Narrative Dominance: The Race to Define Reality
In January 2025, a Chinese lab released an AI model built at a fraction of its American rivals' cost. Within days, DeepSeek had become a "Sputnik moment", proof that chip sanctions had failed, proof that they were working, a triumph of open-source research, a national security threat and a data-privacy scandal. One framing - that cheaper models could mean less demand for chips - contributed to Nvidia losing nearly $600 billion in market value in a single day.
The same technological breakthrough had given rise to radically different interpretations, each illuminating certain possibilities while leaving others in shadow. And somewhere between these competing perspectives, the struggle over meaning begins.
Reality has structure, but it takes light to reveal it. Our perception works in much the same way: it does not create the landscape, but determines what becomes visible, what recedes and what begins to matter.
Narratives organise that perception. They connect events, assign meaning and direct attention. A protest can become democratic resistance, public disorder or foreign interference. AI can become prosperity, strategic power or systemic risk.
Reality still sets limits on what can be claimed. Narrative dominance, however, emerges when one frame begins to organise the field itself, becoming the background against which everything else is understood.
Beyond Truth and Falsehood
We often speak about the human and the machine as though they operated at opposite poles. Instead, technologies, including digital space and AI, are better understood as extensions of human possibility. They do not only expand what we can do, but deepen the ways in which our attention, fears, desires and loyalties can be reached and amplified.
Seen this way, the struggle between truth and falsehood begins to look different. In everyday life, we do not speak only in the language of facts. We remember childhood, holidays or someone we love through feelings, emotions and experiences. We speak about politics in much the same way.
For this reason, the contemporary information environment cannot be understood simply as a struggle between truth and lies. A false claim can be disproved. But another person cannot be forbidden from feeling. Narratives accumulate, gradually establishing which events belong together, whom to trust, where threats are found and what deserves attention. By the time we begin speaking about an event, new information then enters a structure already in place.
The information revolution may therefore be less an apocalyptic erosion of truth than a continuation of something much older: people are governed by passions. What has changed are the tools, and with them the scale, reach and speed. The struggle is not only between individual facts, but between competing systems of interpretation. Not a new enemy, but a new method. And a new method requires new tools.
Europe Has Begun to Name the Struggle
European institutions are increasingly using language that reflects this broader problem. We heard it again only weeks ago in Strasbourg: in her State of the Union address, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen named Russian interference and disinformation among the forces working to divide the bloc, and warned that they seek to “weaponise” public concerns - from wars to disruptive technology - to turn Europeans against each other.
Concepts such as foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), cognitive warfare, information threats and hybrid threats all attempt to describe activity that extends beyond a single false claim. Research is moving in the same direction: this year the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence produced “Crisis, Control, Crusade”, a 194-page study of Russia’s propaganda architecture - research Repsense was commissioned to carry out. Its subject was the system itself, not a catalogue of individual false claims.
Attention is shifting towards systems: who introduces a narrative, how it moves through the information space, which communities receive it and when it enters the mainstream. These are questions about the structure of narratives, not only their content.
Such systems are difficult to analyse because they constantly shift and adapt. A post matters, but so does the network around it. A claim matters, but so does the narrative it reinforces. The source matters, but so does the path along which it moves.
This is where narrative intelligence becomes useful: not as a replacement for media monitoring or fact-checking, but as a way to see the structures that connect them.
The Power to Set the Frame
Artificial intelligence is a useful example because almost every major political discussion about it already takes place through competing narrative frames.
For some, AI represents productivity, scientific acceleration and economic growth. For others, labour disruption, security risk, disinformation or concentration of power. Each narrative draws on real technological possibilities, but gives them different weight.
This is the policy conflict described at the opening of this text. In the United States, Trump and leading technology companies have pushed a model centred on competitiveness and lighter regulation, while the EU continues to defend more binding oversight.
Reality still sets limits. But narratives help determine which questions receive attention. If AI is understood primarily as a question of competitiveness, one set of policies follows. If it is understood as a security problem, another.
The first strategic victory, then, is not necessarily winning the argument, but determining what the argument is about.
Narrative analysis is therefore not about declaring one interpretation correct and another illegitimate. It is about understanding the architecture through which interpretations acquire power.
Fragments of Perception
The information environment has always mediated between us and reality. Newspapers selected stories, television selected images, political movements selected symbols.
What has changed is the scale, speed and personalisation of that mediation. Algorithms increasingly determine what enters our field of vision, while each of us inhabits a slightly different information environment.
There is no longer one shared beam of light moving across the same landscape, but millions. The challenge is therefore not only to identify false information, but to understand how fragmented systems of attention produce different realities from the same underlying world.
Speaking about narratives this way carries one danger: if every event can be framed differently, reality itself may begin to seem negotiable. It is not. The landscape exists whether or not the beam of light reaches it. Evidence matters. Some claims are simply false. Narrative analysis is meaningful only if we preserve this distinction – which is why narrative intelligence must begin with evidence, not only with stories.
Measuring the Angle of Light
Narrative dominance can sound abstract, almost metaphysical: theoretically plausible, practically elusive. But the phenomenon itself is not new. What has changed are the tools that have expanded its scale - and those same tools now allow us to observe it.
We can measure how quickly a story spreads, who introduces and amplifies it, how language travels across platforms, when narratives move from niche spaces into the mainstream, and how they mutate across communities and political moments.
This is not hypothetical. In our Czech study “The Grievance Factory”, we mapped how eurosceptic narratives were built across TikTok, Facebook and X: who introduced them, which communities carried them and when they reached mainstream audiences.
Together, these signals show how interpretative power moves. That is the difference between counting mentions and mapping the information environment. Volume tells us what is loudest. Narrative analysis helps us anticipate what comes next - shifting us from passive observation towards intervention.
The Final Frame
Strategic competition in today’s information environment is not merely a race of quantity. It is a race to set the perspective from which events are connected, actors become important and certain risks demand attention.
A dominant narrative becomes the reference point against which competing narratives define themselves. Even those who reject it may remain within its conceptual territory. To understand narrative dominance, then, is to make this architecture of interpretation visible: to see not only what comes into focus, but also what remains in shadow.