Reflections on Algocracy, the Metaverse, and Albania!

Arian Galdini
Aug 21
3 min read

By Arian Galdini

🧠 From Algorithmic Silence to Encoded Governance…

Could Albania become the testing ground of a global experience?

One bright spring day, a clear message of mine, written with free thought and human feeling, vanished into silence.

That was when I first sensed something was wrong with my Facebook page…

Soon after, I discovered someone had shifted its location, placing my page in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.

My posts were reported, drowned, dimmed, and ultimately lost in the deadly fog of algorithms, calibrated, it seemed, to erase every trace of my voice from Facebook.

And many of you already know the story I’ve shared here about my collision with Facebook and the Metaverse.

That’s when I understood: battles are no longer fought with votes, words, or ideas.

They are waged in invisible lines of code, code that decides what is seen and what is unmade.

Today I came across a headline:

“Albania wants to replace its corrupt government with AI.”

And a direct quote from Prime Minister Edi Rama:

“One day, entire ministries could be run by algorithms. No corruption. No favoritism. No human error.”

This is more than a passing quip.

It’s a moment that demands reflection.

This is not just a postmodern joke.

This is a real attempt to replace politics with performance, reform with code, representation with pre-programmed procedure.

It is the dawn of a new algocracy, a mode of governance where “the human” is sidelined, because trust has evaporated.

As John Danaher (2016) explains, algocracy is a system where power is no longer wielded by faces, but by automated structures devoid of accountability.

Governance becomes computation.

Justice becomes probability.

Shoshana Zuboff warns of a “surveillance capitalism” in which technological transparency is no longer a tool of freedom, but a sophisticated instrument of control.

Evgeny Morozov is even more direct: “Technology will not fix a broken system without real reform, it only conceals the rot.”

And so the question arises:

When a regime rotting from clientelism seeks salvation through machines, are we witnessing a revolution, or a perfectly disguised mutation of digital authoritarianism?

Albania becomes a symbol.

A small country with a big idea, not to reform the system, but to outsource the State itself to artificial intelligence.

This is what Byung-Chul Han might call “the disappearance of the political subject.”

The citizen is no longer consulted, because the machine has already decided.

He speaks of The Simulacrum of Governance, where the state no longer reforms itself but hides behind neutral-looking devices that, in truth, install a new form of control, silent, calculated, and invisible.

The citizen becomes a user.

The user becomes a profile.

And the profile is managed by a system that recognizes neither honor, nor justice, nor liberty.

This is our battle.

And my personal conflict with Facebook and Meta is no longer just an individual grievance.

It is a symptom of a global phenomenon:

an unspoken pact between global platforms and regimes seeking immunity from accountability.

A silent alliance to build a world where silence has a louder voice than speech.

This is the new simulacrum of governance.

And we must not fall for its illusion.

In this war between code and conscience, the word itself is an act of resistance.

And every post like this one is a reclaimed fragment of voice,