2025 Seminar
Ouroboros: The Infinite Loop of Media, Democracy, and Diplomacy
The 2025 Seminar
Seminar Dates: April 8 - 10, 2025
The ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, representing a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It is a useful heuristic for investigating the contemporary inter-relationships between technological changes, media production and consumption trends, governance, and the implications for journalism and diplomacy. As we enter 2025, the fates of these societal foundations appear stuck in a sort of dysfunctional symbiotic loop: hypercapitalism and technological overdrive propel dysfunctions in governance structures and global and local media systems, which in turn intensifies declines in public trust in national and transnational governance institutions around the world, which in turn leads to more governmental dysfunction, wider vacuums filled by corporate and tech companies, and so on and so forth.
The Milton Wolf Seminar focuses on media and diplomacy both broadly defined. If the past decade has demonstrated nothing else, it has called into question the core definitions of media and diplomacy, and these definitional struggles are indicative of a deeper malaise just beneath the surface in headline after headline. Media’s relationship to diplomacy is inextricably linked with global evolutions in domestic governance structures. As 2025 unfolds before us, diplomats increasingly represent countries where democracy is under threat, elections are contested, and voters are disenfranchised, while nationalist and fascist sentiments fester under the skin of surging populist movements.
Concurrently, media is similarly contested, fragmented, and mutating (metastasizing?) as AI software and tech platforms increasingly create, complicate, and fill the void. In a world of bots and auto-generated content and increasingly politicized platforms, debate about the very definition of media itself: what should and does constitute “the media” today? The nation states that diplomats represent are changing just as the media laws and the media actors that inhabit and surround these nation states are changing. The promise of a relatively stable world order and global cosmopolitanism so prevalent at the end of the Cold War has receded at the same pace as public trust in the fourth estate’s ability to narrate and make sense of this breakdown in the global social fabric.
This year’s seminar focuses on diagnostics and interventions. Where and how can dystopic cycles be disrupted? What can we inject into the seemingly endless decay wrought by late stage capitalism? What is the role of the nation state and the private sector in mitigating and shaping the future of large language model AI applications in the global system? What can and should be the role of an increasingly cyborg media?
Seminar Agenda
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM — Welcome Reception and Registration (Diplomatic Academy)
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM — Welcome Tea & Introduction
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM — Session 1: Apocalypse Now? Politics, Platforms, Press in Contemporary Diplomacy
At the turn of the Century, scholars such as Francis Fukayama predicted “the end of history” and the rise of a more prosocial world aided by the rise of a globally minded citizenry connected in real time by new technological networks. Twenty-five years into the new millennia, pundits commonly liken the current geopolitical climate to dystopian fiction such as that written by Isaac Asimov or Aldous Huxley. Information warfare proliferates, ranging from AI-aided bot networks, to bombing supply chains, to exploding walkie talkies, to financial and political capture of social and traditional media companies. Trust in the traditional institutions of governance, media, and politics has plummeted just as debates about what and who constitutes truth have proliferated. How can we and should we understand this pivotal moment in world history? What does it mean for the relationship between media and diplomacy? Panelists in this session will set the scene for two days of discussion, exploring how broader trends in technology, journalism, economics, great power competition, multilateralism, and diplomacy are ushering us into a brave new world.
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM — Welcoming Lunch
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM — Session 2: Trust and the International System
Declining trust in public institutions has fueled the rise of populist and authoritarian leaders who exploit public dissatisfaction and skepticism, weakening democratic institutions and norms globally. Reduced confidence in diplomacy and governance has also translated into skepticism toward multilateral institutions like the UN, WTO, and WHO, weakening collective efforts to address shared global challenges, such as climate change, pandemics, and military conflict. In some countries, public skepticism provides cover for governments to suppress independent journalism, further eroding transparency and accountability. While declining trust in public institutions and polarizing debates about what constitutes truth have been on the rise since the 1970s, this erosion has become more pronounced in the last ten years. Panelists in this session will examine case studies about how these trends are affecting diplomacy, governance, journalism and societal cohesion with an eye towards potential solutions.
3:00 PM - 3:15 PM — Tea Break
3:15 PM - 5:00 PM — Session 3: Disinformation on Steroids
Charles Spurgeon famously said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Insomuch as there ever was a golden age for ‘truth,’ it is safe to say that the era of a shared sense of reality is dead. Whereas previous asymmetries gave legacy media a leg up, established media organizations are now mired in fact checking and fighting against a cascade of corrupted information enabled by nimble tech platforms and alternative journalisms. The Internet disrupted society's ability to manage the tension between total information conformity and total misinformation chaos, with massive consequences for democracies- from elections and referendums to pandemics and wars. Case studies on this panel include recent interference in Moldova’s referendum, elections in Georgia, and information wars in the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
Thursday, April 10, 2025
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM — Coffee and Conversation with the 2025 Emerging Scholars
Supporting junior scholars is a key part of the Milton Wolf Seminar. Please join us for morning coffee and a lively roundtable discussion with our 2025 Emerging Scholar Fellows who will present their research and explain how it relates to the 2025 Seminar theme.
10:00 AM - 10:15 AM — Tea Break
10:15 AM - 12:00 PM — Session 4: The New Geopolitics of Information
Corporations are exacting unparalleled influence over domestic and international politics, particularly in the information space. From hostile takeovers of media companies in India, to mobilizing social media networks in support of candidates in elections, corporate actors, though few in number, wield outsized influence across a wide array of institutions, with consequences for media, elections, tech policy, and the environment. Public media appears everywhere on the decline; corporations increasingly bend both the delivery and the production of information to their wills. It appears that we are moving to a future where a few corporations will preside over the ‘machinery of reality.’ Is there a space for public and alternative media models? What checks on power are available to citizens and activists. Can these trends be reversed? Panelists in this session will discuss current case studies and potential solutions.
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM — Lunch
1:15 PM - 3:00 PM — Session 5: The Digital and Analog Ramifications of AI
Much attention has been given to the ways that AI threatens to supersede human intellectual processes and functions. AI, however, is driven by large language models and very real material resources. Almost every resource on the planet is fueling the AI juggernaut, with consequences for the power grid, nuclear energy, political structures, the production, trade, and trash of physical devices, human labor, and financial systems. The fast pace of AI’s technological advancement appears not so much to be leaving the materially tied world behind but feasting upon it. Panelists in this session will discuss such questions as: What is the reality behind the rhetoric of AI? What are the current and potential political and economic solutions to ameliorating AI’s role in the global system? What is the role of the media, diplomats, corporations, and activists in these decisions?
3:00 PM - 3:15 PM — Tea Break
3:15 PM - 6:00 PM — Session 6: Infrastructures of Independence: New Media Models
Independent news outlets are an essential component to the health of liberal democracies. Declining revenue, the loss of advertising profits to tech platforms, coupled with the corporatization and consolidation of news organizations have facilitated more and more news deserts across the globe - and left those that remain vulnerable to media capture. In the face of the ‘oligarchization’ of the media and algorithmic journalist production, what economic and organizational news production models can help to preserve journalistic integrity and quality? This panel examines new structures and financial mechanisms that may protect and nourish independent media across multiple national contexts.
7:00 PM — Heurigen
Friday, April 11, 2025
Departures