Shooting Palme
malmö 25/09/11
“The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.”
Marshall MacLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)
In 1980, Christer Andersson raised his pistol to the television and pulled the trigger in fury. He’d had enough of seeing Palme on the screen. The set imploded; the bullet lodged in the wall. Six years later, Olof Palme himself was shot in the back on Sveavägen. The assassination of Sweden’s Social Democratic prime minister left the nation in shock and mourning, but the image on the screen endured. Through recordings, speeches, and interviews, Palme’s voice never fully disappeared. Today, thanks to voice cloning and language models steeped in his ideology and rhetorical style, the AI Party has brought him back—revived as party leader, with the ambition to contest the 2026 election.
Is this a provocation—another shot at the television? Or the beginning of a long overdue tinkering with political representation in a time of democratic crisis?
In The Handover, David Runciman describes society as a machine. Palme’s machine was finely tuned to free the individual from the weight of class and gender, at least within the protective arms of the welfare state.
His socialism was less about state intervention in the market—though the idea of wage-earner funds was indeed a plan to redistribute corporate profits—and more about radical social reforms. Universal parental leave, student grants, job security laws. Reforms that brought men and women closer to economic equality, gave the elderly security, and built a preschool system that still stands strong. On the global stage, Palme was a vocal advocate for peace; his government even created the post of disarmament minister, “nedrustningsminister” in Swedish, filled by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Alva Myrdal. “Nedrustningsminister” — a word that today barely survives the indifference of a spellcheck.
The machine worked well, but like all great machines it depended on fuel: a sense of purpose, a belief in its necessity. Without that, it began to rust. Its long arms slackened, losing their grip, as the people struggled to hold on.
The fuel was faith in the future, stoked by eloquence, political maneuvering, and the promise of ever-rising graphs. Tax increases were framed not as burdens, but as investments in the “wonderful days that lay before us.”
For much of the 20th century, politics was about broadcasting. The technologies of the age allowed a few leaders to speak, while millions listened. In Sweden, Palme’s political ascent coincided with the arrival of television in nearly every home. The year he was first elected prime minister, Swedish public broadcasting expanded from one channel to two.
Technology turns us into participants whether we like it or not. The television was not just a window into Palme’s social-democratic vision; it was an extension of his political body. As was the telephone. Palme was known for being listed in the telephone directory and spent evenings answering calls from people who wanted to talk to the prime minister.
Andersson’s shot into the television was an act of iconoclasm, like slashing a painting or toppling a statue. Also, it could be seen as a shot into Palme’s societal machine, a bullet into the flesh of the great social-democratic robot. In this particular analogy then this killing of the image on the screen serves with a metaphoric value tantamount to the actual assasination. Palme-on-screen was shot but the man lived on. Palme-in-the-flesh was murdered. A father, husband, statesman gone. A heart stopped beating, but the image lived on, and continues to rule to some extent, yet today.
Consider the nostalgia in recent years over Palme’s sharp statements against US imperialism and the war in Vietnam. It on the one hand shows a pitch black void in Swedish international policy today where there could have been an undoubted support for Palestinians in Gaza, a resistance against military alliances with mad men and other vivid peacekeeping words and actions so urgently needed. On the other hand how can we fill that void without calling back to times that were while being hurled, like Benjamin’s angel, into the future by the storm called progress.
Resurrecting dead politicians isn’t that like shouting at the debris of history as we’re being propelled away from it? In the 2024 Indonesian election The Golkar Party brought back the appearance of the long-dead dictator Suharto using deepfake. The dead dictator is calling on the people to endorse his former general Golkar was the right-wing political group to which Suharto and his US-backed New Order Regime once belonged, a regime spanning three decades and estimated to have killed between 500 000 and a million Indonesians.
Broadcasting, in a way, has lost its realness.
If television extended Palme’s presence into the homes of his supporters and enemies, today’s media landscape stretches even further—across networks, algorithms, and deepfake resurrections.
Palme, who we can now suspect was shot for being the image of certain politics, returns as one. He speaks, responds, debates. He can take your call at any time. His ideals as a democratic socialist from the last century are in bright contrast to the muddy makings of the current Swedish Social Democrats. In this resurrection, these cracks become visible through your interaction with him.
Gideon Jacobs writes in an essay in LA Review of Books how he saw the widespread image of Donald Trump working at McDonalds and thought it was made by generative AI. It turns out it wasn’t. Did it matter? The image of Trump frying potatoes was “still charged with the fundamental quality that can make AI images unsettling: a realness untethered from reality; vivid signification without a vivid referent”. If the image is real or not doesn’t matter in this broadcasting game that the president of the United States is a master of. Where the image is used to cover up anything that is behind it. Reality is overpowered by the image. A “Trump l’Oeil” Gideon calls it. The image as a communication device here functions as a one-way hammering of a message, destroying all response while concealing the workings behind it. Christer Andersson's urge to shoot at the broadcast is perhaps understandable seen as a desperate attempt at replying to someone who is not listening? Trump himself would’ve gotten a bullet in his head had he not leaned over slightly to catch a glimpse of the jumbotron screen at the campaign rally.
Violence and visibility have always been intertwined. The gun, the camera, the drone, AI - they do not just document history; they make it. In recent wars, GoPro cameras strapped to soldiers and militants erase the boundary between combat and spectacle. The October 7th Hamas footage echoes back to the IDF’s own use of body cams and drones - violence recorded, distributed, watched. Who holds the power: the one who fires the gun or the one who controls the narrative, the image?
In the early 1930’s theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht presented a new theory of the communication device of his day: the radio. He is not so much criticising the content of the medium but the materiality of the radio itself. He makes political demands that radio should not just function as a distribution apparatus but as a device for dialogue.
“The radio could be the finest possible communications apparatus in public life, a vast system of channels. That is, it could be so, if it understood how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a network instead of isolating him.”
In August 1933, only a year after Brecht argued that radio should become a medium of dialogue rather than one-way speech, the Nazis unveiled the Volksempfänger - the “people’s receiver.” Commissioned by Goebbels, it embodied the opposite principle: citizens were to receive, and nothing more. With a single channel, the device ensured the public would be receptive not to conversation but to orders from above - a perfect instrument of authoritarian broadcasting.
How should we develop our current technologies from single channel transmitters into “the finest possible communication apparatus of public life”?
In the Tokyo gubernatorial election in 2024, Takahiro Anno, a 33-year-old AI engineer with no prior office, won 154,000 votes (2.3%), a record for candidates under 40. The real innovation lay in his method: instead of broadcasting, his campaign practiced broad listening, using cheap digital tools to create a two-way dialogue at scale.
Inspired by the collaboratively written book Plurality with contribution by among others Taiwan’s former Minister of Digital Affairs Audrey Tang, Anno’s team visualized online discourse with the online tool Talk to the City and applied language models to foster constructive debate. The results fed into a living policy platform on developer platform GitHub, where supporters proposed and merged ideas like open-source code.
To extend his presence, Anno deployed AI Anno, a virtual avatar that fielded over 8,600 citizen questions in 16 days on YouTube—far beyond human capacity. His experiment suggests the virtual politician as an amplifier of listening, opening new forms of participatory democracy.
Today The AI Party says: it is time to rewire the societal machine. Let’s force the robot to listen, not only by shoving lead into the so called smart screens ruling our every day, but by cleverly tinkering with the apparatus to make it receive and not just transmit. A vote for the virtual Olof Palme is a vote for an updated democracy; a democracy that listens. An image, a radio transmission, a television broadcast, a democratic leader should not just be a one way instrument when it can be carrying out a two-way surgery.
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Keep swimming. Keep computing.