Curators of Sweden

» see curatorsofsweden.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

@sweden was a thing you read about rather than a thing you used. It was a state communications project pointed outward at people who might one day visit Sweden, written mostly in English, and i was not in that audience and neither was anyone around me. It landed anyway, because the idea was loud enough to travel on its own.

The Swedish Institute and VisitSweden opened it on 10 December 2011. Every Monday the login went to a different person living in Sweden or a Swede living abroad, and for seven days that person was the country's official account. There was no script and no approval queue. The curator wrote about their job or their opinions, answered questions from strangers, and then handed it on.

The award industry understood it before anyone else did. Guldagget came in April 2012 and a gold Clio a month after that, and then the Cannes Lions Grand Prix on 20 June. Rotation curation entered the vocabulary as a named format, and other countries and institutions were copying it inside a year.

What makes it worth a grave is not the awards. It is that a government agency signed off on handing a national channel to a private citizen with no editorial control, repeatedly, for seven years, and mostly did not regret it. That decision is unthinkable in 2026 and it was already brave in 2011.

~ the case file ~

~ what actually happened on it ~

Most weeks were unremarkable in the way real life is unremarkable. Somebody talked about their nursing shifts, or about how dark it gets in January. That was the product. A country represented by whoever answered the phone that week is a different claim from a country represented by a campaign, and readers could tell the difference without being told.

The bad weeks arrived too. A 2012 curator posted a run of tweets that read as antisemitic and made international news, and the institute chose not to take the account back, which set the precedent for everything after it. By 2016 curators were absorbing racist and sexist abuse at a volume the organizers had not planned for, and shutting the whole thing down early was openly discussed as a last resort.

~ the blocklist ~

In 2017 the institute started blocking accounts to keep the harassment away from its curators, and the list grew to roughly 14,000 names. When it leaked, it turned out to include Swedish members of parliament and the Israeli ambassador to Sweden. The blocks were lifted and an apology went out.

An external review afterwards was harder on the institute than the press had been. A state body blocking citizens from an official channel is a constitutional question in Sweden and nobody involved had treated it as one. The reviewers also found that the institute had deleted the blocklist document, which for a public authority is not housekeeping, it is a breach of the law on public records.

~ how it ended ~

The last curator posted on 30 September 2018. Nothing had gone wrong that month. The stated reason was reach: one account, mostly in English, was no longer enough, and by then the institute ran more than twenty official Sweden accounts in several languages with about two million followers between them. The single open channel had been beaten by an ordinary social media department.

356 curators wrote around 200,000 tweets between them, and 146,000 people were following at the end, which is small for a country and large for an experiment. The format outlived the project. Rotating accounts still run for regions and professions all over the world, almost always with a moderator who reads the drafts first.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »