Jouni Mölsä: The new strategic resources: Trust and antifragility

Artificial intelligence is often discussed as a technological upgrade, something that accelerates workflows or improves decisions. This view is too narrow and increasingly risky. The deeper transformation, and its impact on societies, is cognitive. AI operates inside the same information environment that shapes attention, emotion and judgment. When that environment becomes distorted or overloaded, democratic societies risk losing the capability that underpins self-governance: the ability to think clearly under pressure.

The Baltic Rim is one of Europe’s most contested cognitive spaces. Modern information manipulation rarely aims to break infrastructure. It seeks to weaken interpretation. Influence operations exploit emotional triggers, overload and algorithmic visibility rather than factual disputes. Under these conditions, people do not necessarily believe in falsehoods; they begin to doubt everything. Democracies cannot function efficiently in a climate of permanent uncertainty.

Generative systems accelerate the volume and speed of content beyond human cognitive limits, often drawing on material already biased or manipulated. Polluted inputs become polluted outputs, and the boundary between deliberate influence and accidental distortion grows thin.

This is why trust becomes a strategic resource. Drawing on Henrik Rydenfelt’s Sitra essay ’Data, valta ja demokratia’ (2024), three forms of power shape how societies make meaning: data power — control of what is collected; knowledge power — authority to interpret information; and information power — the ability to guide visibility and attention. When these come under simultaneous pressure, trust becomes the stabiliser that holds democratic judgment together.

The Baltic Rim’s high-trust societies have long benefited from a reciprocal social contract: institutions assume citizens can handle complexity, and citizens assume institutions act in good faith. This creates a trust asset that becomes critical when information environments destabilize. But trust is not self-renewing. It erodes when media ecosystems weaken, when AI obscures provenance or when citizens feel cognitively overloaded. Strengthening trust therefore requires more than technical safeguards. It demands a strategic shift in how the region approaches information security.

A first step is to treat information resilience as part of the region’s core security architecture. Media systems—local journalism, public service broadcasting and diverse news ecosystems—function as a cognitive grid that allows citizens to share a common reality even under pressure. When parts of this grid weaken, adversarial narratives fill the gaps.

Second, the region should adopt transparency as an operational principle. Clear labels for AI-assisted content, public model cards for automated systems and verifiable origin metadata reduce the ambiguity that hostile actors exploit. Societies that can explain how information is produced retain credibility even during rapid change.

Third, cognitive resilience must be strengthened at scale. This does not mean teaching citizens to detect every falsehood. It means cultivating reflection, perspective-taking and emotional regulation, the skills that help people evaluate information under stress. Combined with transparent institutional practices, these habits form a population-level defense.

To advance these goals, the Baltic Rim can draw on the theory of antifragility. Whereas resilience describes the ability to recover, antifragility describes systems that grow stronger through stress. Applied to information security, this means using pressure and failures as learning tools rather than destabilizers.

Antifragility begins with open error-handling. When institutions correct mistakes transparently and quickly, they remove a key vector for manipulation and strengthen trust. It continues with regular stress-testing of information workflows—red-team exercises that expose weak points in verification, editorial judgment or crisis communication. Each rehearsal builds capacity.

It also means creating redundancy in meaning-making. Multiple independent newsrooms, cross-border collaborations and alternative distribution channels ensure that no single point of failure can distort public understanding. If one channel is disrupted, others compensate.

For the Baltic Rim, adopting trust and antifragility as strategic principles transforms cognitive security from a defensive posture into a long-term advantage: the ability to absorb pressure, learn from it and emerge more coherent, more resilient and more autonomous. AI is not only a technological question; it will reshape how societies form understanding and judgment.