When every decision is rational, yet the outcome is still wrong

We used to worry about young women comparing themselves with retouched images. Now anyone can use generative AI to undress, sexualise and pornographise a real woman without her ever having taken off her clothes.

We talked about social media as a democratic revolution. Now the same platforms are being used to spread propaganda, deepen divisions and attempt to influence elections.

None of this was technology’s original promise, but all of it was embedded in its possibilities. This is not an argument against digitalisation. Technology has brought people together, spread knowledge and created new forms of creativity, entrepreneurship and participation. Gaming environments can give children a sense of community. Social media can give people a voice. Generative AI can make knowledge and creativity accessible to more people. But that is precisely why we need to be able to hold two thoughts in our heads at once: technology can be both liberating and dangerous. Something can be legal, in demand and technically brilliant, and still have consequences that we should not accept.

When responsibility does not follow control

For a long time, we have treated social media, digital games and generative AI as products in a market. But they have become something bigger: environments where children play, relationships are formed, identities take shape, news is distributed and democratic debate unfolds. They have become part of our societal infrastructure.

At the same time, much of the responsibility has been placed on those with the least power to influence these systems: the child is expected to block the groomer, the parent to control screen time, the woman to report the fake image, the citizen to see through the propaganda.

An individual user, however, cannot audit a recommendation algorithm, identify systematic patterns of contact or assess how a platform has tested its safety features. Responsibility needs to follow the power to act. Those who can design the environment, analyse the patterns and reduce the risks must also bear greater responsibility for doing so.

The issue has now gained further political urgency. In an opinion piece in Dagens industri, the Liberals argue that the tech giants’ lack of accountability is a global problem. When companies prioritise profit over responsibility for what is distributed on their platforms, the state must step in and establish clearer rules. It is an important statement, but it also raises the next question: what does it take for political will, new regulation and government mandates to actually change digital environments?

From political direction to capacity for governance

Something is beginning to change. EU regulation is starting to reach into the architecture of the platforms themselves: their algorithms, default settings, reward systems, advertising and companies’ own risk assessments. In Sweden, digital violence is increasingly being treated as real violence, and children’s safety online as a responsibility extending beyond the family. These are important shifts, but a strategy is not the same thing as effective protection, a government mandate is not the same thing as changed platform functionality, and a meeting with technology companies is not the same thing as binding accountability.

The problem, then, is not simply that regulation has been lacking. Our capacity to identify consequences, gather signals and recalibrate has also been weaker than technology’s capacity to transform society. There is a difference between having rules and having the capacity to govern. That capacity means identifying early when a seemingly neutral feature begins to produce harmful effects. It means ensuring that the experiences of children, women, schools, police, researchers and civil society reach all the way to those who have the power to change the systems. It means knowing when an intervention needs to be strengthened, redesigned or discontinued.

Clearer rules of the game do not have to stand in opposition to innovation. They can give responsible companies better conditions for developing services that people are willing to use and trust. What we need, then, is not less technological development, but a stronger societal capacity to govern its consequences.

Recalibrating does not mean retreating from digitalisation. It means making it stronger: by building environments where children can explore safely, women can participate without having their bodies turned into weapons, and technology strengthens democratic discourse.

I develop this argument further in the essay “When Every Decision Is Rational, Yet the Outcome Is Still Wrong: On the Rules of Digitalisation and Society’s Capacity to Recalibrate.”

Link below!