The New Dark Age

Excavating the Facts Buried Beneath the Alarm

To understand the scaffolding that holds The Guardian’s story upright, we have to pull apart the beams the article itself provides and then illuminate the beams it quietly hides. The truth is that even propaganda, when inspected carefully, leaves its fingerprints in the form of verifiable statements. These are the claims the article openly offers: that a Russian-linked “Pravda network” has existed since 2014; that it surged from producing roughly 6,000 articles a day in one year to around 23,000 the next; that hundreds of English-language websites have linked to it; that more than 80% of those websites treated its material as credible; that 40% of the Pravda content circulating among them was about the war in Ukraine; that chatbots, under certain conditions, had spit out Russian-aligned talking points; and that a London think tank, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), has raised the alarm about this digital tide. The article also asserts that the French government previously identified this Pravda network, and that experts fear the Russians may be stuffing the internet full of content to influence the training of large language models. These are the data points The Guardian is willing to put on the table.

But verifiable claims, on their own, are never innocent. They occur against a backdrop of equally important facts that the article leaves in the shadows. And it is those silences—the information excluded, the context erased—that reveal the deeper structure of the narrative. For instance, we are told the Pravda network publishes thousands of articles per day, but we are not told how many people actually read them. We receive raw volume without reach, scale without impact. In any meaningful analysis of influence, engagement matters more than output; yet the article declines even to gesture at this dimension. This omission is not accidental. An avalanche of unread articles makes for a dramatic statistic, but a poor explanation of meaningful influence. The Guardian’s numbers impress the imagination, not the intellect.

The article also invites us to panic over chatbots that have, at times, echoed pro-Russian talking points. But it provides no context for how large language models actually function, no explanation of how training data is filtered, how alignment layers constrain outputs, how guardrails operate, or how isolated “hallucinations” differ from systemic tendencies. Without that context, readers are steered toward superstition rather than understanding. The chatbot becomes a haunted mirror: one wrong answer, extracted under unknown prompting conditions, becomes evidence of Russian infiltration. The silence surrounding AI architectures is not simply a gap in reporting—it is the vacuum that fear rushes into.

Then there is ISD, the think tank whose study anchors the article’s central claims. We are told only that it is London-based and that it studies disinformation. Everything else is left for the reader to imagine. Missing is the institutional context: who funds ISD, who it partners with, what governments and corporations rely on its research, and how its analyses shape regulatory agendas. Without these facts, ISD appears as a neutral lighthouse on the foggy sea of the internet. In reality, every think tank is situated in a network of funders, interests, political alignments, and state priorities. By refusing to name any of this, the article raises ISD’s findings to the level of scripture while erasing the material conditions under which scripture is produced.

The Guardian also reports that French authorities previously identified the Pravda network, but does not situate this within France’s own expanding information-security apparatus. Nor does it mention the broader Western ecosystem of “strategic communications” units, media influence programs, and counter-disinformation initiatives that have grown explosively since the early 2010s. By isolating the Russian operation from the global field of information warfare, the article encourages readers to see only one aggressor, one manipulator, one propaganda machine operating on the planet. What disappears is the historical and geopolitical reality that major powers—East and West—compete vigorously over the production of meaning.

Even the article’s rawest claim—that hundreds of English-language websites have linked to Pravda material—sits in a hollowed-out context. Which websites? What political orientations? What levels of traffic? Were these links accidental, intentional, critical, or incidental? Were they comment sections, aggregators, corporate blogs, content farms, or mainstream outlets? Without this information, the statement becomes a Rorschach test. The reader fills the gaps with imagination, fear, or whatever anxieties about foreign meddling the political climate has conditioned them to feel.

What becomes clear, once the fog is peeled back, is that the facts supplied by the article are only fragments: numbers without proportion, claims without counterpoints, and expert warnings without structural context. The omissions—about ISD’s location in Western statecraft, about the mechanics of AI systems, about the reach of the Pravda network, about the West’s own informational machinery—are not accidental holes in the story. They are the architecture through which the story acquires its shape. By controlling what is visible and what is hidden, the article frames the reader’s understanding more effectively than any explicit argument could.

And so, as we sift through the debris of The Guardian’s narrative, we see the outline of a deeper conflict: one between the stated facts and the unstated conditions that make those facts meaningful. The article offers a handful of data points floating in midair, detached from the wider ecosystem of global information struggles. Our task, then, is not merely to list what the article reports, but to restore the ground it wipes clean—to recover the broader terrain of geopolitics, media power, and digital infrastructure that gives these scattered claims their true shape. Only when we reinsert the facts The Guardian left out can we begin to see the article not as a neutral analysis, but as one move in a larger contest over how the world is told.

Reassembling the World the Guardian Buried

Once the smoke from The Guardian’s alarm bell clears, once we gather the scattered facts and the missing ones, we begin to see a much larger and more familiar landscape. It is the landscape of an imperial information order struggling to hold its shape in a world that is no longer obliged to orbit it. The Pravda network may exist, and it may produce an astonishing number of articles, but what The Guardian’s narrative really reveals is the anxiety of a power structure watching its monopoly on storytelling erode.

When The Guardian tells its readers that Russian articles might “fill a gap” as Western coverage of Ukraine declines, it unintentionally describes the problem with astonishing accuracy. Who created that gap? Who decided that the largest war in Europe in a generation no longer deserved front-page space? It was not Pravda that abandoned Ukraine; it was Western media itself, fatigued, distracted, shifting to new spectacles. The fear is not that the Russian narrative is too strong, but that the Western narrative has lost its stamina. The Guardian’s panic is the panic of a landlord who stopped maintaining the building and now fears that squatters might move in.

This is where the deeper contradictions emerge. In Part II, we saw how the article offers numbers without proportion, experts without context, and warnings without evidence. Those omissions are not mere editorial sloppiness—they reflect the worldview of an imperial center that believes its own voice should be the atmospheric default. Russia, in this story, does not simply publish a lot of articles; it intrudes into a space that the West assumes belongs to it. The internet, in The Guardian’s telling, is a terrain whose natural state is Western enlightenment, disrupted only by foreign meddling. This assumption of epistemic ownership is not an accidental bias; it is the residue of centuries of imperial supremacy in media, education, and global communication.

But that supremacy is cracking. The panic around “LLM grooming,” the hand-wringing about vulnerable chatbots, the warnings about “coverage vacuums”—all of it only makes sense in a world where Western informational dominance is slipping. Large language models, for all their limitations, represent something new and destabilizing: a globalized machine trained on the world’s text, not just the text curated by Western gatekeepers. Western institutions cannot fully control what these models ingest, nor can they dictate which narratives surface once the model begins generating language. And so, in the face of that uncontrollable process, the response is moral panic. The chatbot has become the new Third World: unpredictable, disobedient, and in need of “stabilization.”

Meanwhile, across the world, the working class and the poor live in the blast radius of narratives crafted far from their own realities. Whether it is Pravda pushing Russia’s line or The Guardian pushing Britain’s, global South peoples rarely appear as subjects with their own intelligence, their own political desires, their own capacity to interpret events. They are spoken to or spoken about, never spoken with. And this erasure of the global majority’s agency is the quiet consensus that binds Moscow and London alike, even as they battle for narrative advantage. But for the colonized and semi-colonized world—from the African Sahel to the Caribbean archipelago—narrative sovereignty is not an academic matter. It is a question of political survival, economic development, and the very ability to articulate their own path through a world dominated by militarized superpowers.

In this context, The Guardian’s focus on Russian content production looks less like a defense of democracy and more like a defense of market share. The West is no longer the sole producer of the world’s meaning. BRICS nations are setting up media partnerships, new development banks, joint news platforms. African and Asian broadcasters are refusing to simply parrot Euro-American lines. Latin American states are building regional information infrastructures independent of Washington’s supervision. The imperial center feels these tremors and interprets them as threats rather than as the natural unfolding of a multipolar world.

What we are witnessing, beneath the Guardian’s narrative costume, is the birth of an information order no longer guaranteed to serve the interests of the old hegemon. And in that transition, the global working class—especially in the global South—stands to gain the most. Because when information power disperses, so too does the authority to define the crises and possibilities of our time. When narrative monopolies crack, the stories of peasants in India, miners in South Africa, teachers in Brazil, and warehouse workers in the United States can no longer be flattened beneath the weight of a single imperial storyline.

The Guardian’s alarm, then, is the alarm of a worldview losing its grip. It is the sound of an empire that once believed it could dictate the truth now finding itself one voice among many. And that, fundamentally, is why the article refuses to contextualize its own claims: context would reveal that the Pravda network is not the danger; the danger, for the imperial core, is that the world no longer fears its voice. The danger is that meaning itself is slipping beyond its jurisdiction.

When we reassemble the world The Guardian tried to bury—by restoring the facts it suppressed, by situating its claims within the global struggle over information power—we uncover not a Russian plot to “groom” machines, but a Western elite desperate to retain its privilege of telling the world what is true. And it is precisely at this juncture, where the old authority falters and new voices emerge, that revolutionary movements, colonized nations, and multipolar forces must seize the opportunity to reshape the global narrative in the image of the world’s majority. Because the truth is simple: if an empire must disguise its insecurity behind the mask of moral panic, then its authority is already dying. What remains is for the global working class to define what replaces it.

Toward a Global Rebellion of Meaning

If The Guardian’s anxiety signals anything, it is that the battlefield of truth is no longer a quiet estate patrolled by Western gatekeepers. The terrain has shifted. Narratives are escaping their cages. The monopoly over meaning, once guarded from London to Washington, is now contested in Caracas, Johannesburg, Jakarta, and Guangzhou. And it is precisely in this shifting terrain—this collapse of epistemic unipolarity—that the global working class, the colonized nations, and the revolutionary currents inside the imperial core must find their opening. For once an empire can no longer dictate the story, the people can begin to narrate themselves.

The contradictions laid bare in The Guardian’s article point us directly toward the tasks ahead. The empire fears a “coverage vacuum”; therefore, the organized forces of the oppressed must fill that vacuum with their own voices. The empire fears “LLM grooming”; therefore, workers and technologists must build and democratize the very digital infrastructures the elites hope to control. The empire hides the reach and nature of its own information machinery; therefore, our movements must expose, counter, and surpass it with networks rooted not in profit or geopolitical dominance, but in solidarity and liberation. These are not abstract principles—they emerge organically from the very anxieties the article tries to mask.

Across the Global South, movements are already rising to meet these contradictions. African Union debates over continental data sovereignty signal a hunger for autonomy from Silicon Valley’s extraction of digital labor and digital life. In Latin America, regional broadcasters and alternative news alliances—from teleSUR to Prensa Latina to the smaller community-run outlets in Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile—are building cross-border narrative power independent of Washington’s editorial hand. In West Asia, media networks tied to resistance blocs have become critical sources of counter-narrative during war, sanctions, and occupation. In India, the farmers’ movement built its own communication infrastructure when the national media refused to report their struggle honestly. In the Philippines, labor organizers have formed digital brigades to combat corporate censorship and state narratives targeting unions. These are not isolated sparks—they are the early architectures of a world where the oppressed refuse to be spoken for.

Inside the imperial core, too, the seeds of resistance are germinating. Tech worker unions, from Google’s organizing efforts to smaller coalitions across the software industry, are beginning to challenge the role of their own employers in surveillance, military contracting, and information manipulation. Independent media collectives across the United States and Europe—rooted in Black, Indigenous, migrant, and working-class communities—are refusing to let legacy outlets monopolize credibility. Student movements from France to South Africa have created their own research centers and publishing platforms to force anti-imperialist analysis into public view. These forces are often fragmented, underfunded, or besieged, but they exist—and they represent the beginnings of a counterforce capable of contesting the narrative terrain The Guardian claims as its inheritance.

From these real, living movements, a tactical program emerges—one not grafted onto the moment from the outside, but grown directly from the material conditions and contradictions we have traced. First, we must nurture and defend independent media rooted in working-class and colonized communities, especially those providing the coverage the empire refuses to give. Second, we must support digital sovereignty efforts in the Global South, ensuring that data, infrastructure, and narrative power cannot be harvested and weaponized by foreign capital. Third, we must strengthen the position of tech workers as a strategic sector—because in an era where information is a weapon, the people who build the tools hold decisive leverage. Fourth, we must establish transnational networks of journalists, researchers, and organizers who can coordinate across borders to break the isolation that imperial media imposes. These are not distant goals—they are already in motion. Our task is to deepen them.

The final step is political clarity: to understand that this struggle over information is not a side issue or a cultural skirmish. It is a front line of imperialism. When The Guardian trembles at the idea of losing its grip on the narrative, it is telling us that meaning itself has become a site of class war. The question is no longer whether one faction’s propaganda defeats another’s—it is whether the global majority can seize control over the stories that shape their lives. In this sense, the Pravda network and The Guardian are mere shadows cast by a much larger contest: who will define the crises of our era, and who will define the paths out of them?

To answer that question, the working classes, peasants, and colonized nations must build a rebellion of meaning—a worldwide movement that asserts the right to narrate, analyze, and interpret without permission from the imperial centers. A movement that links the struggle for material liberation with the struggle for narrative liberation. A movement where the teacher’s strike in Lagos, the climate fight in Bangladesh, the anti-austerity protests in Britain, the miners’ struggles in South Africa, the anti-sanctions coalitions in Venezuela and Iran, and the tech worker uprisings in California all become part of a shared global horizon.

The empire is losing its voice. Not because Russia overwhelmed it, but because the world is no longer willing to whisper. The task before us is not merely to critique the dying narrative—it is to replace it with one worthy of the billions who have been silenced. And that task, comrades, begins wherever people gather to fight, to learn, to speak, and to refuse. From there, a new chorus emerges: not Russian, not Western, but global, rebellious, and unmistakably ours.