Surfing the Swamp!

✍️ By Arian Galdini

Albanian media today looks like a luxury restaurant built on polluted water.

Behind the glass, lights glitter, corks pop, plates with French menus are served as proof of “success”.

On the other side of that glass, a tired people count coins for bread, medicine and rent.

Inside, the same circle as always, office-holders turned looters, fattened and rinsed with our taxes, posing as the elite of a country they barely recognize anymore.

In a society where almost half of households risk poverty and social exclusion, where youth unemployment is roughly twice the national average and about one in four young men and women aged 18 - 24 remain outside the labour market, where most of our asylum seekers in the EU are under 35, where since the early 2000s more than 600,000 Albanians have left and around 1.6 - 1.7 million now live abroad, where tens of thousands of young people work in call centres for minimum wages on fragile contracts, where births fall year after year and natural increase fades, where every year thousands of new cancer cases are registered, where hundreds of thousands pin their hopes on the U.S. visa lottery, our screens still orbit the same axis, power, money, clientele.

Albania is only a small corner of this picture, a place where the patterns of our age appear without make-up, the global script with fewer filters.

In theory, the media is the square where truth appears and the citizen sees himself.

In practice, in Tirana, November 2025, it is more stage than square.

Instead of an agora where people come to be heard as equals, we have a closed salon where guests are chosen from a list.

The public is treated not as a conscience to be engaged, but as a consumer to be kept busy.

The luxury media restaurant has its own rules.

It weighs your bank account, not the life you have built, it sees what you can pay, not what you have sacrificed.

It wants the spectacle that covers, not the truth that strips.

The big political chefs send in their order lists, who to feature, who to erase, who to smear, who to crown.

Journalism turns into waiting tables, whoever serves most obediently gets the biggest tip.

So we have reached the point where what matters is not what you do, but who sees you.

Not what you have created, but how much you have been displayed.

Every civic action that doesn’t buy a ticket to the luxury restaurant is declared a “non-event”.

Every thought that doesn’t fit the pre-ordered menu is filed under “irrelevant”.

Freedom of speech is no longer killed by prohibition, it is killed by indifference.

Once, freedom of speech was measured by the danger of “will they let you speak”.

Today the real question is different: “Can anyone actually receive what you say?”.

The old tyranny struck the tongue, the new tyranny, the tyranny of disregard, dissolves the echo.

Our century no longer needs to seal mouths, it is enough to switch off the listeners.

The swamp is not an accident. It is a project.

In this marsh, the frogs of political and economic power croak in chorus.

Each knows exactly when to croak, when to attack, when to fall silent.

Scandals erupt within permitted limits. Protests are dramatized, then managed, then betrayed.

Waves are not allowed.

Only little ripples, just enough to create the illusion of movement.

The left keeps tight control over its army of voices.

Every appearance, every panel, every “debate” passes through the sieve of the propaganda staff.

The official right denounces these methods, then produces the same copy, there too, the list of studio “heroes” comes from the leader’s office, from internal calculations, from bank accounts.

With one quick glance you see the paradox, media that proclaim themselves against the government promote every ex-face of government, as long as he attacks a different clan of the same swamp.

On our screens, the “new politicians” are the same old faces.

Former hired guns in the game, deployed now as occupiers of civic spaces and citizen protests, former operatives of one order become heroes of another as soon as they change table or role.

It is enough to strike, with permission and only with permission, according to the needs of the script, the leader of the moment in a loud tone, and the restaurant door swings open.

Meanwhile, those who do not come from the old script but from a free conscience remain outside the frame.

The real activists, the citizens who cannot be bought, those who carry out clean actions with no orders from above, simply do not exist.

Not in the news, not in the studios, not on the portals.

For this system, anyone who comes from the spring rather than the pipes ruins the recipe.

Fresh water ruins the arithmetic of stagnant waters.

The swamp hates sources.

It hates rain.

It hates every movement that does not descend from its own commands.

But here enters our share of guilt, the share of us ordinary citizens.

We have accepted to see ourselves more as fans than as citizens.

We have traded the word for the punchline, thought for the meme, judgment for the quick comment, and then wondered why nothing truly changes.

Instead of an agora, we have the gallery of enraged comments, instead of argument, we have chanting.

Every time we laugh with the mud, without distinguishing it from analysis, we cast a silent vote for this system.

By giving clicks to filth, by sharing the spectacle and leaving seriousness in the shadows, we have donated to the swamp exactly what it craves most, indifference to the truth.

The swamp is not sustained only by those who pay the bill, it is sustained just as much by those of us who pay with attention.

Our indifference toward the decent is its oxygen.

On our screens, trollitants and bots have become digital legions, more ruthless than any beast of myth, strength without conscience, power without mercy.

Algorithms reward noise, suffocate clear thinking, minimize every voice that does not fit the script.

Our century does not burn books, it renders them invisible, it does not shut down newspapers, it dims their rays in the marketplace of the algorithm.

The new tyrant no longer tells you “don’t speak”, he removes your listeners, lets you talk to a wall, and teaches you to call that a tribune.

The algorithm is not mere technology, it is automated censorship disguised as freedom of choice.

It does not say “don’t speak”, it says “say whatever you like, no one will see you”.

You stand speaking to stone, and you call that visibility.

Whoever dares to speak differently is treated like Iphigenia at Aulis, someone must be sacrificed at the altar so the old fleet can sail one more time.

Whoever refuses to play by the script is expelled from the drama.

The show must go on, even if the honest characters are kept offstage.

I have seen this mechanism up close.

It was enough to refuse a “compromise”, or more simply, to turn down a panel with a pre-ordered cast where I had been assigned the role of “decorative angry man”, and suddenly the calls thinned out, the invitations dried up, my name slid from the guest list to the list of the invisible.

Then I understood, the most dangerous part of the swamp is not the mud, but the selective silence, the kind that lets you speak, yet removes every mirror.

Leaving remains the easiest temptation.

To leave the country, to abandon the marsh, to turn your back on every stench.

Thousands of Albanians make that choice every year, the charts of emigration and the visa lottery say it plainly.

The departure of the upright makes the swamp deeper, calmer, more dangerous. The marsh loses opposition but not power.

Leaving saves your body from the swamp, staying protects your meaning from its rot.

Staying is the hard road.

And here lies the core, if you want to change the swamp, you cannot do it from the shore.

You do not drain a marsh by watching it from afar, by commenting on it from your phone, by cursing it from your couch.

Marshland does not dry up by status.

The swamp changes only when you enter it.

Surfing the swamp. That is the formula.

To step into the mud without becoming mud.

To move through choreographed studios without being choreographed.

To show up in rigged debates without accepting the role they have written for you.

To enter their game, but with your rules.

To refuse to sell yourself for one minute of fame, or for a chair closer to the panel.

To accept that you will be ignored, misrepresented, attacked, and still continue.

Surfing the swamp means not turning into a stone that sinks, but into a plank that moves up and down, bringing breath and sight.

Not dissolving in the chorus of croaks, but neither vanishing in mute withdrawal.

Staying on the surface, lucid, while below, the old game goes on.

Judicial reform may do its part.

The West may exert its pressure.

One day, hoods and handcuffs may arrive for the corrupt and the marauders of this looting order. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

But none of this replaces our duty as citizens.

If free minds surrender, if honest hearts fall silent, if people with conscience leave, no reform holds for long.

External currents can wash the surface, if the marsh within us remains the same, every wave returns to a puddle.

To surf the swamp means to stay, not to make pacts with the stench, not to buy a ticket to the luxury restaurant, not to enter the order list.

It means moving in dirty water with clean gestures.

To refuse the role of victim and the mask of accomplice.

Our age no longer burns people at the stake, it tries to scorch them from within.

In a world where everything can be bought, the only true luxury left is not to sell yourself.

Power passes from one hand to another, only the unsold soul stays whole.

This choice is not easy. It brings no quick fame, no promotion, no titles.

It brings something else, you may remain outside the frame, the algorithm may bury you, yet in the meantime you have preserved yourself.

In the end, the question is not who captured power, but who preserved their soul.

And perhaps, on a day we still cannot see clearly, when the mud begins to shift, when free voices multiply, when springs once again feed the river, it will be remembered that someone surfed the swamp without turning into a frog.

On that day, the luxury restaurant may still host banquets, but the stagnant waters will have been given back their source.

And then it will no longer matter who appeared most often on screen, what will matter is who remained clean within the marsh, because, in the end, neither history nor conscience measures how visible you were, but how long you resisted without being bought.

Arian Galdini