In September 2025, Albania presented the world with a character who did not breathe, but spoke. Diella, an embodiment of artificial intelligence, has been appointed as “Minister” of Public Procurement and Anti-Corruption. She was dressed in traditional costumes and spoke in Parliament as if she were made of flesh and voice. Prime Minister Edi Rama praised her as incorruptible. The opposition protested that they were not citizens, and were not human beings. But the ritual was complete.
This is not a neutral gesture, but a calculated action. By placing the avatar in the Cabinet, the government creates a spectacle of trust amid mistrust. The scene is a modern ritual: the state, in the face of a crisis of legitimacy, raises a luminous image, as if it were shining an artificial sun to hide the gloom. Parliament has turned into a theater, and has become a laboratory for a new political liturgy, where it is not a program, but an icon. What we are promised is not just efficiency, but symbolic redemption (the belief that technology can replace politics).
But algorithms are not angels. These are the power arrangements included in mathematics. They learn from unequal data and can reproduce favoritism under the guise of objective standards. A spreadsheet can decide the fate of millions without anyone seeing the traces of who drew it. The promise to “eradicate corruption” replaces the basic question (who decides and why) with another question steeped in ambiguity: How according to the model? This “how” includes hiding suppliers, databases, training, and contracts. Responsibility, already fragile, disappears: AI does not give up, does not respond to fraud.
By anthropomorphizing the machine, the government creates empathy and obedience. The minister who smiles and promises is no one, but behind her there are programmers, consultants and private companies who benefit from every line of code. State functions that were previously the preserve of the public sector have become outsourced services and depend on external infrastructure. The gesture of dressing AI in traditional clothing is not an elaboration: it is an appropriation of cultural symbols to legitimize technological adoption. The sun cast by the avatar casts a shadow of dependency and privatization.
Diela does not inaugurate purity, but rather a new form of domination. Structural corruption does not dissolve: it only acquires a digital mask. History teaches us that, in crises of legitimacy, the state resorts to the myth of technology (from Taylorism to nuclear energy, and from the Green Revolution to artificial intelligence). Today, the myth is dressed in algorithms, but the plot is the same: to transform political borders into an artistic spectacle. Fundamentally, it is not about exchanging ministers for avatars, but about realizing that the state creates silicon gods to hide its human limitations (and, in promising purity, perpetuates the ancient pact between power and capital).
Thus, the virtual minister is only the latest face of an ancient process: the process of decorating social contradictions that remain intact with artistic symbols.
Editor Michael Fransa asks each participant in the Folha de S. Paulo Politics and Justice space to suggest a song for readers. For this text, Gabriel Telles chose “Cérebro Eletrônico”, written by Gilberto Gil.
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