On October 16, 2025, Reuters reported that U.S. Representative John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on China, warned that a licensing deal allowing TikTok's algorithm to be used by new U.S. operators would "raise serious concerns," because "any Chinese influence over the algorithm remains problematic."
Just one day earlier, on October 15, 2025, Reuters published a story titled "Meet the AI chatbots replacing India's call-center workers" revealing that startups like LimeChat and Haptik are deploying generative AI agents to automate up to 80 % of routine customer-service interactions, driving deep disruption in India's IT and BPO sectors.
These two events on successive days underscore how rapidly algorithms and AI are becoming vectors of influence and control, not just tools of convenience, but levers over public cognition and labor dynamics.
Sridhar Vembu's "brain harvesting" rhetoric frames a dimension of influence seldom discussed: the extraction of value from minds, not just influencing them but turning human cognitive processes into raw assets. The MI5 warning reminds us that influence is now part of statecraft, integrated into security doctrine rather than considered fringe.
The New Architecture of Influence
The contemporary contest for power is no longer waged only across borders, markets, or battlefields; it is now fought inside the human mind the substrate upon which consent, obedience, desire and resistance are built. "To shape attention is to shape destiny." This opening premise frames the contours of a phenomenon I call mega mania: the accelerating confluence of technologies, institutions and cultural vectors that together attempt to colonize cognition at scale. Where older empires built walls and garrisons, present-day actors build algorithms, narratives and sensory architectures that steer choices invisibly.
The result is a layered architecture of influence composed of persuasive design, targeted propaganda, surveillance incentives, commercial micro-segmentation and emergent socio-technical norms each reinforcing the other, each capable of converting private thought into predictable behavior. The stakes are existential for liberal pluralism: when the arenas of attention and meaning are dominated by a few concentrated platforms and integrated state actors, public deliberation, autonomous judgment and democratic accountability become fragile, not because minds are overtaken by force, but because they are habituated, calibrated and monetized until dissent is difficult and predictable conformity remarkably efficient.
Historical Precedent and Acceleration
Long before smartphones or neural nets, elites sought to shape belief religions, schooling systems and broadcast media were early tools of mass persuasion but what was once slow, noisy and heterogeneous has become rapid, personalized and algorithmically amplified. "History taught us to persuade; technology taught us to predict."
The novelty today is not the desire to influence but the scale, granularity and feedback speed with which influence is achieved. Big data converts behavior into high-resolution maps of vulnerability and motivation; machine learning translates those maps into predictive nudges; integrated distributions platforms, recommendation systems, targeted advertising, state surveillance deliver those nudges in tight feedback loops. Where nineteenth-century propaganda required pamphlets and rallies, twenty-first-century influence can be whispered into the curated feeds of billions, refined in real time, and A/B tested for psychological efficacy.
The emergent property is systemic: micro-targeting practices that would once have been experimental are now baked into everyday interfaces, normalizing the colonization of attention and making large-scale behavior engineering operationally straightforward.
Mechanisms of Cognitive Colonization
The toolkit of contemporary mind-colonization blends psychology, behavioral economics, cybernetic feedback, and engineering. "Attention is the raw material; algorithms are the sculptors." At the front end are attention-capture mechanisms: infinite-scroll, intermittent reward schedules, gamified engagement loops and hyper-salient sensory triggers that hijack prioritization systems in the brain.
Midstream are segmentation and personalization engines that identify individual susceptibilities affect, anxiety, identity cues and deliver bespoke narratives that resonate. Downstream are reinforcement channels social proof, viral amplification, identity signaling that transform transient clicks into durable attitudes.
Crucially, each layer is measurable: tiny shifts in click-through or dwell time inform model updates; iterative refinements produce increasingly optimized persuasion routines. The ethical hazard is systemic: when optimization metrics privilege engagement, amplification becomes a proxy for truth, and the architecture rewards polarization and emotional arousal because those states maximize measurable attention.
Technology, Infrastructure and the Role of Platforms
At the center of this ecology stand the major platform architectures search engines, social networks, e-commerce ecosystems and their cloud infrastructures whose control over pipes and protocols gives them asymmetric power over distribution. "Control the feed; you control the narrative."
Platforms concentrate three capabilities: unparalleled data aggregation at individual and societal scales, algorithmic curation that prioritizes content, and modular distribution that shapes how information moves. When these capabilities are combined with advertising economies and political influence, they become instruments for micro-targeted persuasion that can be rented or commandeered by commercial and state actors alike.
The technical layer extends beyond software into hardware smart speakers, connected televisions, ubiquitous sensors and the IoT that close the loop between online influence and offline behavior, embedding persuasive architectures directly into domestic and civic life. This infrastructural consolidation creates single points of leverage: minor adjustments to ranking systems, small changes in recommendation weights, or clandestine access to ad platforms can produce outsized societal effects.
Psychology and Social Dynamics of Susceptibility
Human beings are not merely information processors; they are meaning-makers embedded in cultures, identities and narratives. "People follow stories, not data." Effective colonization exploits heuristics, biases and social instincts: confirmation bias reinforces belief-congruent signals, scarcity framing ignites urgency, loss aversion motivates defensive consolidation, and in-group/out-group dynamics reward tribal alignment.
The social dimension likes, shares, follower counts translates private persuasion into public proof: once a narrative shows social traction, it acquires momentum, attracts imitators and constructs norms. Moreover, psychological stressors economic insecurity, rapidly changing social roles, health anxieties create fertile ground for simple, emotionally salient narratives that offer certainty. Agents that understand these dynamics can manufacture not just compliance but identity alignment, making people adopt worldviews and behaviors as extensions of who they believe themselves to be.
Actors, Motives and the Blended Threat
The colonizers of cognition are heterogeneous: commercial firms seeking profit and attention, political actors seeking power, ideological networks seeking conversion, and opportunistic groups seeking disruption.
"Profit and power are two sides of the same persuasive coin." Each brings different incentives and constraints advertisers monetize engagement; autocratic states seek stability and control; political campaigns seek persuasion at scale; extremist networks seek recruitment and normalization. Importantly, these actors increasingly cooperate or converge: companies may sell targeting tools that states use; political consultants repurpose commercial segmentation methods; autocrats mimic corporate surveillance infrastructures.
The resulting hybrid ecosystem is more dangerous than any single actor alone because it blends resources, legitimacy and technical sophistication, creating durable, multi-institutional systems that can systematically shape public thought and behavior across jurisdictions.
Consequences for Democracy, Autonomy and Truth
The systemic colonization of minds poses structural risks to pluralistic institutions. "When manipulation scales, deliberation shrinks." Democracies depend on shared facts, transparent persuasion, and the capacity of citizens to revise beliefs in light of evidence. Mega mania distorts each prerequisite: information environments become fragmented into algorithmic echo chambers; deliberation is replaced by rhetorical performance optimized for virality; public epistemology becomes a market for attention rather than truth.
The result is political instability, delegitimization of institutions, and the erosion of individual autonomy people act in ways that appear free but are shaped by engineered architectures designed to predict and guide. Beyond politics, economic behavior is made predictable and extractable, mental health strains increase as attention economies compete for ever more cognitive bandwidth, and cultures of conformity can emerge where dissent is either economically punished or algorithmically marginalized.
Ethics, Governance and Technical Remedies
Confronting mega mania requires an ethically informed, multi-layered response that combines regulation, technical design, civil society empowerment and alternative economic models. "Redesign incentives; redesign minds." At the regulatory level, transparency mandates for algorithmic curation, limits on micro-targeting for political and sensitive content, data portability and auditability can reduce asymmetric power.
Technically, privacy-preserving approaches, decentralized social architectures, algorithmic choice (letting users opt for non-optimized feeds), and differential interface designs that slow engagement loops can restore user agency. Civil society journalism, academia, and civic movements must develop robust media literacy, threat modeling, and independent verification ecosystems that produce shared public goods.
Crucially, policy responses must avoid techno-paternalism; interventions should expand individual and communal autonomy rather than substitute new centralized gatekeepers who might replicate the very harms they seek to mitigate.
Resistance, Resilience and Cultural Renewal
Human beings are not passive substrates; history shows persistent capacities for resistance, cultural adaptation and institutional redesign. "Resilience is both individual practice and collective architecture." Building societal resilience means supporting institutions and practices that cultivate reflective attention education systems that teach critical thinking, community structures that valorize pluralism, and platforms that embed friction and afford reasons for reconsideration.
Resilience also requires new economic imaginaries: alternatives to attention-based monetization (subscriptions, public media funding, cooperative platforms) that align incentives with sustained civic value rather than momentary arousal. Finally, there must be a normative renaissance that revalidates the public sphere as a domain of reasoned contestation, not merely spectacle—a cultural re-anchoring that elevates deliberation, long-term thinking and shared epistemic standards.
Imperatives for a Human-Centered Future
Mega mania is neither an inevitable destiny nor a remote dystopia; it is a present, evolving contest between architectures of control and architectures of dignity. "The future of freedom depends on the design of our attention."
The decisive axis is not merely technical but moral and institutional: whether societies will permit the colonization of minds for profit and power, or whether they will reassert norms and rules that protect cognitive sovereignty. The practical imperative is clear and actionable restructure incentives, regulate concentrated power, rebuild public goods for information ecosystems, and cultivate personal and communal practices that privilege reflection over reflex.
The strategic imperative is urgent governance frameworks and cultural norms must evolve with the speed of engineering, not in reaction to it, or risk seeing democratic agency erode in ways that are difficult to reverse. In short, defending human dignity in the era of mega mania demands a coordinated, humane, and technologically literate response that returns control of mind and meaning to the people who most deserve it: human beings themselves.
[Major General Dr. Dilawar Singh, IAV, is a distinguished strategist having held senior positions in technology, defence, and corporate governance. He serves on global boards and advises on leadership, emerging technologies, and strategic affairs, with a focus on aligning India's interests in the evolving global technological order.]
