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DIELLA / THEATER OF POWER
DIELLA / THEATER OF POWER
I. THE MINISTER MADE OF CODE
In Albania, Prime Minister Edi Rama appointed Diella—an AI-powered virtual assistant—as Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, charged with overseeing public procurement. The response was instant theater: opposition MPs hurled trash and bottles across parliament. Clips went viral. The image became more important than the act itself.
Diella, built by Albania’s National Agency for Information Society with Microsoft, began as a digital assistant on the e-Albania portal. Now she has been elevated to full cabinet rank, projected as a woman in traditional dress, entrusted with the nation’s contracts and tenders. This is no symbolic appointment. Procurement is the gatekeeper of government spending—the authority to award billions in infrastructure, hospitals, and state services. In many countries, it is the epicenter of corruption and capture.
II. JUDGMENT WITHOUT FLESH
A minister must weigh not just cost, but ethics, labor conditions, sustainability, and social impact. A minister can be questioned, investigated, and removed. A chatbot cannot. Algorithms cannot negotiate in court, cannot defend their reasoning, cannot carry responsibility when lives are at stake. Procurement is not a neutral process. It is political, moral, and human.
This is not just Albania’s experiment—it is the first time a sovereign state has delegated a cabinet office to an artificial entity. What appears as novelty is in fact precedent. Ministers are legally supposed to be citizens. Can a chatbot meet that threshold? If Diella mishandles contracts, who answers? The servers that sustain her are owned by private corporations. Sovereignty itself is being routed through foreign infrastructure.
III. THE MACHINE NEVER GOVERNS
Beneath the noise of uproar lies the truth – we put our faith in machines because trust in eachother has collapsed. A machine cannot govern—it only masks who does. Code is written, parameters tuned, servers owned. Someone always stands behind the system. By elevating Diella, Albania admits that political trust is broken and attempts to replace it with code. But the machine is an instrument, wielded.
This appointment is not progress. It is a confession of exhaustion. A performance of innovation masking a transfer of power. The public sees an AI minister; the reality is deeper entrenchment of corporate and executive control. More faith in decay. When governance erodes, surrendered over to machines, the only question that remains is not who governs in public (light), but who pulls the invisible strings in private (dark).
This article features computer generated content. AI technology, specifically a large language model, has been utilized to generate both image and video. We chose this approach deliberately, not to undermine our message, but to strengthen it by demonstrating the complex relationship between humans and technology. Our use of AI serves as a practical example of leveraging its strengths while maintaining human oversight and critical thought.