Alexander Bard, born in 1961, is a philosopher, writer, artist, record producer and a highly sought-after lecturer. Bard studied Economic Geography at The Stockholm School of Economics in the 1980s while building an immensely successful career as a songwriter and record producer. In 1992, Bard co-founded Stockholm Records, which quickly achieved global success and became Scandinavia’s biggest independent record company. His first band Army Of Lovers sold over seven million records in the 1990s. He is currently a member of the internationally platinum-selling electro-rock band Gravitonas (http://www.gravitonas.net).

In 1998, Bard sold his shares in Stockholm Records to global giant Universal Music and co-founded the internet incubator area26.com (http://area26.com), which went on to house and nurture eight successful companies, including the business improvement marketplace interesting.org (http://interesting.org), Scandinavia’s biggest youth culture website Bomben, and the music management company Bullgod. Throughout, Bard has remained one of Scandinavia’s leading songwriters and record producers.

Bard has given lectures on the sociological and economical implications of the interactive media revolution at the Stockholm School of Economics and other institutions worldwide since 1996. A series of lectures on history seen through a cybernetics perspective in 1998 caused a sensation and led to a bidding war between publishers for Alexander’s first book The Netocrats (first published in English by Pearson in 2002 as Netocracy – The New Power Elite And Life After Capitalism), based on his lecture series and co-written with media theorist Jan Söderqvist. Merging Nietzsche and Darwin with French poststructuralists and cybernetics, “Netocracy” was Number 1 for four consecutive months in the Swedish non-fiction bestseller list before being picked up by Reuters/Pearson in London in 2001 for international release. The Netocrats has so far been translated to 17 languages and sold in excess of 340,000 copies.

Bard & Söderqvist have since extended their authorship on the interactive revolution into an oeuvre known as The Futurica Trilogy (http://www.youtube.com/embed/EO9dwP1yc_4/). The second book, titled The Global Empire, deals with the political ramifications of the information technology revolution. The third book, titled The Body Machines, crashing Freud against Darwin in a particle accelerator, deals with the death of The Individual and its replacement by an entirely new human ideal: the schizoid character known as The Dividual. The entire Futurica Trilogy was first published in English by Stockholm Text in the spring of 2012 (http://www.stockholmtext.com/titles/the-futurica-trilogy/).

October 2014 sees the release of Bard’s fourth book with Söderqvist: Syntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age, in which the authors set out to construct a complete new metaphysical system for the digital age, covering everything from the inner existential truths of the new physics to the radical utopian potential of participatory culture.

Bard was a fundamental force in creating the Swedish music export sensation – making his small native country the world’s third biggest exporter of music – and promoting the information technology revolution. He is also a front figure for the new export of radical Scandinavian thinkers and has repeatedly been named one of Sweden’s brightest minds. Personally he considers his biggest and most important contribution as being one of the founders of The Syntheist Movement citing this effort as “the one thing in me that is truly bigger than myself and my theories” and “the one meme that will truly survive me and for which I’m merely a small instrument”.

TOPICS:

Among the topics Bard speaks on are:

• Homo Technologicus: Human history as the History of Information Technologies
• The Ethics of Interactivity – The revolutionary move from Morality to a new Ethics in The Network Society
• Attentionalism: How Network Dynamics changes Business and Marketing as we know it – forever!
• Netocrats vs Consumtarians – The online-driven borderless class struggle of the Interactive Age
• Medialization: The paradigm shift from mass media to interactivity
• The Art of Imploitation – how the value of information increases by NOT exploiting it!
• The Global Empire: Local vs Global Politics in the Age of Globalization
• The Body Machines: The Dividual as the new human ideal after the Death of The Individual
• Syntheism – the radically new metaphysics emanating from Interactivity, replacing all religious and philosophical models for society previously known to mankind

PUBLICATIONS:

BOOKS:

• Syntheism – Creating God in the Internet Age, Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2014)
•  The Futurica Trilogy, Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2012)
•  The Body Machines, Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2009)
•  The Global Empire, Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2002)
•  The Netocrats, Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2000)

MUSIC:

• Life in a Goldfish Bowl (1982)
•  Bard fonda Vaccuum
•  I Breathe
•  Prototype
•  Gravitonas

AWARDS:

• Swedish Business Awards 2012

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