The World Builders

The most efficient way to control someone is to make them believe they chose.

At Davos, on January 21, 2026, President Trump uttered a phrase that, under other circumstances, might have seemed banal: You can say yes, and we will be very grateful. Or you can say no, and we will remember. It was about Greenland. But it was, in fact, about something else. About a way of being in the world that no longer tolerates alternatives.

On the same day, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered, unwittingly, the perfect reply: We are in the middle of a rupture, not a transition. The old order will not return. And the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, added what sounds like an epitaph, unintentionally, of course: When friends shake hands, it must mean something.

Three voices from three positions, contributing to the involuntary conclusion that the world we live in is no longer the one in which we were born and raised. But what exactly has changed?

Public narratives mask invisible stakes. This is the first lesson. Trump speaks of Greenland as a piece of ice, cold and poorly positioned. But no one threatens seven-decade alliances just for ice. The real stake is digital strategic security. Whoever controls the nodes, controls the information. Whoever controls information and the anxieties of populations, controls the world.

But let us pause for a moment on what it means to control information in 2026. We already live in an artificial environment without being asked for consent and without being told we are entering somewhere. The recommendation algorithms of TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram do not invite us into a virtual world—they brutally construct the world in which we already live.

What information we receive, what opinions we encounter, what products are offered to us, what people are suggested as potential friends or partners—all of these are mediated by systems we neither see nor understand.

Thought itself is beginning to be mediated, and this is something entirely new. When ChatGPT answers our questions, we do not enter artificial intelligence—artificial intelligence enters us. And it is precisely this undeclared entry, this gradual absorption, that makes it so powerful.

Yes, there is a hidden power behind these systems. But it is not the power that conspiracy theorists speak of—there is no secret group controlling everything, no unified agenda, no deliberate plan for world domination. It is much worse. The power is structural. It results from the architecture of the systems, not from the intentions of the actors. And this is precisely why it is so difficult to contest—because there is no clear adversary, no center that can be attacked, no decision that can be reversed.

For example, training a current AI model requires thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, months of computation, tens of billions of dollars. NVIDIA holds over 80% of the market. But TSMC in Taiwan produces almost all the advanced chips needed for NVIDIA boards. Three cloud companies—AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud—provide the infrastructure on which most digital services run. This concentration of digital resources is unprecedented in the history of technology. Neither oil, nor coal, nor nuclear energy have ever been as monopolized as digital energy is now.

In short, ideology works best when it is not perceived as ideology. A newspaper editorial can be recognized as expressing a point of view, but a response from ChatGPT appears to be information, pure and simple. A recommendation algorithm seems to reflect user preferences. A submarine fiber optic cable seems to be merely technical infrastructure. Each of these systems was built by people with a set of values implemented through the education they received, was designed according to criteria established by people with specific interests, and implemented by people with concrete visions of how the world should function. The systems appear neutral at first glance, but they are not.

The world appears immutable, the result of natural evolution, but in fact it is constructed. And the builders have interests. This is the supreme form of power—a will disguised as a work. Not through direct command, but through the very architecture of options. There is no longer any need to force anything; inevitability will appear as apparent.

Today, declared ideology is no longer fashionable—simulated neutrality is. And yet, there is a limit. People absolutely do not want to flee from reality. The resounding failure of Metaverse projects has demonstrated this abundantly. The immersive Metaverse, with VR glasses, 3D avatars, and virtual worlds for socializing, collapsed spectacularly. Meta has lost over $40 billion so far. People refused to wear headsets to socialize.

The COVID-19 pandemic offered the perfect natural experiment for this global project. Forced to live digitally, billions of people discovered that forced digitalization produces exhaustion, not pleasure. Children suffered obvious, measurable cognitive losses due to online learning. Adults discovered that although they could work from home, something essential was missing—above all, physical presence and the spontaneity of natural, unmediated interaction.

But this resistance does not change the fundamental equation. The explicit Metaverse died, yes, but the implicit Metaverse won. We were not asked to enter a virtual world—the virtual world entered us, without asking.

Let us return to Davos. The most significant event was not the speech about Greenland. It was the announcement about the Board of Peace. An international organization in which Trump is permanent president, even after he leaves the White House. Permanent membership costs $1 billion, fixed rate. The declared purpose is noble—to be a more agile and efficient alternative to the UN. This is world building in its most explicit form—the construction of an alternative institutional infrastructure in which the USA, through Trump personally, sets the rules. Not the UN with its equal members, but a new system in which whoever pays, plays, and whoever doesn’t pay, is played.

In short. US Secretary of Commerce Lutnick declared, without a trace of irony: Globalization has failed. This will be an interesting journey. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded with a formula that summarizes everything: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. A saying that in Romania is repeated until it no longer impresses anyone.

All, absolutely all European reactions confirm the asymmetry of power. Von der Leyen: A deal is a deal. Macron: We will not submit to aggressors. Starmer: Great Britain will not yield its principles. These are merely sterile declarations of principle—they are not strategies.

It is already evident that Europe cannot build a rival system. It does not produce advanced chips. It has no frontier AI models. It does not control the global cloud. It can only resist or accept—exactly the situation of those who are not world builders.

For Romania, the implications are even more profound. We are consumers of digital infrastructure built by others—Americans or Chinese, as you prefer. We do not have the capacity to build AI models, to produce advanced chips, to launch communication satellites. We give our energy to others without being told why, and we receive our food from others because it’s cheaper that way. This country is like a retirement home with pensioners glued to the TV and the radiator, where grandchildren come twice a month to take their pension, in exchange for a bag of groceries and topping up their phone card. We are in the world, somewhere at the window—not builders of the world. The difference is enormous and decisive for what will follow.

But let us not rush to conclusions. There is a tacit presupposition in everything I have said so far—it is as if the world builders were sovereign over their own creations. America builds global digital infrastructure. China builds an alternative system. Each actor seems to act from the position of an autonomous subject that shapes the object-world.

But this presupposition masks a much more disturbing reality—in fact, the builders are themselves built.

In the same week that Trump threatens Europe with tariffs over Greenland, his administration is quietly negotiating with Taiwan to ensure continuity of deliveries from TSMC. Because Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces approximately 90% of the world’s advanced chips. Without TSMC, there is no iPhone. No NVIDIA GPUs. No cloud servers. And no artificial intelligence.

The entire American digital infrastructure, with all its data centers, all its AI models, and all its advanced military systems, depends on an island of 24 million inhabitants located 180 kilometers from mainland China. An island that China considers part of its territory.

Intel and Samsung are trying to build alternatives, but they are years behind, and TSMC’s Arizona factories produce only previous-generation chips. The crude reality is that the American world builder is built by Taiwan. And Taiwan is built by the water that China can block, by the energy it imports, by the engineers that Western universities still train. So the chain of dependencies has no end. Every builder is themselves built. That’s how things work.

Bruno Maçães, in his recent book World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics (Cambridge University Press, 2025), offers a theoretical framework for understanding this paradox. His central thesis is that geopolitics no longer consists in controlling territory, but in constructing territory—that is, creating artificial worlds that others are forced to inhabit. Whoever builds the system, builds the rules.