The conference “Democracy and Culture in the Digital Age” (May 27–29, 2021, Aarhus University) explores the relation between digitalization and democracy.

Today, our society faces an almost insurmountable number of challenges: the climate crisis, Covid-19, a looming recession, threats against democracy and still greater rifts in social cohesion. A common element in all these challenges is digitalization.

Today, the internet is both more ubiquitous and ambiguous than ever before. Social media have radically expanded public debate, but also fractured it into bubbles of selective exposure and exposed it to dangerous misinformation. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated our reliance on digital platforms, but also shown how dangerous that reliance can be when users do not own the data they share. Likewise, the green transition will only be possible through an extensive use of the internet’s infrastructure, but software companies are also among the world’s biggest CO2-emitters.

At the conference, you can meet Danish Minister of Finance Nicolai Wammen, former minister Tommy Ahlers, Microsoft top executive Marianne Dahl, political scientist Francis Fukuyama, award-winning journalist Anne Applebaum, Saxo Bank CEO Lars Seier Christensen, TikTok top executive Alexandra Evans, tech ambassador Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen, director of the Danish Center for Cyber Security Thomas Lund-Sørensen — and many more.

Friday night, we invite you to a network event for IT professionals, including dinner and debate on democracy and digitalization with Fukuyama, Applebaum, Ahlers, Dahl and Engtoft Larsen.

The MatchPoints conference series

Since 2007, MatchPoints has been the annual flagship conference of Aarhus University, bringing together researchers, journalists, politicians, business leaders and engaged citizens to discuss the most pressing issues of the day.