There is nothing out of the ordinary about a book that makes one angry. We have all read ones that provoke us, and the internet is an inexhaustible feast for anyone easily outraged. It is unusual, however, to read a book that makes one mad with oneself.
The co-authors of New Power could not be more likable. Clever, witty and creative, Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans are baby-faced wunderkinds of digital activism; the type whose optimistic energy ought to make one feel hopeful for the future. So it is uncomfortable to confess that I hated almost every word, and wished more than anything for them to be wrong. The reason their book made me so cross with myself was that, if they are right, it means my way of thinking is old-fashioned and elitist – the very problem, in fact, they are trying to solve.
New Power begins by contrasting a 20th-century model of power – “jealously guarded, closed, inaccessible and leader-driven”, typified by Harvey Weinstein – with a new 21st-century model – “open, participatory peer-driven”, exemplified by the #MeToo movement. No political or commercial organisation will survive, it argues, unless it abandons “old power values” of expertise, confidentiality, formal governance and managerialism, and adopts “new power values” of online crowd-sourcing, radical transparency, leaderless structures and amateurish enthusiasm. The future belongs to Airbnb and Black Lives Matter, in other words, and the book is a manual for us to learn how to be more like them.
Heimans is Australian, but has just flown in from the US hours before we meet; Timms is British, but based in New York, so takes part by phone. Heimans is 40, but looks as if he is in his early 20s, and we spend the first five minutes discussing his skin-care regime. He indulges my curiosity about moisturiser choices with self-deprecating humour, but small talk doesn’t feel like his natural register, and the purpose of the book is deadly serious. “The future,” it predicts, “will be won by those who can spread their ideas better, faster and more durably.” In 2018, as Heimans says, “It’s really hard not to make the argument that the forces of misinformation and extremism and nativism are in the lead.”
He invites us to contrast the success of the new power recruitment strategy of Isis with the failure of the US state department’s old power effort to thwart it; Isis recruits through a peer-to-peer network of youngsters sharing seductive intimacies on social media, which the state department sought to defeat with a calamitously ill-judged Twitter account bearing an image of its official seal and the instruction: “Think Again, Turn Away!”
“This is really the reason why we wrote the book, and why we made the book quite practical,” Heimans says. “Because we want these tools to be in the hands of those on the side of the angels.” Timms agrees: “We’re going to need a lot of people – the scientists, the community organisers, the people who believe in enlightenment values – to embrace the new power tools and get really good at being powerful.” Their problem, of course, is that this target audience can be as sniffy about it as me.
“Yes, there’s this emotional resistance,” Heimans reflects equably, trying, I think, to conceal his impatience with it. “There’s a complacency on the liberal side: ‘Why should we have to do this? Why should we get our hands dirty? Who needs a meme when you have a fact?’” That pretty much sums me up, I cheerfully admit. If others want to spend their time sharing amusing video clips on Twitter, they are welcome to, but why do I have to get involved? The question is semi-ironic; his reply is arrestingly earnest.
“The moral argument is, Decca, you care about these values that the newspaper you work for stands for, and we all have an obligation to learn these skills of building movements, spreading ideas, figuring out how to manage these communities.”
The case he and Timms make for the superiority of social media-driven, open, mass participatory movements, loosely structured but cleverly engineered for loyalty, is unarguable. By deploying new power tactics, organisations as diverse as Ted talks, Pope Francis’s Vatican and the National Rifle Association are thriving, whereas Uber – which treats its drivers with contempt – is in trouble. This doesn’t, however, alter my problem with the fact that the stunts that capture attention in the new power model are often toe-curlingly inane.
Gormless frat-boy humour doesn’t, curiously, appear to trouble Heimans. He is a huge admirer of the Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised more than $115m (£82m) for charity in 2015. Then there is Reddit, whose highest-scoring post ever at one point was a message titled: “test post please ignore”, provoking what Heimans calls the “rebellious” instincts of the Reddit community, and others might call asinine. In 2016, the Natural Environment Research Council experimented with new power by launching a #NameOurShip social media campaign. When some bright spark proposed Boaty McBoatface, “the internet,” note Heimans and Timms, apparently amused, “of course agreed.” I am relieved when Heimans tells me he would not have voted for Boaty himself – but less so when he adds that he would have gone for the popular alternative option, “I Like Big Boats and I Cannot Lie”. Public subversion sabotaged the campaign because the NERC, the argument goes, was a new power amateur. Nevertheless, its decision to overrule the Boaty vote and call the ship the RSS David Attenborough instead was, Heimans maintains, a mistake.
“You’ve got this really dull research vessel that no one would have paid any attention to, at a time when we’re trying to get people enthusiastic about science, at a time when the anti-science crowd is gaining potency. You could have had a crowd of people follow Boaty McBoatface on its journey. You could have had people help fund it. You could have had people engaged as citizen scientists. You could have created a whole community around that work that would have put people into the funnel of creating some intensity around science. Why wouldn’t you do that?”
“Because it’s moronic!” I want to say – but am embarrassed by how stiff and snooty I sound. Heimans and Timms make me feel as if I have turned into Jacob Rees-Mogg. There is nothing snobbish about the next misgiving I raise. At the heart of every successful new power platform are what Heimans and Timms call “feedback loops” – reward systems of likes, shares and comments engineered to keep us coming back, craving the next dopamine hit of external validation. That this buzz is addictive is obvious; the authors’ assertion that likes on Instagram “aren’t (just) ego boosts”, however, sounds laughably delusional. What other possible function can “Looking gorge, babe!!” serve? Has Timms, I joke, not seen Instagram?
“We are not here to defend the culture of narcissistic selfies,” he says. “No. We want a healthcare system that works. We want a government that people actually like. We want an education system that gives people a sense of connection. The problem is most of those institutions were created in an old power context. They were built for the 20th century, and sometimes the 19th century, and so we have to start reimagining those institutions so that they don’t fail. You think about a millennial person whose life is full of these feedback loops – a lot of their life is mediated through these new power platforms, right. That’s what they want from their institutions now.”
But the authors never mention the growing evidence of the psychological damage feedback loops are doing to young people’s mental health. If millennials are addicted to loops, of course they will want more – but if the relentless judging and ranking is making them ill, the state doesn’t have to oblige, does it?
“I think mental health is a real concern,” Timms acknowledges. “But I think the really huge risk is the damage of distraction. We are all so engaged in our participation – but it distracts us from the things that matter. If feedback loops are only built around cat videos, that’s clearly a distraction. That’s clearly going to distract us from the things that matter the most.”
Taxes, for example, matter. “They’re critical to any society. But as feedback loops go, the system does not perform particularly well. You essentially just give the government money, and have no real sense of where it ends up. Imagine a world where actually you’re getting much better feedback loops around your taxes, so you pay the taxes and you end up in a world where you find out where the money goes. Maybe you have some more power over how it’s spent. Maybe you hear about the impact along the way.”
The possibility that anyone might not want this appears not to have crossed Timms’ mind. Personally, I don’t want a feedback loop with HMRC. But as I don’t want to share a meme, upload a video or name a boat either, to infer a contemporary trend from my preferences might be absurd. What is less clear, but more important, is whether Timms and Heimans’ temperamental bias similarly distorts their work on new power. Their authorial voice is reporterly, but the affectation of clear-eyed critical distance is misleading, for both are key protagonists in the new power movements they write about. It is hard, therefore, to know whether the power of the new power they report is objectively real, or just wishful thinking.
The son of immigrants, by the age of 12 Heimans was already a precocious political pundit on national Australian TV. At 27, he founded a grassroots movement called GetUp!, which, according to their book, now has more members than every political party in Australia combined. He is also the founder and CEO of Purpose.org, an international activist organisation incubating political campaigns worldwide. Timms is the director of 92Y, a cultural centre in New York, and in 2012 founded a philanthropic movement called #GivingTuesday that brings new power tactics to the old challenge of fundraising. They are evangelical pioneers in the world they describe in their book, and I wonder whether this makes them more cheerleaders than observers.
“We’re optimists,” Heimans concedes. “We do believe that there are inherent benefits to participation, if done well and smartly.” He would still have written exactly the same book, however, if he shared all my misgivings. “We’re very invested in getting this right, because we have to be, because the old world isn’t coming back. Like it or not, it’s just not coming back.”
Both men see plenty of problems with the new world. Facebook comes out of their book very badly, accused of co-opting the rhetoric of new power while behaving more like the Kremlin. Writing long before the Cambridge Analytica revelations, they predict that “Participation farms”, which harvest our data for profit, will have to be tackled. Politicians such as Donald Trump, who deploy the power of social media for authoritarian ambitions, pose a grave danger, they warn, and leaderless new power movements such as Occupy can unravel into chaos. The Parkland students in Florida campaigning for gun control “get it,” Heimans says. “They know how to harness the energy of a connected crowd.” To succeed, however, they will need to partner with old power. Hashtags and marches won’t do it alone. “Our argument,” explains Heimans, “is not: ‘Throw away these old power skills that you’ve learned, the expertise, the understanding of how to navigate traditional organisational structures.’ We all still need those skills. The key is learning how and when to use old and new.”
I think Timms might be trying to cheer me up when he agrees. “Elitists will still have a role. They will still be needed.” After all, he jokes, he had his appendix out a month ago. “And no one wants a group of hipster makers to crowdsource an appendectomy, right? No one wants that.”
New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms is published by Macmillan, price £20. To order a copy for £17, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on orders of more than £10, online only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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