and won the 2019 Transmission Prize.
He has written for Wired, New Scientist, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian, appears frequently in the press, and speaks about his work around the world. He researches and writes widely on these issues, including for Wired, New Scientist, the Sunday Times, the Telegraph and the Guardian. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London.
Carl’s website is www.carlmiller.co and he Tweets at @carljackmiller.
Today’s event is kindly hosted by The Lord Lucas. It is a very special event since we will be raising a glass and celebrating the life of Charles T Ross (RIP 3rd November 2018) before we hear from our speaker.