Culture no longer feels primarily lived or inherited in stable local forms. It is filtered, ranked, and distributed through algorithmic systems that quietly determine what becomes visible, what circulates, and what slips out of view. What does not pass through these systems does not simply exist elsewhere. It becomes structurally de-realized. In a Foucauldian sense, visibility is not neutral. It operates as a regime of power. What can be seen, spoken, and amplified is shaped by infrastructures that organize perception itself, often without being noticed.

In this sense, platforms do not merely transmit culture. They shape the conditions under which it becomes intelligible. Culture is not a summit with a single peak, but a terrain continuously carved by competing forces of meaning. Yet the tools doing that carving are no longer widely shared. They are centralized, opaque, and driven by logics of engagement, monetization, and attention extraction. Guy Debord’s idea of the “society of the spectacle” feels less like theory and more like description here. Social relations are increasingly mediated through images that do not simply represent reality, but begin to stand in for it. The algorithm does not simply reflect culture. It reorganizes it into something more consumable, and often more extreme.

When I think about Tunisia, it is hard to separate culture from structure. Its position within the global order is not accidental. It is embedded in a system marked by deep asymmetries of capital, technology, and production. Immanuel Wallerstein described this as a core–periphery structure, where value and meaning tend to move outward from the center.

From a Marxist perspective, the economic base does not simply influence culture. It shapes the field of what can even be expressed. Antonio Gramsci pushes this further. Domination is not only enforced. It is internalized, reproduced through systems of meaning that feel natural, even chosen. In that sense, dependence is not only economic. It becomes epistemic. The means of communication, including platforms, infrastructures, and distribution networks, are privately owned architectures of visibility. They shape what can be known, what can be shared, and what remains marginal. To participate in culture today is, increasingly, to operate within systems whose logic is not our own.

Within this architecture, cultural life does not unfold freely. It is pulled, sometimes subtly and sometimes forcefully, toward dominant external poles that structure the global attention economy. On one side, media ecosystems tied to Gulf influence circulate conservative moral frameworks, often framed as authenticity or a return to origins. On the other, Western platforms dominate visibility itself. They present themselves as neutral carriers of progress while remaining embedded in unequal systems of exchange.

These are not coherent civilizations, but competing hegemonies. In Gramscian terms, they produce consent, shape desire, and define what feels legitimate. Somewhere in between, smaller cultural spaces are not simply influenced. They are compressed. What emerges is not pluralism, but a narrowing of what can realistically circulate and take hold.

In this environment, content does not just reflect society. It begins to reorganize it. As Shoshana Zuboff argues, platforms are not designed around truth or cohesion. They are structured around prediction and engagement. What follows is an attention economy where intensity travels further than nuance, and emotional charge outweighs complexity. You can feel the effects of this. Certain kinds of discourse start to dominate. These include simplified and often aggressive narratives around gender, identity, and belonging.

Misogyny, anti-intellectualism, conspiratorial thinking, and racialized hostility toward migrant communities, including sub-Saharan Africans and Black Arabs, circulate with increasing visibility. Michel Foucault’s idea of discourse becomes very concrete here. Repetition does not just convince. It sets limits. It defines what can be said without friction, and eventually what can be thought at all.

All of this is unfolding in a country already under strain. Tunisia today sits at a fragile intersection. Economic dependency, political uncertainty, and rapid digital saturation all converge. Public institutions, especially education, continue to weaken, while youth emigration accelerates, not just as an economic choice but as a way out. In that space, platforms begin to fill a gap they were never meant to fill. They become sites of socialization, reference points for identity, and increasingly sources of authority.

From a Émile Durkheimian perspective, this resembles a loosening of collective regulation. As institutions recede, something like anomie begins to take shape. Norms become unstable, and meaning becomes more contested. You can see this in how certain debates are unfolding. Questions around the Personal Status Code (مجلة الأحوال الشخصية), early marriage, informal arrangements like urfi, and shifting gender roles no longer feel abstract. They feel like pressure points where something deeper is being negotiated. None of this moves in a straight line. But taken together, it suggests a gradual reconfiguration of social norms under pressure.

Influence doesn’t usually come in direct or obvious ways. It moves through media, funding, religious discourse, and increasingly through the same digital platforms shaping everything else. In that sense, Gulf countries don’t need to “control” anything outright for their presence to be felt. It’s enough to shape the environment in which ideas circulate.

Part of this has to do with the afterlife of the Arab Spring. Tunisia still carries, even in a weakened form, the memory that change can come from within society itself. For more centralized regimes, that kind of precedent is uncomfortable. Not because it will necessarily spread, but because it remains imaginable.

So the response isn’t direct repression across borders. It’s softer, and more cultural. There’s a clear incentive to promote more fixed, less plural interpretations of what it means to be a Sunni Arab Muslim. Not necessarily as a conspiracy, but as a way of stabilizing a certain vision of order — one where authority is clearer, and where bottom-up challenges are less likely to emerge.

This has consequences. When interpretations narrow, so does the space for people to think and decide for themselves. You see it in the pressure on social norms, in the way gender roles are debated, in the suspicion toward difference. It’s not that institutions like family or education disappear, but they become more rigid, less open to variation.

At the same time, there’s a noticeable spread of anti-intellectual attitudes and distrust of scientific thinking. That doesn’t come from one place, but it gets amplified because it travels well online. And over time, it lowers the general level of critical engagement. A society that struggles to question is a society that struggles to challenge.

The outcome is subtle but important. When education weakens and social divisions grow, people are less likely to push back against larger structures of power whether regional or global. It’s not that they agree with their position but rather that alternatives start to feel unrealistic.

Historically, diversity hasn’t been a weakness. It’s been one of the main sources of strength in any society. Thinkers like Aristotle saw political life as something that depends on a variety of roles and perspectives, not uniformity. And John Stuart Mill argued that without competing ideas, even true beliefs become empty, because they’re no longer tested or lived.

When diversity shrinks, something important is lost. Not just tolerance, but the ability to adapt, to create, to move forward. A more uniform society might look stable on the surface, but it often comes at the cost of stagnation underneath.

So the issue isn’t whether outside actors are deliberately engineering every aspect of cultural life. It’s that the combination of geopolitical interests, economic dependency, and algorithmic systems is gradually narrowing the range of what feels possible.

And once that range shrinks enough, people don’t just stop acting differently. They stop imagining differently.

Even before the Arab Spring, Tunisia carried a stronger sense of pluralism than what feels visible today. That pluralism has not disappeared, but it feels strained, less stable, and less protected. From a Martin Heideggerian perspective, one might say that the horizon within which meaning appears is shifting. What once felt grounded locally now feels increasingly mediated from elsewhere.

I do not personally see much value in turning this into a debate. Most discussions around it do not produce clarity. They produce positions and rhetorical combats. What remains is a quieter and more difficult question.

If these trajectories continue, what kind of life is still possible in our own country? What does it mean, concretely, for a place to remain livable, not just economically but in the texture of everyday life? And perhaps more importantly, what happens to a society when its imagination is no longer something it primarily produces, but something it increasingly receives?

And perhaps the most important part is that none of this is fixed. It is being contested in everyday ways that are often small, but real, and that ultimately leave space for something else to emerge. This ultimately raises a final question: how is this being fought, and what kinds of practices, however small or fragmented, might still interrupt these trajectories?

It is discernible that ever since the Arab Spring ignited in 2011, the Arab World, and especially Tunisia have been living in political turmoil. Given that we benefited from our shift to a democratic system, a system where the ballot box decides who sits at the top of the governing body, the instability was no secret to the people. 11 years long march of time was treacherous with the deterioration of living conditions, notably among the impoverished social classes. The little to no change in the status-quo evoked the concerns on whether this democratic system has been any good to us, inevitably pointing fingers at the individuals whom we trusted with the holy oath of redeeming the country from unraveling, sort-of-speaking, with our voting ballots. We collectively grew contemptuous of politicians, political debates, and everything related to politics, switching TV channels whenever politicians’ juvenile wit triggers our frustration. This reflects on the participation rate on parliamentary and presidential elections, leaving the majority of Tunisians with voting power, unrepresented.

However, we tend to throw our fingers without grasping some of the key elements to get a view on the bigger picture. We say things like “All politicians are thieves”, and speak in the name of democracy while uttering emotionally charged words. In contemplation of how do politics affect our daily life, we have to take a step back and dive deeper into the subject.

“Politics, A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles”

Since the dawn of time, we have not been astray from politics. Exercised from traditional societies composed of tribes and clans to modern governments, from institutions to sovereign states, and from the local level to the international level. Notwithstanding the fact that politics has different meanings to different thinkers and philosophers, we can say that politics is the process linked with making collective decisions, balancing power relations between entities and individuals, and allocating wealth and resources. This definition, broad and immeasurable, suggests that politics exceeds being a deemed member of some higher authority.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

Paulo Coelho

Politics is the conciliation of diverse interests in society. It’s a mean of reconciling differences in a civilized society. Although we might see politics with derision, its ultimate goal is achieving common good. It enables different people to be governed by a common policy. When interests are uniform, there are no politics. Thereby, politics presupposes an established order in which there’s common ground for social groups with different principles and ways of living, politicians included.

Trying to project what has been previously established on our reality would prove difficult at first glance. The gullible masses are duped by politicians. They are taken in by their hollow promises. They are masters in concocting stories to play with the sentiments of masses. The people promised certain amenities which are denied to them after the elections are over.

However, we might be surprised that our example does not defy nor neglect our definition. It does amplify it matter-of-factly.

Previously, we have established that politics is not having a political status, it’s more of a social human activity which can be observed through our daily life. We also inferred that it’s the conciliation of diverse interests of different social groups in a society. We also mentioned that the ultimate purpose of politics could imply its evil repercussions. How exactly so? Well, it is complicated.

Politicians and Megalomania

Verily, one can not make change without possessing power. Although power is a broad and cumbersome term, we will simplify it, in our context, by saying it’s the capacity to direct the course of events. A powerful leader is an individual who can use his abilities to impose a direction for his social group. The entity that decides for our future possesses that power, politicians if we translate it into individuals. We might be asking ourselves “Are these most powerful individuals unaware of how to solve our country’s problems?”

To put it into simple words, no individual can rule alone. The power to rule the country is divided into different groups of actors in the political scene. The capacity to make change looks omnipotent from afar, but it’s not what it seems. One major role for politicians in a democracy is balancing existing power between different groups: Military power, money power, administrative power, and so on and so forth. The path to be “good” politicians is mined with obstacles which deviates them to a whole new objective: Climb through the power ladder and keep your power. If they don’t do the “bad” things, others will simply do them instead.

On top of that, the constant aggrandizement of political figures, shown in the media and in the streets, is another factor which politicians do not draw feelings of power from. Studies from the political psychology field show that it can potentially lead them to a state of megalomania. A person who has discovered god and thinks it’s them. Stressed and less introspective people, when in their aura, agree with their god-like assessment of themselves. Entitled to be the people’s superheroes, they disregard “normal” laws and boundaries for “normal” people.

We have now created a new line of interest, the line for the rules. We mentioned early on that politics is the conciliation of diverse interests in society. Thus, we remain true to our definition still, given the crystal clear contrast between the interests for rulers; gaining more power and influence and the the interests of the people; living in better conditions.

Politics and the Status-Quo, how can politics affect individual life?

To answer this question, we must remind ourselves with the first item of our Politics’ definition: politics is the process linked with making collective decisions. The decisions that politicians make come in the forms of policies and laws that directly affect our lives.

Politics affect our rights. For example, laws that protect us against violence and assure our safety. Politics also affect our economic welfare, having control over salary distribution and tax laws. Additionally, politics affect our health care. The Government makes lots of decisions about which medicines are available through the health service. It can influence how long we have to wait for a hospital appointment. On top of that, politics have influence over our education, price-levels, our jobs, and so on and so forth.

In a democracy, we elect politicians who make decisions about laws and rules which affect nearly every area of our lives.

Everyone is a politician - Opinion Part

We have now, whether we like it or not, politics is integral to our lives. It is the conciliation of diverse interests in a society. Interests that we shed the light on their difference for distinct groups. The common individual wants better living conditions, the politician wants more power, the rich wants less taxes, and so on and so forth. Politics is about finding the most points of intersections between the lines of interests. In the game of politics, every group have a multitude of pressure cards in their decks. However, the people possess the strongest cards: voting power and productivity.

To many, joining politics means that you have to join a political party and push for the party’s agenda. This is very simplistic and narrow definition of politics. By simply voting in the presidential, parliamentary, or municipality’s elections, we are in the game. Voting for the right candidate, even if it’s not applicable, requires minimum updates on the country’s political situation. We don’t have to be Aristotle’s political animals to have that profile. We have to know for where does our tax money go and what could the government actually do to improve our economic and social well-being. To systematically influence our lives from the outside, we have to influence people at the levers. Politicians need to feel strongly that their own success depends on tackling critical issues. Even if large in number, as long as we don’t vote, we are irrelevant in gaining power. Thereby, we often hear the sentence “Every vote counts”.

Besides, the more the wealth of a nation comes from the productive citizens of the nation, the more power gets decentralized and the more politicians need to maintain the quality of life for those citizens. The things that make citizens productive, happen to be also the things make their lives better: transportation, education, healthcare system, freedom of speech, and so on and so forth.

Previously, only large centralized institutions got to define objective units of value; the largest of which, the nation-state, got to determine widely accepted currencies. However, these tokens were always relative to a centralized entity. They only really defined what that entity values. E.g. a Starbucks gift card, the remnant B, a share in “Microsoft”, and so on are forms of tokens. These units of value are defined, created, and managed by centralized entities according to their interests and needs. What is changing now is that anyone or any group can now define any form of value through the creation of a digital token on a blockchain. These tokens are not required to have for an external centralized entity, they can simply represent the inherent value within a network of peers. Tokens are generic units of value that can be used to quantify any form of valued resource. More importantly, they can be used to define specific and distinct forms of value. This is why in a blockchain economy we have so many tokens e.g. energy tokens, food tokens, transport tokens, social tokens, and the list is ever expanding. In such a way, the token economy offers the potential to incorprate more and different kinds of value, thus giving value representation to what was previously excluded from being defined as economic activity.

The potential of this is that we may for the first time, start to move towards an economic system based upon a full cost accounting. In recent years, with the environmental sustainability crisis unfolding, the idea of a full cost accounting economy has been presented as a solution. But to date, the complexity of realizing that have been overwhelming, and the tools for implementing it have remained limited. Rapid advances in big data, complex analytics, and blockchain technology are starting to provide the technical infrastructure for economy that may in fact, incorporate all relevant event information and value sources, thus bringing more areas of social capital and natural capital into token market exchanges.

Tokenization is the process of converting some assets into a token unit that is recorded on a blockchain, anything of economic value can be tokenized and thus brought into the blockchain economy. Today, we’ve started on a long journey of migrating our entire global economy to blockchain networks. Real estate, commodities, supply chains, energy markets, insurance, and so on are going to migrate, one block at a time, into the new information based economy.

“Everything that can be tokenized will be tokenized” says Venture Capitalist Bradley Rotter Yvette

With this technology, not only existing forms of valued assets will get tokenized, but with advances in Information Technology we are quantifying and assigning value units to more and more aspects of our worlds and our social interactions. Token networks will be used to support these new forms of economies, whether we’re talking about the emerging natural capital economy or social capital. It will be a number of years before we really have the underlining blockchain technology to do that on a large scale, but it’s coming, and the implications are enermous.

The point is, the blockchains are not simply extensions of existing financial or monetary systems, but there’s something truly different; they allow us to define, quantify, and exchange new sets of values that emerge in a post-industrial economy. In so doing, they allow us to expand market systems and economies as distributed management systems to coordinate more and more spheres of human activity in a decentralized fashion, through peer-to-peer exchanges within digital token markets.

Can you sleep on a method of organizing with other people arround the world whom you don’t know, being the master of your sea, and making your own decisions independently all encoded in a blockchain? Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are making this dream come true. Blockchain is not only a technological revolution, but first and foremost a socioeconomic revolution. It is a tool to bring us into a more decentralized world.

If we look back, the first generation internet revolutionized information, this is why we call it the information data highway. About ten years later, we had the so called web 2.0. The internet became more mature and programmable, and all of a sudden we had on one hand social media platforms and on the other hand a peer-to-peer economy where the consumer and the producer came closer to each other of informations and opinions of goods and services. Thus, the original vision of the internet was to pave the way for a decentralized world where everybody could share information online. But in the web 2.0 it became very not so, with those platforms. It brought us peer-to-peer economy but with this “huge man in the middle” who got in command of the data and dictated the rules of transactions. What we’re doing now with blockchain and other technologies of the decentral web is that we’re redesigning data structures given the fact that we are already living in the connected world.

If we think of blockchain in the context of the internet, it is the driving technology behind the decentralized web or also referred to as the web 3.0. You could say it’s like a decentralized world computer ; it’s a distributed network of computers’ peer to peer-to-peer network, the protocol could be seen as the operating system where you can run decentralized applications or smart contracts on top of it. We’re reinventing not only the internet but also the computer itself.

Blockchain allows real peer-to-peer transactions without the middle man, it all started with Bitcoin; two people who don’t know and don’t trust each other sending money from into each other without the trusted third party in the middle. It all boils down to one question of trust, it’s a protocol decentralizes trust matter-of-factly, and instead of that third party verifying transactions are verified in a democtatic way by consensus, and it’s all excuted automatically, there’s no people behind it but it’s in fact machine consensus.

The heart of this machine consensus is the smart contract which a code running on top of the blockchain the codifies the rules of a transaction, and when the rules are met, the transaction gets excuted. This is highly disruptive because it drastically reduces cost of compliance and enforcement because they happen on the fly. While it’s true that it all started with Bitcoin and money without banks, it can apply to pretty much any industry. We can have selling books without amazon and sharing content without youtube.

Now, the highest form of a smart contract is a DAO. They are in theory very complex smart contract that defines the bylaws of an organization. If we look at it, Bitcoin is the first DAO, it’s not only money without banks but it’s also money without bank managers. There is no central Bitcoin authority.

If we look into organizations we have today, whether political or economical, they’re very much organized in a hierachical top-down way. Smart contracts and the protocols that are machine consenus that is auto enforceable can now define the rules of an organization into auto enforceable codes. This way we can get rid of a lot of bureaucracy whether in private or public organizations. Even though this technology is in the very early stages, it has a potential to disrupt the way we organize society.

“Blockchain and smart contracts are governance technologies that have the potential to provide higher levels of transparency while re- ducing bureaucracy with self-enforcing code. They can minimize existing principal-agent dilemmas of organizations and subsequent moral hazards. Tokens of distributed networks hereby provide incen- tives to automatically align interests in the absence of third parties.”

On the political side, we had before the kings ruling a dictatorship. When we started to implement democracy, the idea was to allow people to participate in the consensus process. The problem with big societies that it’s inefficient for everyone to take part in every decision-making process. This why forms of democracy that we have nowadays are represenative democracies. These institutionalized representative democracies are in a way very hierarchical. We as citizens we can vote every 5 years but we have little power over what the representatives do. We can not revoke that power with very limited means in most cases. Government entities are trusted third parties in a way, and with blockchain we’re in a situation where we could make concepts like liquied democracy on one hand or holocracy in the other hand happen in a much more efficient way.

Smart contracts or machine consensus are very efficient when we can predict what will happen. It’s easy to put that into code and to reduce transactions costs. However, they’re really lousy when it comes to dealing with unknowns. We can not enforce them. When they occur, we need governance mechanisms that we don’t have yet.

We can see that we all long for a decentralized world, we have been socialized in very top-down structures. There’s a gap between where we want to be and where we can be as a society because we don’t have the tools yet.