Keynote speech 6. march 2025 @ The Future of Bildung in the Nordics

Like the most of you, I am deeply troubled by the events now shaking and reshaping our society.

Standards of DECENCY are falling apart.

TRUTHFULNESS is falling apart.

The PUBLIC CONVERSATION is falling apart.

Firewalls are falling apart.

I would like to use this opportunity to talk about what I believe is needed to empower people to meet the challenges facing us. 

• How do we secure our inner firewalls? 
• How do we maintain healthy relationships, hard-earn truths and making sure negative feelings don’t affect decision making.
• How do we save and develop ourselves as independent, creative, and free individuals with social respond?

As a composer with a lifetime commitment and belief in the power of the arts, I’m rattled by how fast and efficient Silicon Valley is dismantling the work of artists. Society’s ability to PERCEIVE art is in play.

I was also invited to talk here as an American. It is not easy being an American these days. The last 10 years I’ve thought a lot about my American background. 

I was raised by the Tv-set in our living room. This affected my development as a child – my impuls control, physical development, social skills and language. I feel lucky to have survived growing up as a screen-child.

Many Americans my age and younger are marinated in television and digital media. They are engulfed in the attention-industry. And to make things worse, we are now only a few years away from the birth of AGI – Artificial General Intelligence. For the first time in our history – humans will have a phenomenon that is smarter than us.

I strongly believe we need new ideas to meet the challenges we are now facing; Autocracy, threats to human rights, climate change, loss of nature, Artificial General Intelligence and conformity.

How can get we out of this mess?

Can aesthetic thinking and artistic creativity help us?

Can music, books, films, theatre, dance and paintings save us as individuals?

We need to imagine the future in a way NO-ONE LIVING TODAY yet has imagined.

How do we do that?

By exposing ourselves to art and using our creativity of course. 

But maybe even more so by learning from artists how we create art by using not only creative tools, but a broad palette of human experiences. 

But first we need to analyse what’s truly going on in todays madness.

I believe we are too obedient.

I believe we are not power-critical enough.

To face power, to speak truth to power, we need to know the MECHANICS of power.

I may be wrong and forget something important, but I believe there are 4 main forces of power in play in our society today:

Political power

Financial power

Military power

Attentional power

From history, we know how military, financial and political powers work. But we know far less about the makings of attentional power.  

This phenomenon is often described as attention economy. I believe the outreach and influence of attention-grab is much more than an economic device, it is a FORCE FOR MASSIVE CHANGE. 

Power-players who manage the ins and outs of information, are today the most powerful and richest people on the planet. Grabbing the attention, having the eyeballs of millions/billions of people not only makes people buy a certain product or agree with a certain politician, it affects how people think and perceive reality. 

We often say that military force never can win hearts and minds. Attentional power can.

• The engineering of information and attention grabbing has the power to change political views, rewrite history, redefine government, break the legal system, education and culture.

• The engineering of information and attention has the power to not only shape the way we look upon reality, it has the power to shape how we look upon and define ourselves.

This of course started long before Silicon Valley started using algorithms, and has been the theme of books like 1984, Brave New World and my favorite; WE – a dystopian novel by the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

Back to young Glenn in the sofa in front of the TV.

Hours, days, weeks, months and years of extensive tv-watching shaped the way I looked upon myself when I was young. 

I believe this also is true for a vast majority of the American people. Six decades of wall-to-wall television and now cell phones, social media, etc. has speeded up the pace of events and how we experience reality. We get easier bored, less interested in real-life contact and spend more and more time glued to the screens.

Attention-seduction is penetrating how we define ourselves. 

The Norwegian thinker Thomas Hylland Eriksen once said: 

• Man is by nature neither a naked ape, a territorial being, a solidarity creature, nor a brute mammal. Man is a self-defining being.

Freedom to define ourselves is our inner firewall against oppression, fascism, simplicity and brutality.

We are still in the early days of the Attention-regime. There is still a lot we don’t know. But since we recently had a pandemic that forced us to rely on screens, we know a little about where we are headed. 

The New York Times recently wrote an opinion about this: 

– The pandemic turned us into hyper-individualists. For several months the daily lives of many Americans were reduced to the boundaries of their phones and televisions and computers…

Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something LESS THAN REAL.

Maybe Covid was a major shift in society comparable to The Spanish Flu 1918-1920. But the changes caused by digital platforms and attention engineering started long before and where simply reinforced by Covid.

Attention-engineering by use of algorithms and disinformation has multiple effects on our lives. The 7-8 hours we use daily on screens affects our focus and speed up our social lives. Many have less real-life experiences. And a decline in experiences lead to a weakening of language.

The lack of real-life experience promotes illusions of easiness. We turn blind to the manipulative power of information and fall in to rabbit holes of simplicity.

Simplicity does not explain the human condition.

Because:

• Life is hard.
• Knowing how to react to your own feelings is hard.
• Thinking is hard.
• Common truths are hard to realize.
• Facts are hard.
• Recognizing how power works in society, in relationships and in ourselves is hard.
• Taking care of our intrigity, autonomy and uniqueness is hard.
• True freedom is hard.

The historian Timothy Snyder has held unpredictability as one of our most important freedoms.  I share his concern about how digital platforms make us think in similar manners about the world. Conformity is on the rise.

As it tuns out – UNPREDICTABILITY is also a virtue of good art. 

A friend of mine pointed out that these days no one is more unpredictable than the American president. He is, like Stalin, an artist-autocrat. The craziness of this artist president is forcing the rest of us to behave decent, and therefor depriving us of our freedom to be unpredictable. 

MAKE POLITICS BORING AGAIN!

The fascism of technology is attacking inner firewalls all over the world. It is for this reason URGENT that we enforce and build our inner firewall –  THE FREEDOM TO DEFINE OURSELVES.

I believe from personal experience in artistic creativity. 

Artistic creativity combined with critical thinking, less screen-time, analytic abilities, contextual thinking and emotional intelligence are some of the tools needed to reenforce the inner firewall. 

There is however an important difference between artistic creativity and everyday creativity.

Being creative in an artistic context is about using the whole bandwidth of personal experiences and imagination.

An artistic creative work consists of much more than choosing between – and putting together – bits and pieces from what others have done before. Nothing new under the sun is the refrain of the fatalists. 

In my work as a creative artist I challenge and I’m critical of familiar ideas. The artistic PROCESS draws upon and uses impulses from emotions and the subconscious. 

Intuition, failures, surprises, taking chances, sensing and ambivalence is also characteristics of artistic work.

A good work of art often carries within it a presence that awakens and activates the recipient. A work of art with a strong presence testifies to a subjective, creative sense of life. 

What about artistic creativity as opposed to artificial creativity?

Artificial creativity is about putting together existing material without unpredictable playful imagination, blood, sweat or tears. AI calculates and produces music, images or text that work from already existing models and bodies of work. 

AI produced art steals from real art and confirms consensus and conformity.

Its a CON-JOB.

Artistic creativity, in turn, is about the conflict between technical craftsmanship and individual, hyper-subjective failings. 

It’s within limitations and the process that the UNIQUELY HUMAN is to be found. simply because we do not have the logical capacity of a machine. 

Our limitations are human filters through which unique experiences and emotions can be formed in to a personal expression of art.

I strongly believe in the power of artistic creative work. It saved my life. When I was 9 years old I was given a clarinet and a piece of paper with empty staff lines. I started writing down the music that constantly filled my head, and learned how to channelize inner thoughts and emotions.

Building immunity, resilience and inner firewalls is more than just simply providing children and others with hard facts and knowledge. It’s about giving people the tools to work with, create, be unpredictable, feel and live in balance with the inner workings of individual complex lives. It is about taking seriously in to account that we ARE self-defined beings. The meaning of our lives depend on the space and true freedom needed to define who we are for ourselves.

This is in many ways a truly anarchistic idea.

We have to be aware of, understand and act critical to power to be truly free. Military, political and financial powers. The power in language, technology, attention-grab and descriptions of reality. The power of big lies. People who execute power upon others often have trouble taking responsibility for their own inner lives. How do we meet them?

But as a break-away from my anarchistic heart, I also believe in political action. I believe in taking responsibility, relating to the flood of news and going in to politics. 

Politics IS a beautiful thing – a community of disagreement at its best. Politics is the arena where people with different backgrounds, cultural values, experiences and beliefs meet to find solutions, often compromises, for the best for us all. Politics is also an arena for diversity and competition where new ideas and solutions can pop up.  

We live in truly dark times, but there are ways out in to the light. The challenge is enormous and the chances are that we will not be able to avoid a repetition from the last century. It might seem hopeless, but we can not give up. 

I believe in equipping people with artistic creativity, critical thinking, less screen-time, analytic abilities, contextual thinking and dealing with their own feelings.

In addition to strengthening our inner firewall we also must act, open ourselves to difficulties and differences of the world and seek new ideas in both our own imagination and environments where differences compete with one and other in a sivil conversation.

Thank you for the PRIVILEGE of your attention!