Udi Volkov
I operate at the intersection of strategy, technology, and systemic influence. For nearly two decades, I have run campaigns, advised leaders, and navigated complex environments behind the scenes. While "strategic consultant" is a convenient title, my actual expertise lies in influence operations. The kind that work precisely because they remain invisible.
My path was not built in sterile consulting rooms. It started on the ground as an activist at a young age, learning through real-world friction, not theory. That journey eventually led me into government and diplomacy: serving as Chief of Staff in the Knesset, Political Officer at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, and Senior Advisor to Opposition Leader MK Tzipi Livni.
Moving from parliament to digital advocacy and civil society, I directed large-scale voter mobilization, built protest movements from scratch, and managed multi-million dollar budgets across six national election cycles.
The tools have changed. As VP Marketing and Communications at Althimis, I drive marketing and narrative strategy for AI-powered UAV training and simulation platforms. As Advisory Founder at Polytik.ai, I apply the same lens to political strategy: AI-driven predictive models that simulate scenarios and counter-influence operations before they play out for real.
Plan for Order, Simulate for Chaos
The original phrase comes from military doctrine: plan for order, prepare for chaos. I repackaged it. In the age of simulation technology, preparation alone is not enough. You need to model your adversaries, run your scenarios before your adversaries run theirs, and constantly "Red Team" yourself. That is the operating logic behind most of what I do.
This practical approach directly informs my research on Post-Reality: the structural collapse of shared sensory truth. We have moved past the era of "post-truth." We are facing a much deeper crisis. For the first time in human history, the mechanism we use to verify reality itself has been structurally broken.
Strategy
Services & Approach — how I work and what I bring.
Strategic advisory at the crossroads of technology, politics, and public communication — for organizations navigating the AI era, campaigns that need to win, and leaders who need to think clearly about what comes next.
AI & Political Technology Advisory
Consulting for organizations on how AI is reshaping political communication, public trust, and institutional governance. From strategic framing to operational deployment — including AI tool integration, influence operations awareness, and digital risk assessment.
Campaign Management
End-to-end campaign strategy and management for civic organizations, NGOs, and political clients — from concept through execution. $2M+ in managed campaign budgets. Experience across electoral, issue-based, and civic mobilization campaigns in Israel and beyond.
Creative Strategy
Values-driven campaign concepting and narrative design for causes that demand more than advertising. Building conceptual frameworks, messaging architectures, and creative platforms for complex civic and social campaigns.
Executive & Strategic Consulting
Senior advisory for leadership teams on technology policy, public sphere dynamics, and digital crisis management in complex environments. Drawing on experience across diplomatic, parliamentary, NGO, and defense tech sectors.
Cyberbullying Policy Research & Campaign Proposal · Tachlit Institute · 2021–2022
Entry point into a broader social media platform regulation initiative for Tachlit Institute for Israeli Policy.
2026 Elections War Room — Proposal
Strategic proposal for coordinated response infrastructure to protect the 2026 Israeli elections. Not funded; program did not proceed.
Labor Party Primaries Consulting
Independent political consultant to multiple candidates in Israeli Labor Party primaries throughout the years.
Hoze Hadash — Municipal Movement
Political consultant to a multi-city civic movement running candidates across Israeli municipalities.
Served as political consultant to Hoze Hadash, a civic-political movement that ran candidates in multiple Israeli cities simultaneously. The engagement covered strategic positioning, campaign architecture, and inter-city coordination — helping a movement operating across fragmented local arenas develop coherent political messaging and operational discipline. Hoze Hadash represented the wave of local civic movements challenging established municipal machines across Israel.
Mekomi — Founding Member
Co-founded a local governance movement focused on community-based municipal leadership across Israeli cities.
Was a founding member of Mekomi, a local governance movement built on the premise that Israeli municipal politics needs a new model — one grounded in community accountability rather than national party affiliations. The movement developed a framework for local leadership that could be adapted across different cities while maintaining a coherent civic identity. The experience informed much of the later work in municipal campaign management.
Portfolio
Selected Work — campaigns, strategic engagements, and field operations.
Municipal Elections 2024
Full digital campaign management across multiple municipal races, conducted under wartime conditions following October 7th. Delivered results in Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, and Jerusalem.
Managed end-to-end digital campaign strategy and execution across three simultaneous municipal races, all operating under the constraints of wartime Israel in the aftermath of October 7th. Each race required adapting messaging, timing, and mobilization tactics to a public simultaneously grieving and politically energized. Kulanu Ha'ir became the 4th largest faction on the Tel Aviv-Yafo city council. Ramat Gan Hofshit doubled its seats. The Jerusalem Union emerged as the largest liberal-secular faction on the Jerusalem city council.
National Crisis Communications — October 7th
Strategic communications management for a major civilian advocacy organization operating in the immediate aftermath of October 7th — sustaining national and international presence through one of the most complex public campaigns in Israeli history.
SSVG Lobby — הלובי למלחמה באלימות מינית
Strategic advisory and full-service communications support for Israel's leading parliamentary lobby against sexual violence — from pro bono consulting to a full Kalmar engagement covering PR, social media, and capacity building.
The engagement with Yael Sherer's הלובי למלחמה באלימות מינית (Lobby to Combat Sexual Violence) began in 2021 as a pro bono advisory relationship — two years of strategic and policy consulting supporting the organization's positioning, coalition-building, and legislative advocacy on gender-based violence policy in Israel.
In 2023 the relationship deepened into a full Kalmar Campaign Services engagement, delivering PR management, social media strategy and execution, and organizational capacity building — helping the Lobby sustain and grow its public presence as one of Israel's most active parliamentary advocacy organizations on this policy front.
Ukrainian Refugees Campaign
Emergency humanitarian campaign launched days after Russia's invasion, helping Ukrainian Jewish families relocate to Israel through coordinated fundraising and absorption support.
Launched in the immediate aftermath of Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the campaign coordinated emergency fundraising, logistics, and absorption support for Ukrainian Jewish families making aliyah. Working with partner organizations on the ground, the campaign helped hundreds of families navigate the process from transit to settlement in Israel.
Poll Points Voter Tripling (PPVT)
A nationwide relational GOTV operation for the 2021 elections, deploying the "voter tripling" methodology across 20 cities in coalition with the Black Flags movement.
Built on the research-backed "voter tripling" model — where each volunteer commits to personally bringing three additional voters to the polls — the operation coordinated a coalition of civil society organizations including the Black Flags network (800 volunteers), Kumi Israel, and the Convoys movement. The digital backbone was Vote21.org.il. On election day, 800 volunteers operated shifts across 200+ polling points in 20 cities nationwide.
Corona Files — קמפיין עדויות מחדל הקורונה
A civic testimony platform that held the government accountable for COVID-19 failures — collecting hundreds of first-person accounts and driving sustained mainstream media coverage.
Launched in November 2020 as unemployment peaked and government credibility collapsed, the project created a dedicated content platform (corona-files.org.il) to aggregate firsthand testimonies of government failure during the pandemic. Accounts came from business owners, healthcare workers, elderly citizens, and public officials — each one amplified through social media and pitched to national press.
The campaign earned sustained traditional media coverage, including a long-form feature on Channel 12 News and a joint survey with Channel 13. The campaign model was later adapted and replicated internationally.
Menutakim — מנותקים נמאסתם
Built the visual identity and narrative that unified Israel's 2020 protest wave — one slogan, one color, across dozens of disconnected movements against corruption, democratic erosion, and economic collapse.
Launched in July 2020 at peak protest season, Menutakim was built to solve a fragmentation problem: dozens of movements were protesting simultaneously but sending mixed signals. The campaign created a unified brand — yellow signs, a single slogan — and gave the protest wave a common identity. This included a crowdfunding campaign that raised ₪650K from 5,500+ donors, a protest merchandise store, and a public demonstration board (protests.org.il) that logged 100,000+ visits and helped coordinate protests across the country.
The campaign received prime-time national coverage on all major Israeli TV channels and became the dominant visual identity of the 2020 protest movement.
Influencers GOTV — פעם שלישית ודי
Relational GOTV campaign for the March 2020 elections built around a tiered influencer network — using chatbots, WhatsApp, and peer persuasion to drive Jewish Israeli voter turnout.
By March 2020, Israel was heading into its third consecutive election within a year — and real voter fatigue was setting in. The campaign's core creative, "פעם שלישית ודי!" ("Third time and that's it!"), was built directly around that exhaustion: rather than asking people to care, it acknowledged they were tired of voting and reframed turning out one more time as the way to actually end the cycle. The line appeared across digital creative, WhatsApp messaging, and out-of-home placements, including building-scale billboards in central locations.
Designed to counter declining Jewish Israeli voter turnout — projected to drop to 66% without intervention — the campaign recruited a tiered influencer network: 20 coordinators managed 38 influencer groups, each tasked with personally persuading people in their social circle to vote. The infrastructure combined automated chatbots, human WhatsApp coordinators, and a dedicated platform (influence.org.il).
Each influencer committed to convincing three people who weren't planning to vote — "one makes three." Backed by Analyst Institute research showing relational GOTV is twice as effective as traditional contact. The campaign won a Supreme Court challenge and earned front-page coverage in Israel Hayom.
Changemakers — Voter Persuasion at Scale
A large-scale digital persuasion and GOTV operation targeting 2M+ disengaged Israeli voters across both 2019 elections. One of the first Israeli campaigns to run controlled RCT measurement on persuasion effects.
Targeting 2M+ disengaged voters across two back-to-back elections, the campaign deployed issue-based content segmented by audience: religious coercion messaging for secular and Russian-speaking voters, cost of living for young mothers and first-time voters. The operation included 342 petitions, 6 Facebook chatbots, 39 original videos, interactive games, and a first-time voter campaign produced in partnership with Keshet/Mako (Channel 12).
Results were measured through a randomized controlled trial. The treatment group showed a +20% shift toward center-left parties in April, and up to +26.6% in September — establishing the program as one of the most data-backed persuasion campaigns in Israeli political history.
"One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams."
— Salvador Dalí
For the first time in human history, you can no longer trust what you saw with your own eyes. Western epistemology — from empiricism to phenomenology — rested on a foundational assumption: that sight and hearing are the ultimate arbiters of objective reality. Generative AI has broken that assumption permanently.
This is not about fake news or misinformation. It is about something deeper: an ontological rupture. When AI can synthesize photorealistic video and cloned voices indistinguishable from reality, the mechanism by which humans verify truth — sensory evidence — collapses. What we are entering is not a crisis of content, but a crisis of verification itself.
The Western Epistemic Foundation. For three centuries, Western philosophy operated on an assumption it rarely bothered to state explicitly: that the senses — and above all, sight — are the ultimate arbiters of truth. From Descartes demanding "clear and distinct" ideas to the Enlightenment's language saturated with visual metaphor (insight, evidence, clarity, perspective), vision was crowned the supreme witness to reality. Anthropologists call this ocularcentrism. It was never biologically inevitable — it was a cultural construction. Generative AI is the first technology to dismantle it at the level of the senses themselves.
Baudrillard's Simulacra. Jean Baudrillard described the simulacrum as a copy with no original — or one whose original has been lost. Where past forgeries (Photoshop, staged footage) were manipulations of existing truth, deepfake and voice-cloning technologies generate what Baudrillard called "hyperreality" — a reality more real than the real, yet with no physical referent. We have moved from the representation of reality to the production of reality.
Heidegger on Technology. Martin Heidegger argued that technology fundamentally transforms how humans are "being-in-the-world" (In-der-Welt-sein). When the world itself becomes synthetic and algorithmically mediated, the human being loses the ability to orient themselves through their own body and senses. The familiar becomes unfamiliar; the grounded becomes groundless.
The Economic Engine. The collapse of reality is not a random technological byproduct — it follows a specific economic logic. Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism identifies the next evolutionary stage beyond data collection: Instrumentarianism — the power to shape, direct, and modify human behavior to produce market certainty. Synthetic reality and the erosion of sensory verification serve this interest directly: they make the user entirely dependent on the mediating platform, enabling behavioral engineering without resistance.
The Cooperation Precondition. What makes the collapse of sensory verification existential rather than merely philosophical? The answer runs three levels deep. Jürgen Habermas identified the "lifeworld" — the shared cultural and moral background that makes communication and collective action possible — as the precondition for all social cooperation. Jonathan Sacks added a parallel diagnosis: without a shared moral commons, without a "We" that exceeds both market and state, "trust and truth erode, economics becomes inequitable, and politics becomes unbearable." Post-Reality goes one floor deeper still. Beneath the lifeworld and the moral commons lies something more primitive: a shared perceptual reality. Before we can argue about values, we must agree on what happened. Michael Tomasello shows this at the evolutionary level — joint attention to a common reality is the cognitive substrate of all human cooperation. Michael Chwe formalises it: "common knowledge" — everyone knowing what everyone else is seeing — is the structural precondition for coordinated collective action. Generative AI attacks this floor directly. When it goes, everything built on it goes with it.
Boorstin's Pseudo-Events. The diagnosis predates AI by sixty years. Daniel Boorstin argued in 1962 that modern media does not just report events — it manufactures them. He argued that modern media doesn't just report events, it manufactures them: press conferences, staged photo-ops, anniversaries invented for coverage. As he put it, by sharpening our images we have blurred all our experience. Generative AI doesn't introduce a new phenomenon. It industrializes one Boorstin already diagnosed, and removes the last friction standing between intention and fabrication.
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
The Hermeneutics of Radical Suspicion
A new psychological condition — paralytic doubt toward sensory input itself.
The Legal Crisis of Evidence
Courts and justice systems built on "I saw it" are structurally compromised.
Populism 2.0
The epistemic vacuum is being exploited by a new kind of political actor.
Democratic Institutions Under Siege
Every institution that depends on shared reality is now under structural pressure.
Arendt, Hannah — The Origins of Totalitarianism; Between Past and Future ("Truth and Politics")
Baudrillard, Jean — Simulacra and Simulation
Boorstin, Daniel — The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
Chesney, Robert & Citron, Danielle — Deep Fakes: A Looming Challenge for Privacy, Democracy, and National Security
Chwe, Michael — Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge
Gerbaudo, Paolo — Populism 2.0: Social Media Activism
Habermas, Jürgen — The Theory of Communicative Action
Heidegger, Martin — The Question Concerning Technology
Rini, Regina — Deepfakes and the Epistemic Backstop
Ricoeur, Paul — Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation
Sacks, Jonathan — Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times
Tomasello, Michael — A Natural History of Human Thinking
Vaccari, Cristian & Chadwick, Andrew — Deepfakes and Disinformation
Zuboff, Shoshana — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism