Why the digital future needs to be shaped, not just repaired

A lot of philanthropic money has arrived in the technology field over the past two years. During this time, 10 foundations have committed half a billion dollars through Humanity AI to put human needs at the centre of artificial intelligence (AI) development. Current AI was launched in February 2025 with $400 million and the ambition to raise $2.5 billion for public-interest AI over five years.

This is welcome. But funding is still heavily oriented towards repair of the digital world, in areas such as countering disinformation, challenging algorithmic discrimination, protecting children online and defending digital rights. Of course this work is essential – the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026 ranks mis- and disinformation as the second most severe risk of the next two years, with societal polarization close behind. At the same time, AI is making cognitive manipulation cheaper and more targeted.

But repairing is like goalkeeping. It responds to whatever the technology sector fires at society next, one harm at a time. However well the goalkeeper performs, the shots keep coming, leaving them with little time to question the rules of the game or the shape of the pitch.

Public debate about technology does not make this easier since it is dominated and distracted by two opposing frames: technological acceleration as inherently beneficial, or technological progress as inherently dangerous.

Both frames obscure the more relevant question, which is what shape of digital environment are we actually trying to build?

Some movements currently working to shape the future of the digital environment illustrate what grappling with such fundamental questions can look like.

Effective altruism has channelled several hundred million dollars into long-term AI safety over the past decade, while the abundance and progress movements have mobilized comparable sums around science, technology and growth. One member, Renaissance Philanthropy, has raised more than $530 million within two years.

Whatever one thinks of their respective premises, both demonstrate the same method of thinking in decades, building institutions rather than isolated projects and funding the capacity to develop fields such as AI safety. Neither movement fully addresses the wider digital environment in which people experience technology, however.

Between catastrophe and acceleration lie questions about the architecture of digital life itself, including how to counter polarization and degradation of digital spaces, how to create infrastructures, protocols and incentives for an era where the line between real and synthetic is being dissolved, and how to allocate scarce human attention to abundant content. These are not questions about AI alone but rather the digital sphere as a whole.

Work in this direction is underway. At the level of individual organizations, the Forum's Digital Trust Initiative has built a framework covering security and reliability, accountability and oversight, and responsible use. At the level of digital societies, the Montreal Memorandum, published earlier this year, aims to shape a digital sphere in which trust, constructive disagreement and human agency remain possible.

The Montreal Memorandum is not a manifesto in search of a community. It grew out of the Digital Trust Convention, already in its third year, at the OECD in Paris in 2024 and 2026, and at the AI Institute Mila in Montreal in 2025. It brings together more than 350 actors from standardization bodies, regulators, civil society, academia and industry.

The memorandum’s value lies in treating the architecture of the digital environment – incentives, accountability, responsibility and markets – as something that can and should be deliberately shaped.

But consensus documents and convenings do not change entrenched systems by themselves. We need the connective tissue of a lean institutional capability that can keep communities working between convenings, translate shared diagnoses into practical action, incubate consortia and public-interest infrastructure, and ensure that individual projects add up to more than a scatter of good intentions.

Similarly, recent Forum research on innovation economies argues that successful systems are characterized neither by state spending nor by market freedom, but by the strength of the institutions that connect them. In innovation ecosystems, these groups turn investment into adoption.

The same logic applies to the digital environment. Philanthropy could fund an institutional catalyst that can serve as connective tissue. Its mission would be to turn shared principles into standards, protocols, incentive models and pilot infrastructures, and to help promising interventions move from prototype to adoption.

Success would be measured by what this catalyst sets in motion, rather than reports and convenings. To keep it from calcifying into a talking shop or becoming a mouthpiece for the best-resourced interests, it would need a narrow mandate, transparent governance and the full spectrum of expertise around the table, including civil society and frontline responders. Those working directly with people affected by disinformation, algorithmic harm or cyber attacks hold a different kind of systemic knowledge, which is built from lived experience and specific cases rather than aggregate trends.

Building such a catalyst is not a half-billion-dollar proposition. It is within reach of a foundation, a philanthropic coalition or a government willing to take a field-building approach to digital resilience.

There are precedents. The Common Good Cyber Fund pools public and philanthropic resources to support nonprofits providing the critical services underpinning the internet's core infrastructure and protecting civil society. It demonstrates that funding can be designed around shared digital infrastructure rather than isolated projects. The World Economic Forum's proposed sustainable cybersecurity finance mechanism also suggests coordinated funding models and longer-term capital structures can help build digital resilience.

Rather than financing the next response to digital harms, the task at hand is to build the capacity to reshape the conditions that lead to those harms in the first place.

The digital playing field is being redrawn and decisions taken over the next one or two years will set its course for the next decade. The question is whether philanthropy will remain focussed on funding the goalkeepers or shaping the game.