They’ll Use AI to Centralize Power. We Must Use It to Decentralize Resistance.

Fear consolidates. Freedom distributes.

Illustration by Abdel Mukhtar

By Trygve Olson

This is the sixth in the seven-part series, “AI vs. Autocracy: Seven Lessons in the New Battle for Democracy.”

Authoritarianism thrives on control.

And artificial intelligence — especially large language models (LLMs), predictive surveillance tools, and AI-enhanced information pipelines — gives autocrats something they’ve always wanted: total visibility and faster decision-making with fewer checks.

For fear-based regimes, this isn’t about innovation.
It’s about centralization.
AI gives them the power to compress decision-making into smaller circles, eliminate dissenting inputs, and dominate the narrative in every corner of the system.

It’s what I’ve seen in Belarus. In Russia. In parts of Georgia.
And increasingly, it’s the direction we’re watching here at home.

The Law of Political Gravity

In The Battle for Democracy, I wrote that democracy building — like physics — operates by laws.

One of the most important:

Fear-based systems work top-down. Free societies work side by side.

Fear consolidates. Freedom distributes.
Authoritarians want to control the vertical — the one strongman, the one truth, the one path.
But democracies survive and grow when people act across the horizontal: individuals, networks, communities, institutions — all working in distributed ways toward shared values.

This is what makes decentralization so powerful — and why autocrats fear it.

What the Autocrats Will Do

AI gives fear-based systems more ways to tighten their vertical control:

• Predictive behavior modeling to anticipate and preempt dissent

• Surveillance at scale through facial recognition, chat analysis, and social graph mapping

• Centralized state-controlled LLMs that overwrite local truth with regime-approved content

• Institutional dependency — where media, parliament, and judiciary all depend on regime favor to survive

I’ve seen this logic before — in regimes that didn’t need to ban opposition outright because they could neutralize them in advance.

The technology has changed.
The physics haven’t.

What Democracy Must Do

If AI enables autocrats to centralize power, we must use AI to decentralize resistance.

That doesn’t mean being disorganized.
It means building a distributed power system, where no single point of failure can collapse the movement.

This strategy follows another law of political physics:

Success isn’t about who has more resources — it’s about who uses theirs smarter.

Democratic forces may not have the same level of financial resources, media control, or surveillance capabilities as regimes. But they can out-organize, out-connect, and outlast — if they build horizontally.

AI can help do that.

How We Decentralize with AI

1. Equip Local Actors.
   City clerks. School board leaders. Regional media. Election workers. Give them AI tools that detect disinfo, flag threats, and automate response — at their level.

2. Use Open-Source LLMs to Localize Knowledge.
   Train models on regional dialects, real community issues, and trusted messengers — so AI amplifies local truth, not national spin.

3. Create Peer-to-Peer Defense Networks.
   Build systems that can flag and address disinformation or digital threats at the grassroots level. Think neighborhood watch, but for democracy.

4. Turn Organizing into a Platform.
   AI can streamline volunteer coordination, distribute content in multiple languages, and map trust networks — all ways to empower people at the edge, not just the center.

Three Things You Can Do Today

1. Support tech infrastructure at the local level.
Libraries, small newsrooms, city councils — they need tools, training, and backup. This is the digital front line.

2. Build resilience into your community.
Create redundancy in communication. Know who your trusted messengers are. Don’t wait for a crisis to start organizing.

3. Choose tools that give you control.
Avoid platforms that centralize power without transparency. Look for decentralized apps, open-source tools, and systems that work for you, not just on you.

Bottom Line

AI gives autocrats the control tower.
But it gives democrats the means to build networks that resist from below.

The lesson from Belarus to Bakhmut to Baton Rouge is the same:
When resistance is distributed, it survives.

Not every voice can be silenced.
Not every node can be severed.
Not every truth can be scrubbed from the system when the system is no longer centralized.

This is the next frontier — not in coding, but in power.

And if we play it smart, we don’t just hold the line.
We shift it.

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