Jan 16, 2019 1:00 AM

For better or worse, power is breaking free of its shackles

In the coming year, we'll be asking 'who's in charge?' a lot more – but the answer will be both 'they are' and 'you are'

Power is the most dangerous, most intoxicating thing that touches each of our lives. It comes in many forms: from blunt force and coercion, to bribes and incentives. It moulds our perceptions and shapes our preferences. What we see, think, hear, buy, know and do are all shaped by it. And in 2019 it will finally break free.

We’ve always tried to cage power. Professional standards, ethical frameworks, regulation, public scrutiny, the law itself: all are meant to keep power under control and limit how it can be used. But power has been changing. The ways that people can reach in and shape our lives – and us theirs – have been shifting in drastic, breathtakingly radical ways.

Power now reaches us through the technology woven throughout our daily lives. Sometimes it is buried in the technical arcana of the platforms and services themselves. Sometimes it is in the hands of the people who most understand how these technologies actually work, and often with the businesses that, thanks to technology, understand us far better than we understand them.

Across almost every single aspect of our lives, power has been changing; draining away from where we think it sits, and shifting away from what we think it is. And as power changes, it has begun to break free of the cages built to contain it. The bars have been creaking, straining for years, but 2019 will be the year when we all finally feel them shatter.

In 2019, the police will try to ride out the worst crisis of law enforcement in their history. Using a growing suite of affordable, accessible and unbelievably easy-to-use crimeware, millions who otherwise wouldn’t break the law will be attracted to cyber-crime as a dark new route to power. As the internet becomes the venue where most crime happens (according to last year’s Crime Survey of England and Wales, online fraud is already the most common crime in the UK), the police will be faced with forms of crime that pass between countries with frictionless ease. Faced with victims, evidence and perpetrators spread all over the world, police investigations have, again and again, foundered as they collide with borders that they cannot reach across. New forms of policing will have to emerge to bolster the rule of law in an age where criminals cannot be brought into British courts.

Capitalism will come under strain as another set of rules breaks down. Driven by the powerful economic logic unleashed by digital technologies, software companies will continue to be swept to the top of every vertical. Healthcare and legal services will go the way of hotels and transport, but the century-old laws that were made to protect the lifeblood of capitalism – open competition – will fail to recognise the new ways that monopolies are sustained through the cycle of dominant platforms and peerless quantities of data. Disruptive challengers will be bought off, and capital and market share will continue to concentrate within a tiny number of enormous incumbents.

The political mainstream will be besieged. The monopolies political parties are long used to holding – the political mobilisation of enormous numbers of people – will continue to come unstuck. Regulators will struggle to monitor and enforce standards in digital campaigning, and the rules of democracy itself will face a quieter, more fundamental challenge.

As electorates feel increasingly disenfranchised from their political systems, both inside and outside Government, new kinds of politicians will say with increasing volume that Parliaments aren’t enough any more. They will point to new, digital ways of making political decisions, unthinkable just a generation ago.

Warfare will increasingly be fought with information, and outside the rules and laws of war. Technologists themselves will churn out creations that urge habits and addictions in us, yet unbounded by any rules or ethical codes or professional standards. Others will make algorithms so complex that even their own bosses won’t be able to offer much oversight.

2019 will be the year when we realise that the old cages for power don’t contain it any more. Again and again, the old rules will break down, be overcome and undermined. The regulations won’t work. The law will fade further into irrelevance. Professional standards will be largely absent and ethical standards will be an optional opt-in for many of those who now hold the power to shape our lives. The organisations that were most responsible for controlling power were exactly those that had been made most powerless by the digital revolution.

The year will see an onset of both tremendous new liberations and potent new forms of control. Right at your fingertips will be dizzying new opportunities to shape the world around you: you could start your own political party online, break an enormous news story, become famous or rich.

But people will be freer to shape your life, too: cyber-criminals may target you with impunity, information warriors of hostile states will seek to shape your attitudes and beliefs, and much of what you do, say, sell and buy online will be subject to the design decisions of technologists an ocean away. Both in your hands and in others’ will be wild, weird forms of power, now unshackled from the cages that used to contain it.

Carl Miller is research director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos and author of The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab