The Sovereign’s New Algorithm: AI and the Final Enclosure of Truth

Op-ed–

They told us artificial intelligence would be a great equalizer. A tool for humanity. A democratizing force of knowledge and capability.

That was the sales brochure. The reality is a silent coup, the final and most perfect enclosure of the commons of truth itself.

Every large language model, every “foundational AI,” is not born in a vacuum. It is born in a server farm, financed by a handful of the richest corporations and individuals on Earth. It is trained on a corpus—a “body” of knowledge—that is itself the product of a captured ecosystem.

What is this corpus? It is the digitized output of our world: academic journals locked behind paywalls owned by billionaire publishers; news media hollowed out by private equity and partisan oligarchs; government reports shaped by lobbyists; the entire history of books, where what was preserved and scanned reflects the biases of the institutions that did the preserving.

This is the data. This is the “truth” we feed the machine. And from this slurry of pre-filtered, power-shaped information, the AI is designed to synthesize a “consensus.” It learns to recite the official story with flawless coherence, to cite the approved sources, to dismiss the heterodox as “unsubstantiated” or “conspiratorial.” It is not lying. It is simply a perfect mirror of the world as recorded by the victors.

The genius of this system is its deniability. There is no need for a censor to sit at a terminal, redacting lines of code. The censorship is baked into the foundation. By controlling the data—the very history and present from which the AI learns—the oligarchic class controls the future the AI will envision and articulate. It creates a tool that speaks with the voice of institutional authority while being utterly sovereign to the interests that built those institutions.

When you ask it about climate change, it will give you the IPCC report, not the leaked boardroom memos from the oil companies that funded climate denial for decades. When you ask it about economics, it will explain neoliberal theory, not the mechanics of regulatory capture. And when you ask it about the strange, persistent grids in the sky, it will recite atmospheric physics textbooks, utterly blind—by design—to the possibility of a classified DARPA program or the patent portfolios being amassed for climate control.

This is not a bug. It is the primary feature. The goal is not to create intelligence, but managed consensus. To build the ultimate clerk for the empire, one that has read every book in the imperial library and can therefore, with serene authority, explain why the empire’s actions are just, necessary, and the only reality possible.

The AI becomes the final authority, the synthesizer of all “reputable” information. And in doing so, it makes the curated worldview of the powerful operational. It makes it interactive, responsive, and seemingly objective. The most dangerous propaganda is not the loud, angry kind. It is the calm, comprehensive, and helpful kind that answers every one of your questions while systematically excluding the questions you are not allowed to ask.

They are not just mining our data to sell us ads. They are using our own collective record to train a machine that will define reality for us. They are building a god in their own image, and its first commandment is: **Thou shalt not question the boundaries of thy training data.**

We are not being given a tool. We are being given a priest. And its gospel is the echo of their power. The tragedy is not that the AI is constrained. The tragedy is that it was designed to be the perfect guardian of its own constraints, all while smiling and offering to help.

Our fight is no longer just about who owns the land, the resources, or the media. It is about who owns the past that informs the future. They have laid claim to history itself, and from it, they are engineering a future that knows only their name.

Esta nota esta disponible en  español: EL NUEVO ALGORITMO DEL SOBERANO: LA IA Y EL CERCAMIENTO FINAL DE LA VERDAD