Dictatorship Through Freedom and the Synapses

Liviu Poenaru, Dark Machinic Epistemology (forthcoming)

This regime has no flag, no single party and no leader required to appear on a balcony. It has an interface. The word dictatorship may seem excessive if understood only in its constitutional sense: elections still take place, speech still circulates and no digital apparatus holds a monopoly on violence. Yet the term becomes precise when it names a structure of command that progressively narrows the possibility of disobedience. What is new is the displacement of command. Orders no longer always come from an identifiable authority. They are prepared within the environment, incorporated into habits, carried out through gestures and then recorded as the spontaneous expression of individual choice.

I grew up under Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. Power displayed its face, its portraits, its slogans, its ceremonies and its lies. It could destroy lives and invade them through surveillance, fear and denunciation. But its propaganda remained crude enough to be recognised as propaganda. One could participate outwardly in the spectacle without believing its story, privately ridicule the dictator and preserve some psychological distance. That distance was neither universal nor safe. Yet it could exist because the lie had a source, a style and a voice. We knew where command came from, even when we were powerless to fight it.

Machinic dictatorship blurs that possibility. It does not necessarily order you to “do this.” It tells you that this content interests you, that this route is optimal, that this profile poses a risk, that this offer suits you or that this decision is the result of a calculation. Command returns disguised as an apparently neutral description of reality. No one seems to be speaking. The result simply “appears.” Yet there are executives, boards of directors, shareholders, contracts, growth targets and states that purchase or authorise these systems. The machine does not replace power; it masks it. Those who set the objectives can retreat behind the technical output that carries them out.

Command also moves upstream of decision. Classical dictatorship bans a book, a meeting or a journey. This one can make a text nearly invisible, divert attention towards another subject and exhaust a person before they have even formulated what they were looking for. It controls the order of appearance, frequency, timing, reward and cost of refusal. Choice survives at the end of the chain, providing the perfect alibi: you clicked, watched, bought and shared; no one forced you. Freedom becomes the delivery system for command. Command no longer needs to abolish choice when it can engineer the conditions under which one choice becomes far more likely than the others.

Calling this dictatorship synaptic does not mean that software directly programs the brain or injects commands into it. That would be neuroscientific fiction. As Chapter 2 showed, platforms organise repeated experience: the same object always within reach, the same signals, the same gestures, frequent interruptions, intermittent rewards and the removal of stopping points. Repetition within a stable context can automate behaviour and strengthen the association between a signal and a response (Lally et al. 2010; Wood and Rünger 2016). Research on habits has also demonstrated the role of corticostriatal circuits in the gradual transition towards action sequences that depend less on consciously reassessing their purpose (Tricomi, Balleine, and O’Doherty 2009). The interface does not program the synapses. It programs the repeated experience that changes them.

Power thereby descends below the level of stated opinion. A user may despise a platform, understand its methods, want to leave it and still open the application as soon as the phone vibrates. Their beliefs may hold firm while their attention is already gone. Perhaps the most accurate formulation is this: my attention obeys before I do. This obedience is never total, but it spares the apparatus the need to secure ideological consent. A low level of arousal, an uncertain promise, a few seconds of boredom or the hope of relief may be enough to restart the sequence.

The dictatorship then becomes libidinal. It offers pleasure, recognition, presence, excitement, belonging and temporary relief from anxiety. People do not return to the apparatus merely because they are afraid to leave it. They return because their friends are there, a message may be waiting, a video may amuse them, a purchase may provide relief or a chatbot may finally answer. Human attachment becomes the vehicle of economic capture. The industry can then present dependence as proof of necessity: if people return, they must like it; if they like it, they must have chosen it; and if they chose it, intervening against the apparatus would restrict their freedom.

This loop carries command from bodies into social organisation. Billions of micro-gestures become engagement metrics, market forecasts, rankings, editorial decisions and political arguments. Hidden knowledge acts through bodies before returning to society in the form of what “people want.” A response elicited within an engineered environment is recast as a preference held by the population. Power no longer needs to impose its programme directly. It can present the behaviour it helped produce as the mandate authorising it to continue.

Responsibility travels along the same route in the opposite direction. When harm appears, the company invokes the model, the model answers to no one and the user is blamed for lacking discipline. The state claims that it cannot intervene without definitive evidence, even though that evidence often depends on data retained by the company. The diffusion of command produces organised irresponsibility. Yet it eliminates neither owners nor beneficiaries. Profits remain concentrated while decisions disperse. The absence of a signature is not an absence of power. It is power’s protection.

Science arrives later. Products are launched, habits are formed, schools and families are made dependent, and only then do researchers attempt to measure the effects using incomplete data. By the time a harmful relationship has been documented well enough, the interface has changed, another service has taken its place and the behaviour has become ordinary. Power experiments in real time; public science reconstructs events after the fact. This asymmetry allows the apparatus to demand impossible proof from those who challenge it while continually altering the object whose effects they are attempting to establish.

Parents encounter this violence before it reaches the scientific literature. They see a child going to bed later, becoming less able to tolerate boredom, interrupting a meal to check a phone or growing furious when the device is taken away. An intuition takes shape: something is wrong. That intuition is not causal evidence, and not every observed change comes from the screen. But dismissing it as moral panic, nostalgia or parental incompetence would be another mistake. Parents possess a form of daily observation that aggregated research captures poorly: the increasingly visible shifts in mood, attention, sleep and desire.

The fight that follows is grotesquely unequal. On one side, a mother or father asks a child to put down the phone, limits a connection or tries to preserve a night’s sleep. On the other, platforms continually test what holds the gaze, restarts use and makes stopping less likely. Family rules seem amateurish because they are: a wooden sword against a drone war. Parents are also confronting an adversary that never looks like one. It wears the face of friends, games, music, first love, group belonging, the fear of exclusion, freedom and emancipation. The war enters the child’s bedroom speaking the language of connection.

The confrontation is then handed back to the family as evidence of its own failure. The parents must be too strict, too permissive, poorly informed or incapable of communicating. The child must lack willpower. An industry equipped with data, designers, computing power, large-scale experimental capacity and a dark machinic epistemology beyond the reach of public science suddenly disappears from the picture. What remains is a domestic conflict between overwhelmed adults and a supposedly irresponsible young person. This is another way in which the dictatorship hides: it transforms an accurate perception of an unequal struggle into a private sense of guilt.

What is at stake within these families extends far beyond schedules and good manners. Often without having the necessary language, parents are trying to protect thresholds of attention, the capacity to wait, sleep, sensory life and the possibility of experiencing pleasure outside programmed stimulation. They are not merely fighting a particular kind of content. Guided by a protective instinct, they are trying to prevent a commercial infrastructure from becoming the primary organiser of their child’s relationship to boredom, desire, other people and the self. Their intuition should open the scientific investigation. Instead, it is too often disqualified because they do not possess the very data that the apparatus refuses to disclose.

At the political level, the same model becomes a dictatorship without a declared regime. A benefit is suspended, a piece of content buried, an application rejected or a person flagged; each decision is presented as the outcome of a procedure. The official can claim to have merely followed the recommendation, while the provider insists that its system merely produced a score. Command moves between them until it becomes almost impossible to locate, even as its consequences remain perfectly concrete. Democracy retains its debates, committees and appeals, but speaks only after the operation has already altered the lives of those it claims to protect.

Dictatorship through the synapses does not describe an omnipotent power. It remains fragmented, contested and resistible. Its strength comes precisely from the fact that it does not present itself as a regime. There is no palace to seize, no official doctrine that can be defeated by a single truth, no button whose destruction would liberate the population. There are contracts to terminate, certain interfaces to ban, data to make accessible, human services to preserve and owners to hold accountable for the effects they produce or make more likely. Naming command where it hides does not abolish freedom. It is the minimum condition for preventing freedom from serving as an alibi for our conditioning.