Debilitating Air: 
Authoritarian algorithmic governance and the politics of barely audible voices

Affect control system

It’s winter 2021, almost a year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what becomes a full-scale neo-colonial war. Dozens of protests spread across Russia and are yet again suppressed. Due to the overflowing numbers of detainees, authorities utilised the Sakharovo, one of the Centres for Temporary Detention of Foreign Nationals, which has been primarily used to incarcerate immigrants awaiting processing. Protestors detained in winter 2021 were put into Sakhorovo’s overcrowded cells, where the conditions are designed to be dehumanising. For some detainees, the Sakhorovo introduced personalised slow torture as the heating in the cell was set to more than 30 degrees during the day, and turned off at night, so the inmates would suffer in cold. This type of modulation of the state of the body via infrastructure is an example of a proxy form of pressure. The  autocratic government itself has been developing more of such modulating methods rather than disciplinary systems, as it is more resource-efficient. This condition of autocracy indicates an extremely persistent kind of dictatorship.

The political regime that has developed in Russia is the result of adding just more layers of strata to ongoing problems: crises and social interfaces emerging from imperial, colonial and totalitarian issues such as unprocessed repressions from the time of the gulag have remained without due attention. The regime could be described as a manipulating dictatorship based on the manipulation of information and the hybrid of new media and reactive conservatism. However, this regime also has another bizarre feature, which is institutional impostering – maintaining the shape while changing the meaning. While the regime maintains the appearance of an autocracy and is not seen as being a dictatorship, it can quite easy integrate into the neoliberal infrastructures, which are more tolerable to autocracies. The socio-political and economic problems for such regimes are dealt with by management of the levels of uncertainty. This uncertainty helps the manipulating dictatorship become more manoeuvrable.

It could also be related to double thinking or hypernormalisation and the performative shift during the soviet period, though it perhaps grows from the experience of existing restricted areas around military plants or secret science facilities. These areas are classified not only within the certain plant or secret facility, but also within the wider area that also includes the cities and villages around it. This opaque logic of access, control and cover of the whole city and society can and is expanding further, swallowing whole ministries or services or infrastructure. And we also witness the logic of uncertainty, now that it functions as a form of security, but the uncertainty in social environments will sooner or later become a mess. If the state has a problem with the origins of some particular missile, they can simply classify it as sensitive data, making it illegal to investigate or scrutinise. It’s a system of rules and agreements with a double-bind state of mind. The classification of the hidden mess became a control logic of governance in the expanded restricted area of militarised autocracy, which became a context for many Soviet- and Russia-born generations.

Chaotic mess and the complexity of algorithms of access lead to a chaoplexic (combination of complex and chaotic) control system based on the manipulation of information, hidden power formations and corruption. This chaoplexic control system became a logical form of algorithmic governance in manipulating dictatorship after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, today this structure has been augmented by digital, social media and AI technology with user-generated content that implicates reaction and affects. The manipulating dictatorship not only manipulates information through a chaoplexic control system, but it also manipulates affects.

In the situation of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, the manipulating dictatorship has extended this chaoplexic control system to the battlefield, fighting with its proclaimed enemies both on the outside and on the inside. The chaos and complexity of war multiplies through uncertainty of manipulation, and it developed the milieu close to a climate of violent, unpredictable, colonial control. The chaoplexity of the manipulating dictatorship created the climate of oppression and debilitation in which chaos is the main geopolitical resource. The weather of uncertain chaos is a stream of affects, a cloud of continuous modulation and control of the social temperature. Authoritarian affect-control systems manipulate the atmosphere from individual to dividual, from imperial to postcolonial, throughout bodily to infrastructural.

Conflict dimmer in catastrophic loop

Continuous modulating control can’t be separated from the algorithms. In other words, modulating control is connected to the rhythms of uncertainty and affects. At the core are the mechanisms in algorithms and technology. If one controls the temperature of air, one controls someone’s breathing; if one controls breathing, one controls the affect.

It’s autumn 2025. The temperature in a cell was being adjusted during the day, making it higher or lower to effectively inflict discomfort on the inmates. The denial of breath is one of the most widely used torture methods. In a similar fashion, the manipulating dictatorship works through control of the media, to elevate or suppress certain voices or put pressure on users. This media weaponisation in times of war combines the direct violence of shelling missiles with the images of victims and lives destroyed in order to control war. In a similar manner, they controlled the volume of the reactions to the annexation of the Crimea in 2014, or to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, or they tuned the warfare itself, making it low-intensity conflict (LIC) or high-intensity conflict (HIC) whenever either is required for the system. Dimming the conflicts (external and internal) and affects. After dozens of repetitions, it now can produce many grey zones that help the autocracy be manoeuvrable and persistent. This recursive nature of repetitions with alterities on the various levels deeply correlated with algorithmic technology and itself became a form of governance.

Another crucial point of this technology is the use of the past to predict the future, and particularly how the future is used to modulate the present. Even though the future is always uncertain, the affects of such predictions are more valuable and effective. This spiral or loop of prediction of the yet-to-manifest (or may-never-manifest) threats introduces the new preventive laws, launches wars or shapes the truth, utilising the past to revive a toxic nostalgia. This is a catastrophic loop of modulating patterns of speed of life. This manipulation, somewhat like air conditioning in the building, moderates the condition of being in different modern categories such as ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality and disability. Air condition systems could be viewed as a model or a miniature of the control of human behaviour, whether it’s a matter of privilege, access or security. The repetition of microclimate change in the building and self-sustaining algorithms and rhythms produced by the air ventilation systems is a simple model of algorithmic governance and continuous recursive modulating mechanism.

The recursive nature of algorithms has created a loop inside of logic in manipulating dictatorship. Nevertheless, this loop is a reason for debilitation or hopelessness as the affective response in the process of control and consequently has been one of the main tools of oppression. Manipulation itself here is the looped chimera of recursion, dimmering and control.

Sound agency in manipulation dictatorship

Sound is coming to the listener like a wave or weather. Sound is immersive and political in its nature. Political processes and the notion of listening are deeply correlated: in any parliament where one speaks and others listen, or when the political voice is raised to be heard, it only gets muted by the loud scream of propaganda. The transfer from autocracy to dictatorship rhymes with the distinction between silence and loudness. The main objective for the autocracy is to keep the political process silent: people promised freedom in exchange for their exclusion from the political process; but in the case of a dictatorship their freedom is revoked unless they loudly proclaim their loyalty to the regime. It could be recognised during the protests and manifestations. The temperature of the political environment is changing as if the volume of the sound, while autocracy turns into dictatorship – political temperature interlinked with the political sonic.

It’s summer 1880. The agency of sound has another non-active feature, resembling the agency of prisoners – while a prisoner can’t influence the process, the process itself is meaningless without the prisoner, just like a sound is meaningless without the listener. Political prisoners in the 19th century invented the knocking code to communicate with each other through walls. Political prisoners like Peter Kropotkin described this communication as if the sound was coming from everywhere in the cell, while another prisoner called Nikolai Morozov described it like the song of a grasshopper or timber worm, and the humming of the intellect existing around you. Vera Figner said: “It is not without reason that the struggle for knocking is the first struggle a prisoner has with his jailers”. The air of solidarity in any solitary confinement is a sound of the insectile of another intellect.

Stories of torture by heating in a jail with little air, and the sound of knocking in solidarity in tsarist prisons confront each other during a regime of manipulating dictatorship. Everyone who is stuck in the horizon of this political regime, especially during war, is subjected to the modulation.

Barely audible voices

It is summer 2119. I’m captivated by the splits in this model that would allow resistance movements to grow and flourish. These elements include the hidden creatures who hide from systems of control and sabotage them. Whether it’s via communicative solidarity knocking between isolated subjects or the chirping of cicadas near the governmental facility – all of this is a political sound.

The barely audible voices of insects hidden in the infrastructure, like spiders living in technical splits or junctures. Their muffled communication isn’t recognisable until a short circuit or conflagration. The barely audible voices of insects are a domain of opposition in algorithmic governance, a starting point to reroute the recursion and constrict infrastructure of the oppressor. The insects in this metaphor could be understood as an insurgent agent or a model for understanding resistance via bites or hidden communication and solidarity. The undetected communication contradicts the recursive sound of climate-control infrastructure, but it does not interrupt it yet. The barely audible voice of the oppressed is a concomitant of this process and the first signal of the change of political regime.

Failed resistance doesn’t mean the end.