Publicação
From analogue totalitarianism to digital authoritarianism: the "perfect prompt" as a heuristic tool for analysing algorithmic control
| dc.contributor.author | Santos, Nuno Miguel Rodrigues dos | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-17T16:07:40Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-07-17T16:07:40Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2026-07-13 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This article proposes the “Perfect Prompt” as a heuristic for analyzing algorithmic governance in the digital age. While existing frameworks — surveillance capitalism, platform governance, informational authoritarianism — theorize the economic and political logics of algorithmic power, none adequately names the phenomenological register in which algorithmic authority is experienced as simultaneously structureless and totalizing. This gap matters for regulation: frameworks such as the EU AI Act and the Digital Services Act rest on assumptions of transparency and auditability that may be insufficient when harm emerges as an unauthored property of optimization systems. Drawing on documented cases of shadowbanning and electoral disinformation, the article articulates the “Perfect Prompt” through three operational concepts — “Digital Submission Labour”, “Digital Social Death”, and the “banality of code” — and extends the framework to Large Language Models through the concept of “intentionality of code”. The analysis operates at three levels — technical infrastructure, the political economy of platforms, and subjective user experience — avoiding both technological determinism and economic reductionism, and offers implications for outcome-based algorithmic accountability in European digital policy. | eng |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.5281/ZENODO.21338436 | |
| dc.identifier.other | 32310077-be1e-478e-a5d9-50b7b9b6e882 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/58754 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.publisher | Zenodo | |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject | Algorithmic governance | eng |
| dc.subject | Digital authoritarianism | eng |
| dc.subject | Platform accountability | eng |
| dc.subject | EU AI act | eng |
| dc.subject | Digital services | eng |
| dc.subject | Surveillance capitalism | eng |
| dc.title | From analogue totalitarianism to digital authoritarianism: the "perfect prompt" as a heuristic tool for analysing algorithmic control | |
| dc.type | preprint | |
| dspace.entity.type | Publication | |
| oaire.version | http://purl.org/coar/version/c_970fb48d4fbd8a85 |
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