Power Switch — conference report
I’m at the Power Switch conference in Cambridge, exploring how power is changing in a networked world. I’ll be updating this post through the day with notes from the sessions. John Naughton and David Runciman introduced the day , from the Technology and Democracy project at Cambridge. David: Power is a slippery concept. It’s tempting to think we know what it is and that we recognise it when we see it, but this can lead to difficulties. Cass Sunstein’s latest book includes: “people’s growing power to filter what they say, and others power to choose what we see” — but those are two very different kinds of power. Political scientists might wish for a taxonomy of power, but that’s confusing too. So today we want to interrogate what it is, so we’ll know it when we see it, without getting bogged down in definitions. There’s nothing new about most of the kinds of power we’ll hear about today (except, perhaps, the session on algorithmic power). The same sessions could ha