Strolling through informatics #22 – It's easy to say "digital"

previous #21 ––– next #23

by Enrico Nardelli

(versione italiana qua)

After examining in recent posts the significance of the informatics revolution, the various meanings of the term intelligence for machines and for humans, and the importance of not focusing solely on trending topics, I begin to address in this post the challenges posed by the growth and development of the digital society, citing some historical references.

At the end of 2019, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the "network of networks," that Internet whose birth date has been conventionally set as October 29, 1969, when the first connection between remote computers was established between a computer at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) and one at SRI (Stanford Research Institute). With that first transmission, Arpanet was born, the communication network between computers whose development was funded by the US Department of Defense to provide the country with an extremely resilient communication system against enemy attacks, which would become the Internet in the 1990s and which – thanks also to the global spread of the World Wide Web – would surpass one billion users in the first decade of the new century.

The cornerstone of a social revolution, as well as a technological one, had been laid, even though for several decades it seemed to be merely a tool. But a visionary artist like David Bowie, during a 1999 BBC interview, called it "an alien life form, ... the birth of something exhilarating and terrifying." Often artists see clearly what scientists and technologists fail to grasp well, especially when discussing the social impact of their discoveries. Their advantage lies in being better trained to perceive these nuances of progress's consequences on people and human relationships, though it should also be kept in mind that these are extremely difficult predictions to make.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the introduction of the term "artificial intelligence," which appeared in the research proposal that aimed to achieve "significant advancement" in "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence" by working on it "with a carefully selected group of scientists for a summer." Tremendous progress has certainly been made, but it's still too early to say to what extent it will determine a societal change as important as that brought about by the advent of the Internet.

It's extremely difficult to understand where informatics technologies will take us, not just in 50 years, but even in just 10 or 20. Just think that in 1999 Amazon was taking its first steps, Google had just been born, and Facebook had not yet been conceived.

The real problem is that we're forgetting that humans should always remain the focus of every technological progress initiative, while these digital innovations that seemed destined to lead us to a better future are instead increasingly constraining our daily lives. Digitization opens unprecedented opportunities for society, but also poses serious concerns.

This is primarily a social and political challenge and only secondarily a scientific or technological one, because the digital dimension is now increasingly intertwined with various social dimensions, covering all the different relationships (economic, legal, cultural, ...) that are established between people. This dimension, which is where digitized data exists, therefore defines a social space that, as such, can be constructed according to different visions. I therefore consider it entirely natural that governments want to implement their guidance and management activities also regarding the digital realm.

Just as every nation protects its natural resources, so it should do with its digital ones, including its citizens' data. When I began raising attention to these issues in 2019, many minimized them by labeling them as "populist" and "sovereigntist," while now they have become relevant.

I believed and still believe it's absolutely legitimate and necessary for a state to govern digital space just as it governs physical space, given that the natural world and digital world are now interpenetrated and must be managed together. In the digital society, whoever controls data controls society.

What would we say if rulers sold their citizens to foreign powers? Is it acceptable for this to happen in the digital dimension? To what ends should the control and governance of digital infrastructures and data be subordinated? It's often repeated in recent years that "data is the new oil." But if this data belongs to people, is it correct (socially, ethically, and politically) to consider it as a commodity? Are people a commodity? There's very little awareness of these aspects, as evidenced by a famous experiment where a store sold items to customers who paid with their personal data. I apologize in advance if the comparison is morbid, but would you give up a finger to buy a car?

I'll add a psychological observation about digital fanatics, enthusiastic about being able to record and monitor their every activity. Moving from tracking heart rate during a run to total health monitoring every year, or from a simple surveillance camera at the front door to a network of robotic sentries, is just a matter of money. Doing so gives the illusion of being able to control the future by removing existential threats. But it's not productive behavior.

As with other major social issues, it's the role of politics to decide what to do. In the digital sphere, I usually recall a quote from Evgeny Morozov (a sociologist of Belarusian origin among the most acute and profound in analyzing the digital world) who wrote in his book "The Tech Titans": "for a modern mass party, not caring about one's responsibility regarding the digital realm is equivalent to not caring about one's responsibility for the very future of democracy."

[[The posts in this series are based on the Author's book (in Italian) La rivoluzione informatica: conoscenza, consapevolezza e potere nella società digitale, (= The Informatics Revolution: Knowledge, Awareness and Power in the Digital Society) to which readers are referred for further reading]].

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The original version (in italian) has been published by "Osservatorio sullo Stato digitale" (= Observatory on Digital State) of IRPA - Istituto di Ricerche sulla Pubblica Amministrazione (= Research Institute on Public Administration) on 5 March 2025.