Democracy, at its core, is built on the premise that sovereignty belongs to the people. But as we’ve passed through the information age and entered the age of AI, the very question of what sovereignty means is beginning to shift.
In today’s world—where computational resources, electricity, and data can influence the fate of nations and the direction of society—how can citizens, as sovereign actors, recognize and exercise their sovereignty?
In the information age, sovereignty meant choosing which sources to trust, which platforms to participate in, and which algorithms to entrust with our attention. But in the age of AI, that definition requires a deeper level of inquiry.
For example, we now have to ask: which computational resources processed the information that underpins our decisions?
Where were the models trained? Under what national legal frameworks and ethical principles were they built?
Where does the electricity come from, and who controls the compute processes?
All of these questions are directly linked to how and what we think.
It increasingly feels as if computational resources are becoming the new foundation of sovereignty.
In this era, having the right to vote may no longer be enough to be a true sovereign.
We also need to understand where our data is stored, under what nation’s rules our cloud operates, and which computational infrastructures are supporting our decision-making.
That ability to understand and choose is what I would call the literacy required of sovereign citizens in the era of computational resources.
If we entrust everything to Big Tech, we are, often without realizing it, relinquishing our sovereignty.
Which compute environments can we access?
To which computational infrastructures do we submit our data?
These may now be political rights in their own way.
So what kind of literacy do we need in this age?
Not just technical understanding, but literacy that spans systems, energy, ethics, and the meaning of decentralization.
Knowing which computational ecosystem we live upon may be one of the most important forms of awareness we can have.
That, I believe, will be a new prerequisite for democracy in the age of AI.