Strolling through informatics #27 – No digitalization without representation

previous #26 ––– next #28

by Enrico Nardelli

(versione italiana qua)

We discussed in the previous post how informatics has been an essential component in achieving the productivity increase we've witnessed over the past 30-40 years, but how much of this benefit hasn't trickled down to workers. In this post, I address what has happened in our daily lives.

Over the past centuries, we've witnessed parallel advancement of social changes and automation, which have made certain aspects of our existence more comfortable and have allowed many to improve their living conditions.

Let's consider just domestic life (though similar reasoning can be applied to work life). Until the mid-20th century, in the family of a middle-class professional, there were still a certain number of domestic servants, responsible for a whole series of activities that still needed to be carried out in a family. Until the spread of the telephone (which began around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries), even communicating something to a nearby relative required a visit or sending a messenger. The number of servants obviously varied according to the household head's income (almost always the man) and they all answered to his wife, who was effectively a true corporate manager. (Could this be why startups led by women are more profitable than when men lead them?)

The twentieth century is the century when automation grows increasingly explosively, with electrical appliances replacing flesh-and-blood servants and enabling women's liberation from household care. Not everything works well from the start, since a washing machine is just a piece of iron infinitely more stupid than a servant capable of washing clothes according to the lady of the house's directives applied flexibly through human intelligence. However, on one hand the companies' effort to produce understandable and easy-to-use appliances, and on the other people's adaptation to using such devices for what they're capable of achieving, means that many "technological contraptions" actually make many activities more comfortable today and have given people who would once have been lifelong servants the opportunity to build a more fulfilling existence for themselves and their families.

With the advent of electronic automation, which soon becomes digital automation, the trend reverses. The problem is that machines begin operating in a context characterized by perception of the external world and decision-making based on its interpretation, a situation that's difficult to govern without human intelligence, unless operating in very restricted sectors. Industrial automation, in fact, from the 1980s onwards makes giant strides: just think of how many production processes are now completely robotized. We, instead, remember well that during that period in our homes we struggled against a video recorder that refused to record our favorite program.

Then comes personal informatics, gradually inserted into all devices, from appliances to cell phones, and into all services, from banks to public administration counters.

And here the great betrayal is celebrated.

People are left at the mercy of monstrously complicated mechanisms that show no sign of their internal state and offer no possibility of understanding what's happening. They're forced to follow incomprehensible lists of actions like puppets, which they carry out religiously hoping not to make mistakes, while the more superstitious accompany them with apotropaic gestures ("you never know!"). As a result, we find ourselves transformed—we who should be the lords and masters of machines—into slaves with no way out.

It wasn't understood that, faced with a revolution of much more dramatic scope from a social standpoint than those caused by television or automobiles, a serious program of informatics literacy for Italians should have been launched. Conferences upon conferences were filled with the theme "It's Never Too Late 2.0," saying that digital skills would be spread throughout society, but without investing real resources in this education, believing that all the necessary information was available on the Web anyway. And they continued as if nothing had happened on the path of this automation.

I believe instead that a necessary requirement for the success of every digital transformation is: "no digitalization without end-user representation." This explicitly recalls one of the 18th-century mottos that were the basis of the English colonies' revolution against the mother country: "no taxation without representation." In our case, it means that if you don't involve the end user, who on the web is anyone, from the scholar to the worker, both united by being hit by a technological revolution that happened too fast for them to assimilate it, the system works poorly. I'm sure each of us has their favorite example of a website that requires an enormous dose of patience and self-control to manage to complete operations that, speaking with a counter clerk, would have been completed in half the time and with zero stress.

They then proceeded to elaborate beautiful plans for digital "things," where "thing" could be "school" or "healthcare" or "justice" (or any name of interest to the government in power) without reflecting that an epochal change of this type can't be implemented quickly, because it requires thorough training of people. Only in "Matrix" movies do you plug in the appropriate cartridge and immediately become an expert: human beings instead need time to learn, especially if they're simultaneously continuing to do their work and live their lives.

Now, as I mentioned in the previous post, we should manage to include informatics among the subjects taught in compulsory education. In any case, the fundamental principle that informatics automation must first and foremost serve end users should be clearly stated in the premises of every institutional document dealing with so-called digital transformation: «NO DIGITALIZATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION».

[[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 9 April 2025.