GCRD Completes Landmark Lecture Series on AI, Manipulation, and Democratic Survival
The Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy has completed its first major public lecture series of 2026, with Founding Executive Director Dr. Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob delivering three sessions examining one of the defining challenges of our democratic moment: the weaponisation of the cognitive environment through AI-Enhanced Reflexive Control (AIRC).
Hosted by AltLiberalArts - a member of the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century, and running across three consecutive Mondays in February, Democracy, AI, and the Freedom to Learn: A Survival Curriculum for the 21st Century drew on research tracing how Soviet-era psychological warfare techniques have been fused with cutting-edge AI capabilities to manipulate entire information environments at unprecedented scale.
The three sessions moved from diagnosis to response. The first mapped the mechanics of AIRC: how computational content generation, predictive audience modelling, and dynamic narrative evolution combine to engineer the cognitive environment itself, producing populations who feel they are thinking freely while being steered toward predetermined conclusions. The second made the affirmative case for liberal arts education as civic infrastructure, arguing that the analytical, ethical, and contemplative capacities it cultivates are precisely what AIRC cannot automate and democracy cannot survive without. The third examined academic freedom as both a strategic target of influence operations and a foundational condition for resistance, drawing on the Bulgarian case study from research from GCRD-Sensika Disinformation Observatory.
The final session also featured a live demonstration of the Community Knowledge Encoder — a civic technology tool developed by GCRD that enables students and researchers to encode ethnographic fieldwork directly into AI system prompts on Anthropic’s Claude for the analysis of AIRC operations in their own communities. The demonstration showed how local knowledge, gathered through careful fieldwork, can become an active instrument of democratic inquiry and a powerful epistemological layer on AI.
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