(versione italiana qua)
In the previous post we discussed the importance of maintaining an approach based on respect for humanity, both from a personal and social perspective, when considering the development of informatics technologies. After the intoxication of the first twenty years of this century, when it seemed that digital tools were leading us into some kind of ideal society, we began to realize the problems associated with the digital measurement of every aspect of our lives. As a reaction, this is giving increasing importance to the intrinsically unmeasurable aspects of our existence, attributing ever greater value to them. Personal relationships, contact with nature, the sense of identity and tradition are regaining ground and becoming spaces where we increasingly and actively take refuge to escape digital control.
Detachment from digital technology is the hallmark of the elites who have contributed most to the spread of tools that – as we see from the increasingly heated and polarized discussions that occupy social media – are undermining the foundational values of evolved societies: mutual understanding, solidarity, compassion, support and protection for the weakest. Not only that, there has been increasingly important evidence for several years now of the negative consequences of too early use of smartphones and social media. See, for example, the final report of the 7th Permanent Committee of the Senate "On the impact of digital on students, with particular reference to learning processes" from June 2021.
Digital technology does not intrinsically imply its use in an anti-social manner, but if development is guided solely by economic values without being balanced by a pro-social approach, the atomization of behaviors that it encourages, since everything can be done through a smartphone, risks making humanity regress to the situation of homo homini lupus.
On the other hand, it is true that we have moved a large part of our lives into the realm where these disembodied cognitive machines dominate. Consequently, our existence now unfolds not only along the usual relational dimensions (economic, legal, cultural...) but also articulates itself in this incorporeal dimension of "representations", increasingly relevant from a social perspective.
This is not entirely new. Humanity has been recording data about the world for thousands if not tens of thousands of years. However, from a completely negligible component of our existence, data representations have become a relevant and important part of it. Even though most of the digital data we create has ephemeral use without being permanently stored, the quantity of data collected has reached incredible levels. In 2025, the total digital data archived worldwide is expected to reach, according to various estimates, 200 Zettabytes, that is 200 billion Terabytes, or 200 million million Gigabytes. These are values we cannot even imagine.
As the health emergency of 2020 unfortunately taught us, we can no longer ignore the digital representation of data concerning us. It has become an integral and constitutive component of our personal and social life. Hence the need to protect people's rights not only regarding their body and spirit, but also their digital projections. In my book The informatics revolution I argued that constitutional-level protection would be necessary, modifying article 2 so that it recognizes not only the protection of rights but also the fulfillment of duties in the digital world. This would be the proposed new version (in bold the added part): "The Republic recognizes and guarantees the inviolable rights of man, both as an individual and in social formations and in digital contexts where his personality unfolds, and requires the fulfillment of the non-derogable duties of political, economic and social solidarity".
To conclude, I recall that the absence of a physical body in cognitive machines has a dual counterpart in the fact that this digital dimension of our existence is populated by "forms of life" for which we have no detection sensors. Digital viruses and worms, which are not benign toward our "digital self", just as their biological counterparts are not benevolent toward our physical bodies, continue to spread at an alarming rate without us being able to effectively counter them. We would indeed need the digital version of those hygiene standards that played such a role in improving living conditions in the twentieth century. Once again, it is only through education that we can make a difference, and we must start as early as possible.
[[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]].
--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 19 March 2025.
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