{"id":243164,"date":"2026-08-25T09:02:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:02:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/petter-tornberg-algorithmic-tyranny-digital-modernity"},"modified":"2026-08-25T09:02:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T14:02:25","slug":"petter-tornberg-algorithmic-tyranny-digital-modernity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/petter-tornberg-algorithmic-tyranny-digital-modernity","title":{"rendered":"Petter T\u00f6rnberg: Algorithmic Tyranny &amp; Digital Modernity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/petter-tornberg-algorithmic-tyranny-digital-modernity.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><audio controls style=\"width:625px;\"><source src=\"https:\/\/feeds.soundcloud.com\/stream\/2178653688-singularity1on1-petter-toernberg.mp3?_=1\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n<p>What do Facebook, Google, and TikTok see when they look at you? And more importantly, what do they miss?<\/p>\n<p>I recorded this conversation with Petter T\u00f6rnberg almost a year ago. It has aged into something closer to a warning.<\/p>\n<p>T\u00f6rnberg is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam and co-author of Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity. His claim is straightforward and uncomfortable: platforms have become the new eyes of power. Industrial modernity ruled from the top down and you could see it. Digital modernity rules through #algorithms you cannot see at all, and it is no less total for being invisible.<\/p>\n<p>Algorithms do not reflect society. They rebuild it. Politics, culture, and your own sense of who you are.<\/p>\n<p>We got into:<\/p>\n<p>Why algorithmic tyranny does not need a tyrant. Why self-organization so often smuggles in a new hierarchy rather than dissolving the old one. Decentralization as camouflage. Whether #AI becomes the ultimate platform of platforms, the layer that sits above and swallows all the others. What is actually left for citizens, activists, and policymakers who want to push back.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/petter-tornberg-algorithmic-tyranny-digital-modernity\">Continue reading \u201cPetter T\u00f6rnberg: Algorithmic Tyranny &amp; Digital Modernity\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What do Facebook, Google, and TikTok see when they look at you? And more importantly, what do they miss? I recorded this conversation with Petter T\u00f6rnberg almost a year ago. It has aged into something closer to a warning. T\u00f6rnberg is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam and co-author of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-science","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}