Power morph: how digital platforms convert affective attention into political authority

Political power in electoral democracies increasingly circulates through platform-mediated emotion rather than through mandate, procedure and programme. This article develops 'power morph', a concept first proposed by the author in a 2025 public essay, into a theory of that change. Power morph is defined as the process by which the effective basis of political power shifts from institutionally conferred authority towards platform-ranked affective resonance, so that the capacity to shape belief and conduct comes to depend on, and to be answerable mainly to, algorithmically mediated attention. The article specifies four dimensions along which power changes form (source, medium, form and accountability) and models the mechanism that links them as a resonance–authority conversion circuit of performance, ranking, recognition, conversion and reinvestment. Three companion concepts are formalised as mechanisms – affective simulation, nodicentrism and fictocracy – and 'viralism' is introduced as the decision logic by which virality becomes a reason to act. Four reversible stages of morphing are distinguished: amplification, conversion, substitution and inversion. The concept is positioned against the faces-of-power debate, Foucault, Castells, Han, Bourdieu, Papacharissi, Gerbaudo and the literature on platform power, showing what each leaves unexplained. Six falsifiable propositions, explicit scope conditions and a measurement agenda follow, with Indonesia and other Global South democracies as research sites. The article concludes that platform-era accountability risks becoming 'metric answerability' and outlines non-partisan institutional remedies that re-couple resonance to claims that can be checked. Preprint, not peer reviewed. Declaration on generative AI: The author conceived the concept of power morph and its companion terms in an earlier essay (Almadani 2025). The author used Claude (Anthropic; Claude Opus 5.5) to assist with literature retrieval, reference verification, structuring, drafting the English text from the author's concepts and instructions, translation and formatting. The author reviewed the full text, approved every passage and takes full responsibility.