The Empire of Code: X, AI, and the Digital Looting of Europe

How Elon Musk’s AI project is exposing the soft underbelly of European data sovereignty in the age of technofascist empire.

By Weaponized Information

There was a time when colonial theft required ships and rifles. Today, it requires algorithms. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has launched an investigation into X (formerly Twitter) for its use of Europeans’ personal data to train Elon Musk’s new AI model, Grok. This isn’t just a regulatory inquiry—it’s a flashpoint in the global battle over data sovereignty.

X has admitted that it is scraping user data—including posts, metadata, and behavioral patterns—to feed the neural networks behind its generative AI. What it hasn’t disclosed is how that data is being extracted from users in the European Union without clear consent, in violation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

At stake is more than privacy. This is about who gets to own the future. In the same way colonial powers once looted natural resources, today’s digerati—Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg—are looting cognitive labor and behavioral surplus from populations around the world. And as always, the empire justifies itself by promising innovation, convenience, and “progress.”

X’s data harvesting operation reveals a deeper ideological shift in imperial strategy. As physical wars become costlier and harder to win, technofascism offers a cleaner method: build monopoly platforms, extract behavioral data, train AI models, and shape the global consciousness. It’s counterinsurgency through predictive code. And Europe, despite its liberal illusions, is still a digital colony of American tech capital.

That’s why this investigation matters. Not because the EU will deliver justice, but because it exposes the soft underbelly of Western liberalism: its complicity in data colonialism. Ireland, home to the European headquarters of most U.S. tech giants, has long acted as both gatekeeper and doormat. The Irish DPC has a history of delaying or weakening enforcement. But this time, the theft is too blatant to ignore.

We are witnessing the rise of a new resource war—one not over oil or lithium, but over neural networks, language models, and human attention. The question isn’t just whether Europe can protect its data. It’s whether any region can assert digital sovereignty in a world dominated by the U.S.-Silicon Valley state nexus.

As Musk turns X into a testbed for behavioral training models that feed into weapons systems, ad networks, and global surveillance infrastructures, the rest of the world is being coded into submission.

The plunder continues. Only the medium has changed.