Writing under algorithmic rule: digital authoritarianism, surveillance, and counterpublic imagination in contemporary Indonesian fiction

Abstract

Background: Digital authoritarianism has increasingly transformed public communication into a terrain of algorithmic visibility, surveillance, informational control, and anticipatory conformity, yet its cultural representation in contemporary Indonesian fiction remains insufficiently examined. Objective: This study aims to investigate how Indonesian fictional narratives represent algorithmic rule, surveillance practices, authoritarian memory, and counterpublic imagination under digitally mediated conditions of power. Method: Using qualitative digital literary analysis, this study examines selected contemporary Indonesian fictional texts alongside scholarly and contextual materials through thematic coding, narrative interpretation, and comparative textual analysis. Results: Findings indicate that algorithmic rule is represented primarily through mediated visibility, data profiling, platform dependency, and self-censorship, showing how digital power enters everyday subject formation. Surveillance is narrated less as direct coercion than as anticipated monitoring, historical fear, informational restriction, and socially distributed observation. Implication: Counterpublic imagination emerges through alternative public formation, symbolic resistance, memory-based solidarity, narrative reclaiming, and future-oriented imagination, suggesting that fiction preserves critical spaces for meaning-making under conditions of control. Novelty: This study offers a novel contribution by bridging digital authoritarianism studies, surveillance studies, and Indonesian literary criticism to show how fiction functions as an interpretive arena where algorithmic power becomes culturally visible, emotionally intelligible, and politically contestable.