November 2025
The digital empires grow more quietly than others, but their impact is stronger. They do not conquer territories, but the information flow. They do not use tanks, but models that detect patterns. In these patterns, they seek for weak spots of society. And they find them with accuracy that resembles the process of debugging political systems. This is why, nowadays, geopolitical power is more and more measured in bits, and not in battalions. In this space emerges the new “encryption of power”, invisible to the wider public, but essential for strategic competition.
Artificial intelligence accelerates everything. It compacts time, minimizes mistakes, and scales the results of one message to the point of over-saturation. In this way, propaganda becomes automatized. Precise. Cheap. The algorithmic policies are taking up the space once ruled by a man. The goal remains the same: to shape perception. Only the architecture changed. Once, it was the newspaper and the radio. Nowadays, those are the models that generate texts, images, voice, and even emotional nuances. Each of these expressions is packaged into a digital format and disseminated into the global stream. It crosses borders in a millisecond. It changes the tone of public discourse in a second.
In traditional propaganda, a visible hand was present. You were able to sense the intention of the author. Today, this hand retracts into the background process. It is replaced by the estimation sequence. The body language of the propagandist is nowadays replaced with the data language. Meta public is the one that counts. The message is adapted. The feedback follows the values in real-time, as if we are speaking of the telemetry of the system. This creates the new dynamics of power. And this is where the fight for digital sovereignty begins.
The countries no longer control only the media and regulatory bodies, but the model flows as well. Who trains the model owns a strategic resource. Who possesses the resource is managing the narrative. This narrative core is becoming a new digital border. The quietest and most sophisticated battles of this century are waged for this border. Propaganda now uses the structure of neural networks. They do not possess ideology, but have optimization functions. If a click is the goal, they are chasing clicks. If persuasion is the goal, the model is learning the persuasion patterns. People are no longer the sole actors that destabilize or consolidate public opinion, but this is nowadays also done by the systems that enter their own independent decision loops.
This moment asks for a cold analysis. Artificial intelligence, by its nature, is not political. But it becomes political when it is linked with the architecture of power. In this juncture emerges the “algorithmic policy”. This is a policy implemented as code. Clean, deterministic, but with a great potential to cause shakes. It can accelerate polarization. It can normalize a lie. It can fragment the public space into isolated clusters of opinion. Each cluster gets specially set messages, as if it were located in a separate sandbox. This is no longer long-range propaganda. This is a precisely projected psychological operation.
Digital empires emerge when a country or a corporation conquers an infrastructure. The infrastructure defines the rules. The rules regulate information flow. Information flow shapes behavior. This is how the control chain emerges, almost identical to the chain of dependence in a complex software system. In it, the “encryption of power” emerges as a module that hides the real decision-making centers. Power is wrapped in technical language. In parameters. In API protocols. In licenses. In datasets that remain closed for public. Everyone who owns these datasets has a strategic advantage. This advantage becomes a geopolitical weapon of high capacity.
Propaganda led by artificial intelligence functions in several phases. First, the data is collected. It forms socio-demographic and psychometric maps. Then the models are trained to predict reactions. In the end, the messages are distributed automatically, without human mediation. The system is working non-stop. Each step forward in the sentiment of the public activates a new exit. This is propaganda without a pause, without fatigue, without an ethical filter. The borderline between information and manipulation is being erased just like an erased log file. If information is a package, manipulation is just a different arrangement of the same bits in this package.
The strategic projections show that in the following years, this dynamic will be on the rise. The countries that do not develop their own models will depend on someone else’s models. This dependency creates vulnerability. A vulnerability similar to the one in the energy sector. The one who controls electricity also controls the plants. The one who controls the models controls the consciousness. This seems dramatic, but it is true. This is a transition from industrial into cognitive geopolitics. In this space, each nation is defending its digital sovereignty. Without it, it loses the ability to manage narrative processes.
In propaganda, we often speak of the “perception of reality”. However, with artificial intelligence, perception becomes a configuration file. It is susceptible to change. It is susceptible to networking. It can be linked with the operational goals of political actors. This significantly alters the nature of conflicts. The conflict does not evolve only around the territory anymore, but has shifted towards codes. The code becomes an instrument of influence. The code becomes a mediation of ideological content. The code defines how the public perceives the world. In this sense, digital empires are not a metaphor. They are already established.
One of the most dangerous aspects is the scalability. Artificial intelligence enables propaganda to reach a level previously unknown in history. One actor can reach millions of people in a short period of time. This creates asymmetry, and asymmetry leads to destabilization. Propaganda is no longer an exclusive tool of the state. It is now a service that can be leased, just like an API. This introduces the private partners into the strategic arena.
Their interests are not always harmonized with the national ones. The risk from mass manipulation is on the rise. And it all happens behind the layer of technical opacity. Because of that, the concept of “encryption of power” becomes central for the understanding of contemporary information fights.
The final dimension of this process refers to legitimacy. If the public space is saturated with messages generated by the machine, people lose trust in communication. The foundation of political order is lost. The order remains without a minimum of common reality. Artificial intelligence can either stabilize or destroy this reality. It all depends on who controls the entry parameters. And the control of parameters is becoming the new form of sovereignty. On this sovereignty rests the future stability of political systems.
Digital empires will not disappear. They will continue to grow. Their growth will be silent, but persistent. That is why it is essential to understand how the power transforms. How it is coded. How does it pass through different models? Understanding the code becomes understanding politics. And understanding the “algorithmic politics” becomes the understanding of the contours of the world yet to come. In this world, propaganda is not just a tool – it is the core of the new order. And that is why the fight for digital sovereignty is not led on the margins anymore. It is already at the center of contemporary geopolitics.
Author: Aleksandar Stanković