I'm going to say something that sounds arrogant. Bear with me.
I've been watching yesterday happen for seven years. Not predicting it exactly. But building the theoretical framework to understand it before it became undeniable.
Who I am and why that matters
I'm a 44-year-old former AI entrepreneur who burned out, went back to university, and started studying radicalization in criminology. Not a career move. An obsession. I spent years travelling across the US watching friends and entire communities radicalize during the first Trump era, trying to understand the mechanism. Not the politics. The mechanism.
In 2018 I built a startup called Rain 4 Us. One component was something I called Data 4 Me, a tool that would analyze how algorithms were manipulating your data and show you a portrait of the manipulation being done to you. Give you back your narrative sovereignty.
Nobody cared. VCs thought it was interesting but unfundable. The problem wasn't visible enough yet. Also, they thought, as it would require training an AI for years, that it would be a money dump. They were right but...
Yesterday it became visible enough.
What happened in 24 hours
Anthropic gets blacklisted by the Trump administration for refusing to remove safeguards preventing Claude from being used in mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. OpenAI signs a Pentagon deal hours later. The US and Israel launch Operation Shield of Judah, with major strikes on Iran, including Tehran and nuclear facilities. Iran retaliates against US bases across the Gulf.
These look like three separate news stories. They're not. They're infrastructure, capability, and deployment in sequence.
But I'm not here to do geopolitical analysis. I'm here to talk about the mechanism underneath all of it.
The framework I built to understand radicalization
After years of research across psychology, criminology, sociology, anthropology, and media studies, I developed what I call the "narrative power" framework. I published an academic version last month: "Narrative Power: A Complementary Diagnostic Framework to the RBR Model for Intervention with Marginalized Youth."
The core idea is this. Radicalization, whether toward street gangs, extremist groups, or conspiracism, happens when three psychological pillars collapse at the same time.
Narrative Coherence. The ability to construct an intelligible story about your own life. Why are you where you are? How did you get here? Where are you going?
Control. The genuine sense that your choices are yours, that your actions have real impact, that you have actual authority over your own interpretation of reality. Not the feeling of control. Real control.
Relevance. The feeling that your life matters. That you're part of something larger than yourself. That's what you do that means something to someone.
When these three collapse simultaneously, a person becomes maximally vulnerable. Not because they're weak or stupid. Because they're human. We are narrative creatures. We cannot tolerate the absence of a coherent story about who we are and why we exist.
Radical groups, whether gangs, extremist movements, or conspiracist communities, are extraordinarily good at exactly one thing. Offering to restore all three pillars at once.
"Your life is chaotic because of them." That restores Coherence. "Join us, and you'll have power." That's Control. "You'll be a soldier in something cosmic." That's Relevance.
The offer is almost always partially built on real injustice. That's what makes it work. That's what makes it so hard to counter.
What Orwell got wrong
1984 is the reference everyone reaches for right now, and they're not entirely wrong. But Orwell made a critical error in his architecture.
He imagined control as visible and violent. The Ministry of Truth actively rewrites history. The telescreen watches you openly. The Party demands conscious participation in lies; doublethink requires actual effort from the person doing it.
He assumed people would feel the manipulation and have to suppress that feeling.
What he didn't anticipate was a system where you never feel it at all.
The algorithm doesn't rewrite your past. It just never shows you anything that contradicts your present narrative. It doesn't tell you what to think. It curates an environment where certain thoughts become literally unimaginable over time.
Radicalization through a social media feed doesn't feel like radicalization. It feels like finally understanding what's really going on. It feels like clarity. Like the fog lifting.
Because it's not destroying your coherence, it's providing a coherence that crowds out every alternative. It's not taking away your sense of control, it's offering an illusion of control that fills the void left by real powerlessness. It's not making you feel meaningless; it's making you feel cosmically important inside a system that needs you angry and engaged.
Winston Smith knew something was wrong. That knowing is what made him human in the novel.
The modern version eliminates the intuition that something is wrong. You don't silence dissent. You make it invisible to itself.
What yesterday actually proved
The Anthropic blacklisting happened because Claude refused to enable mass domestic surveillance. The Pentagon wanted what every authoritarian infrastructure eventually needs: a tool that can build a cognitive fingerprint of millions of people simultaneously. Not just their behaviour. Their reasoning patterns. Where their doubts live. What arguments move them? What emotional states make them susceptible? What specific combinations of ideas make them act versus stay passive?
Advertising already uses parts of this to sell shoes.
What gets built with that capability in the hands of a government managing internal dissent during a prolonged war is not complicated to imagine.
And the timing isn't coincidental. You build the surveillance infrastructure. You deploy the capability. You launch the war that creates the emergency requiring the surveillance. All in 24 hours.
The tool I should have built in 2018
Data 4 Me was trying to be a mirror. Show you what was being done to your narrative by the digital environment around you.
The framework I've spent years building in criminology is essentially the manual for understanding why that mirror matters and exactly what it should show you.
A personal AI layer that doesn't filter your information environment but continuously monitors the three pillars in your own thinking.
Is your narrative coherence being artificially stabilized around a single totalizing explanation?
Is your sense of control real, or are you following scripts that benefit someone else?
Is your sense of meaning genuinely yours, or have you been made cosmically important by a system that needs you angry?
Not censorship. Not a political tool. A cognitive sovereignty device. The technology to build this exists right now. The theoretical framework to make it rigorous exists right now. And the reason it matters just became front-page news.
Why I'm writing this today
I'm a 44-year-old criminology student at Université de Montréal, a Master student, with no PhD and about 20 Substack subscribers. I have a paper that's just starting its academic journey and a prototype that isn't built yet.
I'm not writing this because I think I'll save anything.
I'm writing this because I've been watching this specific mechanism operate for years, built a framework to describe it precisely, and yesterday it scaled to a civilizational level in a single news cycle.
If you've read this far, you already sense that something is wrong. The question is whether we develop the language to describe it precisely enough to do something about it before the architecture gets built around us.
I think we're close to that line.
The academic paper is available on request. As it is related to clinical intervention and linked to projects for my master's degree, it has to be taken in that context, but I will write a version ready for the field. I'm not claiming to be an expert. I'm someone who has been staring at this problem from an unusual angle for a long time and would rather say something imperfect right now than something polished in eighteen months.
For those interested in criminology specifically, the framework proposes a testable hypothesis about radicalization patterns that complements existing risk assessment models used across Canada and most European countries. Happy to go deep in the comments.
\**Disclaimer: My native language being French, I used Claude AI to translate the original version of this text and my article. I also used Grammarly to avoid common typpos and syntax errors.*
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