Recalibrating Authoritarian Coercion With Neoliberalism: Prepaid Meters, Techno‐Politics and Mundane Governance in Egypt

Abstract

This article examines how authoritarian governance, in Egypt, is being recalibrated through infrastructural technologies that embed regulation into everyday life. It argues that, in the current phase of neoliberal financialisation, authoritarian governance must, by necessity, harness citizens' capacities for self-regulation to achieve the neoliberal objective of making the population creditworthy. Focusing the analysis on the recent nationwide rollout of prepaid electricity meters, the article traces a gradual shift from direct police coercion to technopolitical control, where mundane devices are used to discipline consumption and enforce financial compliance. Using digital ethnography, the study investigates citizens' responses to the new technologies of governance. The analysis shows that, in their engagement with these technologies, citizens articulate a normative critique that challenges the inequity and exclusion embedded in them, forging a distinct idiom of contestation and opposition