News and activities
15 March 2019
The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab
Presented By Online Civic Culture Centre. with Dr Carl Miller (Demos, and O3C advisory board member)
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Carl’s new book , The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab (Penguin), describes his groundbreaking 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 become 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. describes Carl’s groundbreaking journey to track down and expose one of the most important things that shapes, guides and limits each of our lives: power.
Biography
Carl Miller 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.
Carl writes widely about the pitfalls and promises of the digital age. His interests cover digital politics, cyber-crime, the changing nature of warfare, journalism, the rise of the hackers, the threat of hate speech, the grip of automation and how power is being reshaped. He has written for Wired, The New Scientist, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and for a number of websites and academic journals.
He appears regularly on national and international media, including BBC News at One, News at Six, BBC Daily Politics, BBC Click, Radio 4 Today Programme, Victoria Derbyshire, BBC World, GMT, Trending, BBC Radio Scotland, Good Morning Scotland, BBC Talkback, World Tonight, 5Live, LBC, ABC, CNN, Sky News, Sky Digital View, and has been Sky’s social media pundit during coverage of a number of by-elections and political debates. Carl’s website is and he tweets @carljackmiller.
