Algorithms, Silence and the New Shape of Power

Rastinews — The phrase "I've been thinking about power lately" is no longer just a personal reflection. It describes an era — the process we are living through.

Power, today, can no longer be explained by weapons, money or state capacity alone. Modern power mostly operates unseen. It shows itself in a headline, in a social media feed, sometimes in a deliberate silence, sometimes in a manufactured news cycle.

Repression once had a clear address. People knew what to stand against — a government building, a uniform, a court, a prison. Power was visible. Now it sits somewhere more scattered, more elusive, less visible: in the phones in our pockets, in the content that keeps appearing before us, in the digital feeds that decide what we get angry about and what we're meant to think.

Today's power governs largely through banning, largely through making things invisible, and largely through opening space — whichever serves the moment.

A rights violation, a major corruption case or a social tragedy — a decision made on your behalf, built upon historic ground — is no longer suppressed only through outright censorship. Sometimes it is simply buried at the bottom of an algorithm. It goes unseen, unspoken, uncirculated. And so what actually happened is erased from society's memory as if it never happened at all.

And that is the most dangerous form of censorship: silence.

Because when an age that never stops talking falls into deep silence on certain subjects, or when a lie is imposed on society as belief, there is more at work than coincidence. Television channels all suddenly busy with something else, major media outlets pulling back with the same shared reflex, public attention steered elsewhere — these are all instruments of repression in the new era.

People today are held down not only by force, but by the distortion of lies, errors, defeats and betrayals that conceal the truth.

We are growing used to images of war. We are growing used to cruelty, to lies, to death, to poverty. We are growing used to lawlessness. We are growing used to an order that carries on as if nothing were happening, even as daily life grows harder by the day.

This is exactly where modern power does its work: by slowly wearing down the human instinct to object.

Another fracture concerns who gets to define the truth. Today's greatest hegemony is the power to define reality itself. Who counts as a "terrorist," who as a "freedom fighter," who as an "acceptable citizen," who as a "threat" — these questions are now decided mostly not on battlefields, but in media headquarters, at diplomatic tables and on digital platforms.

That is why truth today is not only a moral question, but a political one.

People are increasingly isolated. Everyone withdraws into their own digital room. Even people living in the same city have become strangers to one another. Algorithms do not simply steer us; they pull us apart. As everyone lives inside their own echo chamber, any shared sense of truth breaks apart.

This state of isolation may be one of the era's greatest feats of political engineering.

Because when people fail to come together, when they cannot build a shared memory, power moves more freely. The more fragmented a society becomes, the more visible its centers of power grow.

But one thing about history never changes: no power lasts forever.

Forms of repression change. Tools change. Languages change. But human memory cannot be erased entirely. Much of the truth suppressed today resurfaces tomorrow in society's collective conscience.

Because the truth, sooner or later, leaks out from somewhere.

Sometimes in a mother's scream, sometimes between the lines of a courageous piece of writing, sometimes in the voice of someone who keeps speaking despite their fear…

The most important thing about truth is this: it does not depend on any authoritarian power, but on the capacity for free thought.

You can suppress the truth for a while. You can distort it. You can cover it up. But you cannot erase it entirely. Because the truth goes on existing within the lives people actually live.

And perhaps that is the most important thing to be done today:

To step outside the feed.
To tear through the silence.

To cry out the truth against the normalization of lies.

To keep memory alive against normalized cruelty.

To insist on the truth against false, manufactured perceptions.

Because sometimes simply telling the truth as it is stands as a form of resistance in itself.

Salute to all who resist every siege…