Quick Take
- Narration: Andrew Fallaize brings sharp, articulate delivery to a book that demands intellectual precision, his British pacing suits the analytical sections without making the American political examples feel remote.
- Themes: Participatory power, digital movements, old vs. new power models in politics and business
- Mood: Energizing and intellectually provocative, with moments of unease as the model’s darker applications emerge
- Verdict: An illuminating framework for understanding how viral movements, platform companies, and authoritarian actors all operate by the same participatory logic, though some examples have aged unevenly since the 2018 publication.
I picked up New Power on the recommendation of a colleague who runs a non-profit communications team and had been using the old-power versus new-power framework in strategy sessions for two years. She warned me it would change how I read every political headline for the rest of the month. She was right. The book arrived at an interesting cultural moment in 2018, when the participatory energy of movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter was cresting, when the Obama organizing model had already transformed political campaigning, and when it was becoming clear that the same networked dynamics enabling social justice movements were also enabling ISIS recruitment and the Trump populist surge. Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms found a framework that held all of that together without pretending any of it was simple.
The core distinction is deceptively clean. Old power is held and spent, hoarded by institutions and individuals with the resources to accumulate it. New power is made and distributed, it flows through networks, it amplifies when it moves rather than depleting, and it is most forceful when it surges, the book’s memorable metaphor of water or electricity versus currency. The elegance of that framing is real, and it explains something genuine about why some movements, companies, and political actors are able to punch far above the weight their traditional resources would suggest.
Where the Framework Earns Its Keep
The chapters on platform companies are among the strongest in the book. Heimans and Timms are unflinching about the way companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Facebook have built their competitive advantages on the new power logic of distributed participation while retaining old-power control over the underlying architecture. This is not a minor irony; it is a structural tension that explains why platform companies are both genuinely participatory and genuinely extractive, and why they are so difficult to regulate. The analysis of how these companies handle the gap between their participatory rhetoric and their actual governance structures is shrewd and specific.
The political chapters are where the book becomes simultaneously most compelling and most complicated. The authors trace the new-power dynamics of the Obama organizing model, the unexpected emergence of Trump’s base as a participatory movement rather than a top-down coalition, and the operational effectiveness of ISIS as a distributed movement with a coherent participation system. Putting these three in the same analytical frame is provocative, and Heimans and Timms defend the comparison without endorsing the equivalence. The point is not moral but structural: the same participatory logic that enabled Hope and Change also enabled darker surges, and understanding that structure matters more than cheering for one application of it.
What Andrew Fallaize Adds to the Experience
At just under ten hours, New Power is a substantial listen, and Fallaize sustains the energy throughout. The book is co-written by an Australian and a Brit, which may explain why Fallaize’s narration, delivered with British clarity, fits the analytical sections so naturally. He is equally comfortable with the fast-moving case studies and the more abstract theoretical passages, which is not always the case with nonfiction narrators who excel in one register and struggle in the other. The political examples, many of which are American, occasionally carry a slight distance in his delivery, but not so much that it becomes distracting.
One caveat that any honest review of this book must address: it was published in 2018, and some of its examples have been overtaken by events in ways the authors could not have anticipated. Uber’s labor battles, the subsequent reckonings with platform power and content moderation, and the evolution of the movements it discusses have added complexity to a framework the book presents with some confidence. This is not a reason to avoid the book; the structural insights hold. But listeners should approach the specific case studies as illustrations of a framework rather than final judgments.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
New Power is the book for anyone who wants a framework for thinking about how movements, companies, and political actors succeed in a networked age. It suits listeners who are intellectually curious about power dynamics and comfortable with a book that declines to offer simple moral verdicts. It will be most useful to people in communications, advocacy, organizational leadership, or politics who want language for the shifts they are already observing. Skip it if you want a purely tactical playbook, or if the 2018 vintage concerns you, as more recent analysis has updated some of its case studies significantly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is New Power politically biased, given that it discusses both Obama and Trump as examples of the same new-power dynamic?
Heimans and Timms are analytically rather than politically framed. They are explicit that the same participatory mechanisms that powered progressive movements also powered nationalist ones, and they resist treating one application as inherently more legitimate than another at the structural level. Readers across the political spectrum have found the framework useful, though those who want moral verdicts alongside the analysis may find the neutrality frustrating.
How has the book held up since its 2018 publication, given how much has changed in platform politics and social movements?
The structural framework, the distinction between old and new power and the participation ladder model, has held up well because it describes mechanisms rather than predicting outcomes. The specific company and movement examples have been complicated by subsequent events, but the analytical lens remains useful for understanding those subsequent events.
Does New Power apply to organizations outside politics, like businesses or non-profits?
Yes, extensively. Several chapters focus directly on how businesses can build new-power models, and the participation ladder framework has been widely adopted in organizational strategy and communications practice. The non-profit and advocacy application is addressed directly.
Is this book best for people already familiar with concepts like network effects and platform economics, or is it accessible to general audiences?
Accessible to general audiences. The book was written deliberately for practitioners and thoughtful general readers, not academics. The reviewers who describe it as easy to read and racy reflect its journalistic rather than scholarly register. No prior knowledge of economics, political science, or technology is required.
