Banality as political aesthetic — and the people who became algorithms
Driving along Athalassa Avenue during rush hour — take that as your representative sample — may be the most honest political experience available in Cyprus in 2026. It confronts you simultaneously with the failure of public planning and with your own most feral, primordial instincts. During an election campaign, it can also confront you with something else: the image those people have of you in their heads. You know the ones.
Somewhere between exhaust fumes, blaring horns, and the almost physical sensation of time evaporating inside a stationary queue of cars, you find yourself with nothing to do but let your eyes wander across the political advertisements on their colossal billboards. Each poster is essentially a declaration of existence. A digitally retouched face requesting temporary lodging in your peripheral vision while you wait at the lights.
Occasionally, something breaks through — a flash of the unexpected. A slogan or message with a hint of actual wit, a phrase that seems to want to engage with the world it inhabits. In the desert of the predictable, even a suggestion of creativity feels almost revolutionary. It doesn’t matter whether it convinces you politically. For a moment, at least, you feel that someone has registered that you exist as a human being rather than a consumer. I’ll venture a prediction: those particular candidates will do well.
Banality in Cypriot political communication is the permanent default — and increasingly, a one-way street. More grating by the day is the sense that words have entirely shed any obligation to mean anything. They need only emit a faint aftertaste of positivity, an atmosphere of “seriousness,” a corporate whiff of “credibility.” Slogans are no longer written to be read. They are written to slide frictionlessly across the surface of the brain without triggering any reaction whatsoever. They don’t even attempt to lodge in the memory — personally, I struggle to recall a single one — they simply slip down into the emotions unchewed. As for thought: not a chance.
Hollow words like “responsibility,” “guarantee,” “dignity,” “stability,” “change,” “homeland,” “hope,” “forward,” “together,” “strength” mean nothing specific, but they circulate and recombine — much like the tokens in a large language model — packaged as bright, empty boxes. They could just as easily be advertising a bank, an insurance company, a multivitamin, or a household cleaner.
I think the implications deserve anthropological scrutiny. Fifteen years ago, on the eve of the 2011 parliamentary elections, I published a piece in Phileleftheros under the title “I am your mirror, voter, and I look like you” — a riff on Galateia Kazantzaki’s line “I am your image, society, and I look like you” — in which I made the same observation about sloganeering, concluding that it reveals more about the assumptions made regarding the person being addressed than about the person doing the addressing.
I find that piece could run today without a word changed. If anything, things have got worse. When public language becomes this desperately flat, it means those producing it believe they are speaking to voters who cannot cope with complex thought, subtle irony, ambiguity, provocation, or a real idea. Beyond the messaging itself, political marketing constructs a psychological profile of its intended recipient. To put it plainly: if they’re talking to you as though you’re an idiot, it’s because they think that’s what works. And they may well be right.
Audiences are not comfortable with the unpredictable. They feel safer inside familiar structures, stereotypes, repeated codes. Originality unsettles them. Which is why political aesthetics so often appears to self-censor, and political language ends up neutral, sterilised, hollow. Anything imaginative is treated as somewhere between suspicious and dangerous.
There is something deeply postmodern about this exhaustion. We live in the age of hyper-hyper-hyperproduction of content and the total absence of meaning. Never has politics talked so much to say so little. Social media made it worse. The slogan had to become a meme, then a TikTok clip short enough to clear before the user scrolled on. It adapted itself to the duration of a thumb movement. Because thought generates low engagement. Complexity doesn’t go viral. Even when it tries to provoke or intrigue, a political poster does so in the most schematic way imaginable.
We already knew that modern political communication had migrated from the realm of persuasion to the realm of stimulation. And the problem I’m describing isn’t even dishonesty or provocation — there is something almost traditional about election campaigns being seasons of exaggeration and theatre. The problem today is the total absence of imagination: a poverty so complete it cannot even produce convincing illusions. Perhaps because an empty word on a billboard allows everyone to project onto it whatever they wish. It is a vehicle for “creative” vagueness.
And now artificial intelligence has entered the picture, adding a contradictory dimension. At the very moment a language model can generate thousands of slogans in seconds, public discourse feels more dead than ever. One hypothesis: AI didn’t create the problem. It simply exposed how mechanical human communication had already become. Much political writing — candidates’ interventions, party announcements, the whole machinery of it — reads as though produced by an algorithm, because the people behind it have themselves begun to think and operate algorithmically.
I return to the question I posed in 2011, as I have at every election since — more urgently now than ever. Perhaps these slogans resemble us more than we care to admit. It is, when you think about it, deeply humiliating to be treated as a stupefied creature whose needs are met by three words, a smile, and a logo. But what does it mean in a society that is gradually thinking less, reading in fragments, reacting before it has understood, and outsourcing even the most basic functions of its own judgement to screens and algorithms?
Perhaps the greatest danger is not that machines are getting smarter. It is that we are getting comfortable with the idea that we don’t need to be.
