Big data refocuses power between states and technological giants, weakening democracy and privatizing the general interest under the guise of algorithmic efficiency.
The global democratic order is teetering under algorithms. This is the finding of a reference work, published in the 4th quarter of 2025 by Presses de l’Université Laval, entitled Artificial democracy: the effects of big data on politics, politics and policies. This brutal reality of artificial intelligence is redrawing the geopolitical arena on five continents.
Recent news is the perfect illustration of this: the authoritarian offline of Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 advanced models by the Trump administration has relegated the quiet debates of VivaTech and the G7 to the background. Held in June. This technological clash validates the urgency of rethinking the nature and scope of political and military power in the age of AI.
The technological capture of politics
The collective work directed by Éric Montigny, full professor of political science at Laval University, and Cecilia Biancalana, assistant professor at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society at the University of Turin, dissects a profound change in the contemporary world, namely the massive use of big data which distorts the very semantics of power in terms of its nature and scope.
It is from this perspective that the book articulates its criticism around three axes: politics (public space), transformed into a logarithmic surveillance market: politics (the conquest of power), reduced to individualized electoral microtargeting: policies (public action) dictated by the predictability of behavior.
The strength of this essay lies in its demonstration of a paradox: the illusion of increased democracy actually hides an unprecedented centralization of social control in the hands of a few technological giants.
The geopolitics of algorithmic censorship
This theoretical framework took a concrete turn during the VivaTech 2026 business fair and the G7 2026. While global decision-makers displayed pious regulatory intentions, Washington’s coup against Antrhropic recalled a harsh truth: digital sovereignty remains an illusion in the face of American technological nationalism.
By censoring Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the American federal state brutally reaffirms its predominance over Silicon Valley firms, contradicting the thesis of a definitive shift of political and military power towards the private sector.
Towards compulsory political enterprise
It is precisely in this gap that the thesis of Pascal Demurger, general director of the French mutual insurance company MAIF, takes on its full meaning. In his manifesto The company of the 21st century will be political or will no longer be, the manager maintains that the company must actively commit to the common good or risk losing all legitimacy.
On analysis, this vision of the effects of big data on the global democratic order is double-edged. If corporate civic engagement offers a salutary counter-power to state abuses, it also carries the risk of a creeping privatization of the general interest. By delegating public morality to corporations, democracy only hastens its own obsolescence, becoming definitively artificial.
