The Proletariat of the Algorithm: Edi Rama’s Open Letter to a Protester

In the grey hour after the boulevard emptied, Prime Minister Edi Rama published an open letter addressed not to the organizers of the so called Flamingo Revolution but to a single figure left behind by it. The premise is a piece of rhetorical engineering. Rama concedes the protester’s grievance as legitimate, the unpaid overtime, the wage paid half under the table, the sick mother and the unregistered land, and then peels that grievance away from the apparatus he says exploited it: the studio commentators on a quiet retainer, the influencers monetizing their followers, the caravans bussed in from Kosovo and Tetova, and the bot networks he traces eastward across Europe. What remains, in his telling, is a man alone, the human likeness of an algorithm that knows no ideals and asks no one who is right. The letter closes with an invitation rather than an argument, an offer of common cause framed as the only thing standing between Albania and a darkness he assigns to his opponents. We publish it in full translation below. Read it twice. The first time for what it grants the protester, which is real. The second time for what it asks in return.

Good morning, dear protester.

I do not see you as the loser of a protest, but as the man left alone with his convictions.

You joined the sucking whirlpool of the crowd because you sincerely believe you are defending something precious.

Perhaps you fear the country is heading toward the abyss. Foreign capitalists will devour nature. Albania’s rare birds will die. Your homeland has been put up for sale.

Or perhaps you are not worried about the birds, nor do you even know exactly where the Narta lagoon lies. But maybe you are angry because you carry a trouble of your own. A trouble at work, with an employer who treats you like a robot. Who does not pay your overtime. Who gives you half your wage under the table. A health trouble in the family. God forbid, a sick mother who needs expensive medicines. A property trouble with the house on the outskirts that still is not legalized, or the land in the village that still is not registered…

I do not know exactly what trouble you carry. But I know you carry a trouble that not only no one solves for you, but no one even grieves over. Believe it or not, I feel your sorrow. Because I not only understand you, I sympathize with you, since I am just as angry as you are with the rich employer who imagines that wealth gives him the right to behave as the lord of your fate. With the clerk or the director he serves without conditions, while he will not so much as glance at you. I am angry at the arrogance of anyone who exercises a duty toward you as power over you.

But precisely because your sorrow pains me, and your reasons find me convinced of their legitimacy, I cannot see you that way. Alone. Like a fish out of water, after the great wave that cast it onto the shore has wholly withdrawn. And those who called you to become “the sea of the new Albania,” without arrogant employers, without clerks who bow to money and scorn the human being, without troubles of health and property, without foreigners investing in our lands and without private investment on our shores, without anything at all that wounds the harmony of a happy brotherhood, are nowhere today.

Those who commented on you last night in the television studios with such enthusiasm, as the man of the people who is finally settling accounts with the corrupt government and prime minister, while for themselves, over long years, they are paid more under the table than over it to slander every dark thing and to curse me by name, with my home address, are now sleeping in the spacious houses bought at steep discounts from the “oligarchs.” On soft mattresses bought with the black, thousand-euro “alms” of those same men.

Those who fell from the horse of power across all these years and never once saw the reason for the fall in themselves but in the horse, and who found in you the light of their lost hopes, raising you to the sky, are drinking their early morning coffees with one another. They can hardly wait for you to be angrier tonight, more impatient, more unhinged in your protest against the regime that left them without a horse, without a guard, without subordinates. In short, without the matchless taste of power that, the more useless you are, the more you miss it.

The influencers, the bloggers and the cranks who made you feel like their hero, giving you for the first time in your life the intoxicating sensation of power that the soul of the warrior risen from the ranks of the people holds over the wealthy, the famous, the well known, and why not, frankly, even the potent sensation of the male who, as in a fairy tale, became the idol of the unreachable women of the world of luxury, have also flown far away, on the wings of the orgasm for last night’s surge of likes and followers, those who entered their bosoms and their thighs as protesters but will now remain on their lists as advertising clients for the villas, the hotels, the creams, the perfumes and the seductive underwear for the slaves of the algorithm.

The caravans of the “diaspora” from Kosovo and Tetova have left as well. They used you, to carry into Tirana, with the brutal coarseness of conquering hordes, the political spite of layabouts from other parts of our nation. Against your government in Albania, which you are in no way obliged to love. Nor are you forbidden to fight it. But neither do you have the right to let others decide about it and speak in your name; the sons of the uncles and the daughters of the aunts cannot come into your house to decide.

Of course, they too have left, those whom the algorithm and the parties and partylets of thrown stones and hidden hands gathered to imprison Rama, turning the boulevard of the capital of Balkan Europe into a medieval square where the mobs of the inquisition howled in chorus for the witches to be burned alive. The blind babblers have left. The ballibullists have left. The sheepish opposition hens who circled around you, talking to the mirror of the digital washroom before their hypocritical faces, have left. The parliamentary caricatures who poked their heads out from behind the eagle on your back have left…

Together with the enemy armies of fake profiles and digital rockets, launched without pause from the East across Europe toward the television square of the flamingo revolution, scattering into thousands of crumbs of fake likes and followers, every bomb that fires a lie, a false report, a manipulated video, those too have left who flooded the boulevard from emigration in foreign states, like the saving eagles of the motherland dragged out by the algorithm onto the battlefield of the global, political, ideological opposition to the President of America.

They have all left!

Even a black crow of ill omen left, one that preached vengeance against the Americans who killed “our brother,” the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the merciless butcher of the terrorist regime of Tehran.

You remained alone, with your trouble and with no one to grieve for you, the human likeness of the proletariat of the algorithm, because the algorithm has no feelings, knows no people, wants no ideals, asks not who is right. It cares only for what produces the most curiosity, excitement, anger and dependence upon it.

You in fact remained as you were. The one you were when you set out toward the boulevard to change the world. Alone before the long day. With your eyes open in the void that surrounds you, after the return to earth from the night in the sky of revolutionary illusions. While those who climbed high into the attention of the world thanks to you, convincing you that you had suddenly become what you are not, the force of a revolution that is not, for the overthrow of reality and its replacement with a reality made only to seduce you, cooked without mercy, in the boundless frying pan of the algorithm, their meal of your flesh and your soul.

And they vanished.

You remained there.

In this sad photograph I do not see your failure at all. I see myself, and your difficulties and troubles. Yes, because I fight every day and grow not a little angry with those who feel nothing for those difficulties, and who not only do not know how to grieve your troubles, but worse still, despise them as if you were an anonymous comment on their Facebook, not a creature of God with the burden of your problems on the threshold of the door of your state.

But in this photograph of the awakening in the empty square I also see the taste of the betrayal of everyone who used you last night for their own ends. Be sure that, however strange it may seem to you, it happens to me too to have empty awakenings with the very same taste. Just the same, the photograph is mine while the betrayal is others’. Sometimes a collaborator, sometimes a known subordinate, and at other times unknown subordinates of subordinates, who for their own interests violate my trust in various forms. They treat people badly. They scorn merit. They reward kinship. They promote the clique. They demand money under the table. Favors. And above all, they forget that the chair is an honor, not a chamber pot. Fortunately, unlike you, my day goes on with unceasing work, thanks to the good energy of many, many others who work alongside me.

So as you see, this letter of mine is not the letter of someone who grieves your trouble while looking at you from above or from afar. It is a heartfelt letter of respect for you who believed, fought and remained alone. But at the same time it is also a hand extended from someone who knows what it means to feel alone, when the trust you give is abused and the fight you wage is betrayed.

I know that today you may see me as your opponent. Perhaps even as the cause of your anger. This letter is not an attempt to make you see me differently. Nor a request that you aim the arrow of your anger elsewhere.

Ask yourself whether your enemy is me, who strives without pause amid a thousand difficulties so that Albania may become every day a little better than the day before, or those who turned you into the hero of the evening only to leave you in the street, alone, like an empty bottle tossed aside without a care after a collective intoxication.

If your answer is still that your enemy is me, of course I will respect it. Because democracy lives also from this right, and from respect for this right. But if one day you come to understand the simple truth, that your trouble is not at all far from mine, then do not wait there for those who will come back again in the evening.

Come to me.

Not to applaud me. Not to give up your criticisms. Nor to vote for me if you are not persuaded, that not only am I not the great evil they have convinced you I am, but that I today am the only obstacle standing between this country and you and the great evils they could do to Albania if the road were opened to them.

Come to me, then, if only so that no one may use your trouble against Albania, nor use the troubles of Albania against you.

Come, because Albania is made neither by those who cheer blindly nor by those who rage blindly. Albania is being made by every Albanian man and woman who, instead of cursing the darkness, lights every day the candle of his own contribution, adding at every step to the light of European Albania and lessening the darkness inherited from old times and newer ones.

Whoever wishes the light to grow greater and the darkness to dissolve faster is blessed, however much he disagrees with me. While those who will come back this evening to use your body and your flesh are themselves the darkness of an old curse upon Albania.

I am your friend, not your enemy.