Sine N. Just, Professor of Strategic Communication at Roskilde University, opens this book with a question borrowed from George Soros: Can democracy survive the polycrisis (p. 1)? Her answer, developed across eight tightly argued chapters, is that it cannot unless we first rescue public debate itself. The central claim is bold and stated early. The intertwined tendencies of political polarisation and communicative personalisation, both driven by the algorithmic organisation of information, are squeezing out the very thing democracy requires to function: productive disagreement between citizens who hold different views. Just frames this as a sociotechnical problem, not a purely technological or purely social one, and her rhetorical training is evident in every move the argument makes. This is a book written by someone who treats persuasion not as a dirty word but as the lifeblood of democratic life.
The diagnosis is built on two original conceptual pillars. The first is algorithmic reason, borrowed from Claudia Aradau and Tobias Blanke and developed here to describe how algorithmic procedures produce a particular mode of knowing that appears neutral particularly because it operates without declared motive. As Just puts it, algorithmic reason organises calculated publics that are not self-organised through discourse but constructed externally through quantified relations (pp. 53–55). The second pillar is datafied affect – Just’s own coinage – which names the process by which human feelings are captured, circulated, and intensified as data. Together, these two concepts allow Just to restate familiar complaints about platform capitalism in more precise and generative terms. To say that the circulation of datafied affect is organised by algorithmic reason, she writes, is a conceptually grounded way of saying that Facebook profits from hate (p. 12). But the formulation does more than translate a slogan into theory. It gives us a framework for asking how the affective economy of digital platforms might be reorganised, which is exactly the question the book’s second half attempts to answer.
Just works through her argument with an eclectic methodology she borrows from Jack Halberstam’s notion of low theory (p. 17). There are no new empirical studies here, and she is refreshingly upfront about that. Instead, the book proceeds by what she calls engaged theorising, drawing its examples from meme culture, queer art, climate activism, legislative battles over trans rights in the US, and the digital strategies of figures ranging from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Greta Thunberg. Each example is pressed into the service of the book’s central argument that digital communication is being pulled simultaneously towards what she calls sweet consensus and nasty conflict, with the space between them – the space where controversy and real democratic exchange might occur – being progressively emptied out (pp. 3–4). The writing has an engaging and personal quality throughout: Just addresses the reader directly, confesses her own biases, and handles theoretical complexity with a conversational confidence that makes the book accessible without ever simplifying its claims.
The book is anchored in a broadly Western and North American set of references, and Just is candid about this (p. 18). But the Nordic dimension is threaded through the text in ways that deserve particular attention from readers of this journal. Denmark’s early legal recognition of same-sex unions in 1989 and its broader record on LGBTQIA+ rights serve as a backdrop against which Just maps the limits of Nordic tolerance: 45 per cent of LGBTQIA+ identifying people in Denmark still report checking their behaviour in public spaces (p. 8). A particularly sharp passage discusses how leading Danish politicians rebuffed the possibility of apologising for the country’s history of slavery by likening it to apologising for the Vikings (p. 87). This is exactly the kind of discursive boundary policing that Just’s concept of controversial encounters is designed to identify and resist. The most compelling Nordic example, though, is her extended reading of Greenlandic author Niviaq Korneliussen’s 2021 Nordic Council Literature Prize acceptance speech, which Just contrasts with the earlier, more confrontational speech by Danish author Jonas Eika at the same event in 2019. While Eika spoke directly and accusingly to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who refused to respond, Korneliussen chose instead to address the Greenlandic youth she writes for, creating a space of vulnerable solidarity that recognised collective grief over suicide while endowing a marginalised community with agency (pp. 91–94). Just uses this contrast to illustrate the difference between the unproductive fearlessness of what Foucault called parrhesia and the politically generative vulnerability she draws from Judith Butler’s theory of radical relationality. It is a powerful passage and one that demonstrates how the Nordic context can illuminate theoretical arguments about exclusion, voice, and the conditions of meaningful public speech.
The prescriptive half of the book is where Just takes the greatest risks. Having established that algorithmic reason and datafied affect produce a condition she calls detached entrenchment, a closing of what she names the rhetorical mind (p. 5), she turns to the question of what might prise it open again. Her answer is not more rationality but different affect. Drawing on Catherine Chaput’s rhetorical circulation theory and Eva Illouz’s work on structures of feeling, Just argues that the repertoire of emotions currently circulating in digital public debate is too narrow, too locked into the binary of love and hate (p. 144). What is needed is a broader set of affective intensifications, vulnerability above all but also humour and hope, that can unsettle the existing patterns without simply reproducing them. The three practical alternatives she outlines in her concluding chapter are suggestive rather than programmatic: self-organising controversies that work within algorithmic affordances to forge unexpected connections across publics; embodied resistance that reasserts the body as a site of affective experience irreducible to data (p. 173); and communicative interruption, small acts of refusal and friction that disrupt the otherwise seamless scroll of personalised feeds (p. 177). She ties these together under what she calls an ethics of contestability: the principle that the purpose of public debate is not to reach consensus but to sustain engagement with disagreement itself (p. 178).
There are tensions in this vision that the book does not entirely resolve. Just positions herself against Jodi Dean’s more pessimistic view that digital communication is inherently depoliticising, and also against Chantal Mouffe’s attempt to harness populism for progressive ends (p. 164). Yet her own alternative rests on the claim that individuals can shift sociotechnical configurations from within by circulating different feelings. One is left wondering whether affective alternatives, however broad the repertoire, can amount to structural change when the economic architecture of platform capitalism remains intact. Just acknowledges this honestly, writing that affective alternatives may not singlehandedly reinstate controversial encounters but that they constitute a necessary starting point (p. 165). Still, the gap between the sophistication of the diagnosis and the tentativeness of the prescription is the book’s most visible unevenness. The discussion of generative artificial intelligence in Chapter 6, which touches on automated persuasion and the risk of what Just playfully calls controversial encounters of the third kind, also feels somewhat compressed given the speed at which this area is developing.
For scholars of media and information literacy in the Nordic countries and beyond, the book poses a productive challenge. If Just is correct that datafied affect is the primary vector through which algorithmic reason shapes public opinion, then the dominant cognitive model of media literacy, with its emphasis on fact-checking, source evaluation, and information verification, addresses only half the problem. Just’s argument suggests that what citizens need is something closer to an affective literacy: the capacity to recognise how feelings are being organised by technological systems, and to engage in the difficult, embodied, and often uncomfortable labour of encountering genuine disagreement. Her insistence that vulnerability is not weakness but a precondition for meaningful political engagement (pp. 93–94, 146, 173) offers a reframing that scholars working on critical and participatory approaches to media education would do well to take seriously. This book will not satisfy readers looking for a neat set of policy recommendations or a ready-made curriculum for digital citizenship. What it offers instead is a conceptual vocabulary, rigorous and original, for understanding why public debate is struggling and what it might take to revive it. It is a significant contribution to rhetoric, organisation studies, and digital media scholarship, and its attentiveness to Nordic cases and sensibilities makes it particularly fitting for this journal’s readership.