Authoritarianism spreads like a virus, slipping into every corner of our lives. In this era, authority is more insidious—not just because power corrupts, but because attention has become a new form of influence, a subtle intoxicant that feeds the narcissism at the root of authoritarian spread. As we obsess over metrics and visibility, attention and authority intertwine, allowing authoritarianism to thrive and mutate within the very structures we built to share and connect.
Governments and corporations have shown how seamlessly they extend their control by riding the wave of our fears. Under the guise of "security," governments worldwide are ramping up facial recognition systems and deploying predictive policing. Each step forward is justified by an immediate need—a crisis, a threat, a call for safety. But each step also brings us closer to a world where surveillance is normalized, authority’s reach stretching into once-private spaces, each small infringement an enduring fixture in the architecture of daily life.
Corporations wield the virus just as deftly, manipulating trust to build influence. Tech giants have made recent pledges about "ethical AI" and "data transparency," hoping to establish themselves as champions of consumer protection. And yet, beneath the pledges lies a quiet consolidation of data power. Our personal information, preferences, and behaviors are mined for value, reshaped into influence. When CEOs declare transparency, they often mean control over what data means and who gets to use it. The result is a slow, calculated takeover of public trust, a rebranding of authority as ethical responsibility. What begins as a pledge to protect consumers morphs into a rationale for corporate dominance over markets, narratives, and public perception.
Yet, amid these expanding powers, a resistance has emerged—a resistance born of language and creativity. "Algo speak," a new lexicon designed to outsmart surveillance algorithms, has become a tool to dodge digital authority. People who seek to speak truth to power are now speaking in code to evade algorithmic detection. Social media users sidestep bans and censorship by replacing sensitive words with innocuous ones or misspellings. Instead of saying "dead," they say "unalive"; instead of "violence," they may write "v*olence." Algo speak is a linguistic rebellion, a way of slipping past the surveillance nets cast by social media algorithms trained to monitor, suppress, and control.
The very existence of algo speak highlights the infectious nature of authority in our digital lives. As algorithms extend their reach, we adapt by evolving our language, maneuvering around the systems that aim to corral our thoughts and expressions. But algo speak is also an indicator of how deeply authority has embedded itself in the fabric of our communication. That we need to speak in code to avoid suppression speaks volumes about the reach of algorithmic surveillance—a surveillance that hides behind the neutral veneer of technology but acts as an agent of control.
The true danger is that authority doesn’t need to demand our obedience outright; it achieves it by framing control as protection, by presenting surveillance as stability. Algo speak, like any form of resistance, only exists because the virus of authority has spread so far, feeding off a culture of metrics and visibility. We are forced to adapt to avoid it, but in doing so, we confirm its dominance, even as we resist. In an age when attention is currency, authority quietly justifies itself by promising to filter, protect, stabilize.
If algo speak tells us anything, it’s that we are already navigating a landscape where authoritarianism is normalized, not by the overt assertion of power but by the silent establishment of boundaries that define what we can and cannot say. This is how authoritarianism spreads in the digital age—not by force but by subtly reshaping the language, filtering the narratives, and hiding its grip behind the mask of algorithms. Authority mutates, just as we mutate our language, and soon, the rules of engagement shift until what was once private becomes public, and what was once ours becomes theirs.
To resist, we must recognize that authoritarianism’s greatest strength lies in its invisibility. In our efforts to avoid detection, to escape the surveillance nets, we confirm the virus's hold. Only by naming it, by calling out its presence wherever it infects, can we begin to build immunity before authority becomes so ingrained that we forget it was ever foreign.
