The resonant gong of Albanian defiance: Algocracy as global alarm!

✍️ By Arian Galdini

Programmed silence. The algorithm that exterminates voices.

One radiant spring morning, a message of mine, born of free thought and human feeling, was obliterated into silence.

That was when I realized, something had seized my Facebook page.

Its location had been absurdly shifted into the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.

My posts did not merely disappear.

They were flagged, smothered, drowned, cloaked by lethal code, calibrated to extinguish every trace of my voice.

I still remember the sting.

I refreshed the screen, and where my words had lived, there glared only a mocking emoji from an anonymous troll, a pixelated sneer heavier than any police raid.

My hand trembled before the void of the screen.

It was not merely censorship; it was annihilation.

My voice, my Albania, reduced to a glitch in their code, a ghost devoured by a machine that consumes identity and spits out silence, as if history itself could be unwritten by a line of code, as if my nation’s defiance could be erased from the annals of time, as if our collective soul could be exiled into digital oblivion.

That was the moment I understood, battles are no longer fought with votes, with words, with ideas.

They are fought in invisible lines of code, lines that decide what will appear and what will sink into extermination.

Today you can be unmade from every platform.

Without warning.

Without debate.

Without accusation.

Without even a trace.

This is not absence.

It is programmed silence.

For months now, both my profile and my official page, Arian Galdini, have been suspended in algorithmic limbo.

And I am not anomaly.

I am omen.

The algorithm does not deliberate.

It replaces.

Albania as the testbed

Days ago, I read the headline: “Albania wants to replace its corrupt government with AI.”

And the Prime Minister Ed Rama himself declared: “One day, entire ministries may be run by algorithms. No corruption. No favoritism. No human error.”

This is no postmodern jest.

It is the attempt to replace politics with performance.

Reform with code.

Representation with pre-programming.

A nascent algocracy.

A government where the human has been dismissed, because trust has evaporated.

John Danaher warns, algocracy is rule by structures without faces, automated and unanswerable.

Governance becomes calculation.

Justice collapses into probability.

Shoshana Zuboff unmasks surveillance capitalism, where transparency no longer liberates, but cloaks domination.

Evgeny Morozov is blunt, technology cannot heal a rotten system; it conceals the rot.

So the question rises: when a regime devoured by corruption seeks salvation in machines, are we witnessing revolution, or the perfected camouflage of digital authoritarianism?

Albania becomes symbol.

A small nation with a large experiment, not to reform the state, but to outsource it to artificial intelligence.

Byung-Chul Han calls it the disappearance of the political subject, the citizen no longer asked, because the machine decides in silence.

This is the Simulacrum of Governance, veiled, shadowed, cloaked in neutrality, yet enthroned as invisible sovereignty.

The citizen yields to the user.

The user dissolves into a profile.

And the profile is managed by a system blind to honor, deaf to justice, mute to freedom.

From patronage to trollitantism…

My personal battle with Facebook is not anecdote.

It is emblem.

It reveals the silent covenant between global platforms, Meta, OpenAI, Presight AI, and governments eager to escape accountability.

A covenant to build a world where silence outweighs speech.

This is the new simulacrum of governance.

And the word itself must become resistance.

Each reflection, each act of testimony, is a shard of voice wrested from suffocation.

But silence has evolved.

Until recently, the Edi Rama’s government relied on patronage networks to map political loyalty, and militants to mobilize crowds.

Now a more invisible army has emerged, the Political Troll.

I name it Trollitantism.

Trollitantism is not trolling.

It is a digital militia, not of flesh but of algorithms, weaponizing irony and extermination to strangle the soul of dissent, to exile thought itself, and to bury the agora in eternal silence.

Its structure rests on four pillars:

1. Coordinated annihilation. Dissent is not countered, but flagged in unison until code buries it.

2. Centralized bullying. Armies of fake profiles unleash ridicule, hate, humiliation, a theatre of digital cruelty.

3. Fabricated consent. Comments manufactured and infused with simulated emotions, irony that wounds, euphoria that deceives, mimic “the people.”

4. Engagement as weapon. Algorithms amplify noise, drown truth, entomb reason in deluges of emojis and pixelated extermination.

This is not dialogue.

It is the theft of public thought, reason drowned in a deluge of coded derision and pixelated extermination.

Foucault foresaw it, power no longer strikes bodies, it shapes acceptance.

Trollitantism does not kill flesh.

It kills reputation.

It erases belonging.

It renders dissent socially uninhabitable.

This is semiotic violence.

The tribune still stands, yet the public has vanished.

Words are not banned, sentences are replaced with emojis.

The evolution of control:

Militants → Patronage → Trollitantism.

This is censorship by code, not decree.

And Albania is its laboratory.

Software totalitarianism

In 2023, Albania became the first country to use ChatGPT for translating EU legislation. (Euractiv)

In May 2025, it invested €8.8 million in Mira Murati’s Machine Thinking Lab, backed by Andreessen Horowitz. (The Recursive)

In February 2025, it signed with Presight AI for “smart cities” and automated governance. (Tahawultech)

This is not reform.

It is replacement.

From politics to protocols.

From citizen to server.

As Rouvroy and Berns explain, algorithmic power does not command; it predicts, your vote before you cast it, your dissent before you voice it.

It does not debate.

It does not represent.

It cloaks itself as service, yet enthrones itself as sovereignty, silent and absolute.

Habermas warned: when argument is replaced by dashboards, democracy collapses into technocratic management.

Agamben saw it deeper, the algorithmic citizen is not outlawed. He is exterminated, deleted from language, from visibility, from memory.

The gong of albanian defiance.

Is this democracy?

Or the totalitarianism of software?

The NACD Report 2025 warns, decisions of vast consequence are already being made by automated systems, without human hands.

What corporations normalize, fragile states adopt. And Albania, stripped of balances, becomes the perfect testbed.

We must forge a counter-architecture, the Alliance for Algorithmic Sovereignty of Citizens.

At its core, absolute transparency.

Every algorithm shaping public life must be documented, audited, overseen by an independent Digital Ombudsman.

This echoes Article 22 of the GDPR, forbidding life-altering decisions made solely by machines.

But transparency is not enough.

Human presence must return.

Technology must be bridge, not wall.

Albania must create its own Data Commons, where citizen data is not commodity but public wealth, safeguarded by law.

UNESCO (2021) names this a pillar of ethical AI.

And it must begin with children.

By twelve, they must learn not only to code, but to weigh justice, responsibility, consequence.

In an age obsessed with efficiency, only the enlightened citizen can guard freedom.

And freedom must never be delegated.

Albania as global alarm

If algorithms silence us without decree, without debate, without voice, we are no longer citizens.

We are profiles. Optimized. Cloaked. Passive.

What once was freedom becomes an option never given.

So let us ask aloud, with the force of a gong:

Where lies the citizen, silenced by code?

Where stand our rights, exterminated by algorithms?

Where lurks accountability, entombed in the cold hum of unassailable servers, deaf to human cries for justice, blind to history’s lessons, mute before freedom’s call?

Can a bot hold conscience?

Can an algorithm stand trial?

Can a server be summoned to parliament?

Can an API be condemned?

This is the silent covenant: Meta, OpenAI, Presight AI, enthroned as sovereigns, scripting obedience in the name of efficiency.

If there exists a pact, silent, shadowed, yet powerful, between corrupt governments and omnipotent technologies, then we face the newest autocracy, the autocracy of code allied with power.

This is no hypothesis.

It is forming now.

And Albania, small, fragile, exposed, has become its testbed.

If we do not raise our voices today, tomorrow no voices remain.

If we do not recognize that power has changed form, from face to code, from human to network, from representation to performance, we will live as statistical beings in a simulated order of total control.

The resonant gong

Albania is not merely a country.

Albania is the resonant gong of defiance, a clarion call forged in centuries of unyielding rebellion, shattering the silence of a world shackled by code’s iron chains, echoing through mountains, oceans, and the marrow of history itself.

And the choice, rebellion or silence, must be made now.

For ourselves.

For democracy.

For humanity.

For freedom, which dies when words vanish, when thoughts are erased, when a nation becomes prototype of algorithmic rule.

Now is the moment never to be silent again.

Albania is not merely land.

It is alarm.

It is summons.

It is challenge.

And the choice must be made now, for democracy, for freedom, for humanity.

Arian Galdini