Critical Updates From Cultures Engine Rooms

In the autumn of 2006 I created an account on the newly launched Facebook, hoping for a social lifeline while staying at home with our newborn. The platform, though praised by the media, was ugly, illogical, and basically empty. So I logged out and didn’t return for six months. I immediately regretted it: messages from strangers, anonymous bullying, and legacy media frantically posting links to articles was all there was. So, bye-bye.

Facebook’s hunger for money became crystal clear when I tried to delete my account. It was nearly impossible, since their goal was (and still is) to maximise stickiness. Escaping required half a dozen angry emails to their support department – whose response times are part of the business model, as someone always gives up. Facebook turned volume-based network effects into standard practice and created the broken tech-feudalism we now live in.

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By law-mandated nervousness, Swedish tech bros adapted US-style neoliberalism and swallowed the key. That’s where they still live – frantically pointing to markets they claim are in dire need of solutions they’ve read about on TechCrunch. Backed by friends and family, they move into evangelist mode and print shares like toilet paper. Privacy violations and legal breaches are buried in unreadable user agreements, and the data used to justify insane profit forecasts is carefully selected. The dream of cranking the money pump never dies for true go-getters.

Swedish policymakers have never understood that it is people – not companies – who create and fill culture with value. What they do know, however, is that popculture matters, since it moves consumer-citizens along the lines capital has drawn. As the lowest common denominator produces the highest margins, media compliance is crucial for herding the People away from potentially system-threatening demands for variation and alternatives.

This is the very foundation of the toothless (in fact non-existent) Swedish critique of platforms like Spotify or retail giants like H&M and IKEA: they simply will not give them the hard time they deserve, since … well, they depend on them too much. In small countries there is no room for truly critical voices that might challenge the national self-image.

The motives differ, but the so-called Tidö parties (liberal conservatives and nationalists) share the vision of minimal diversity. It has become the glue binding their think tanks together, as they claim cultural creation is a special interest but know very well that strong art threatens the systems that give them power and money.

That’s why the Sweden Democrats signal so clearly against the interests of culture – piously noting in parliament that if “state cultural policy becomes too narrow and focuses solely on individual creators, there is a risk that the entrepreneurial perspective disappears.”

Is that so? They haven’t the faintest idea what it takes to survive as a creator – and why would they? Their idea of creative arts is folklore and midsummer.

They have assessed – correctly – that the “individual creators” the cultural policy system would support are mainly leftist and deeply critical of their ethno-nationalist ideals. Hence the double thumbs-up for politics that favours capital over culture.

In short, Swedish liberal-conservatives and ethno-nationalists finally understood their joint project: monoculture.

Today, great art in Sweden is born only out of resistance, since stimulation costs too much. But even counter-culture is instantly picked up and neutralised by tech platforms on Big Data and AI steroids, meaning resistance itself now serves the market – consciously or not. Artists work within existing systems, and that’s fine, I guess, provided they understand that pre-emptive obedience is what keeps culture in chains. In Sweden, artistic merit does not lead to economic freedom.

The well-oiled interplay between business, politics, and media has increased the number of Swedish billionaires by almost 1,000% since the turn of the millennium. We continue living in the “Satsa på dig själv” (“Bet on yourself”) society brought forth by neoliberal policymakers in the eighties and accelerated in the nineties – a society that has suffocated all conversations about class.

But I no longer accept the passive-aggressive accusation that long-term thinking, solidarity, and collective responsibility is communism. It isn’t even necessarily socialism, just humanistic – and it should be the default position of any responsible adult.

I have waited – far too long – for relevant criticism of the ever-tightening neoliberal chokehold on Swedish culture. I’ve clenched my fist in my pocket and whispered “we’ll see” to myself as politicians and companies actively undermined art and were applauded by gullible media.

But I’ve realised we will not see.

All real criticism of cultural policy is weeded out, because the “Image of Sweden” requires it. When the Sweden Democrat Linus “journalists are the nation’s enemies” Bylund was elected to the board of the foundation that steers public service, I understood that not even public service will make room for the systemic critique we deserve. That risky art demands.

So, today I’m stepping down from the bleachers to point at the weakest links in Sweden’s security shell – hoping to expose the dependence of corrupt systems on mediocre culture to keep the masses entertained.

Like the MAGA movement, Sweden’s business think tanks demand strict narrative discipline. Voters must feel that they benefit only from individualisation, privatisation, and market adaptation – and that it is proven that nothing else could ever work.

We need to trump that story – which, honestly, is paper-thin. It should be easy.