Democracy requires a shared foundation of facts. But what happens when public discourse moves to digital platforms where the attention economy prioritizes conflict over truth, and where the entire infrastructure is controlled by a handful of foreign tech giants?
In this episode, Torbjörn talks with Carl Hearth (a senior researcher at RISE and affiliated with the University of Gothenburg) about how digitalization, closed ecosystems, and the AI race are fundamentally reshaping the rules of democracy.
The conversation delves deeply into the shift in power behind our screens:
- The Price of the Attention Algorithm: How platforms like X, TikTok, and Instagram turn users into passive observers and create a prisoner’s dilemma for politicians and journalists—where the most extreme content prevails.
- Private Streets in the Public Discourse: Why we would never accept a foreign private company owning and setting the rules for our physical roads or public squares, and what the Greenland case teaches us about digital vulnerability.
- The Path to Digital Sovereignty: How open, federated protocols (such as ActivityPub) and legal requirements for interoperability can break up monopolies and give power back to citizens.
- AI as a monopoly on core values: What does it mean for Swedish classrooms and young people when AI systems are shaped by the ethics and training data of American language models—and why might the future lie in local AI swarms and Edge AI rather than centralized giants?
A thought-provoking and forward-looking discussion on how Europe and Sweden must transition from being passive consumers of technology to actively building and protecting their own digital infrastructure.