Asimmetria Digitale. Il piano inclinato dell'innovazione tecnologica

In recent years, social inequalities seem to grow together with the digital transition. Why the increased information accessibility does not turn in a fairer distribution of life opportunities? The book try to answer this question, searching a link between the two phenomena in the notion of “digital asymmetry”, a bias that currently affects the exercise of democratic citizenship in data-driven societies altering the distribution of wealth and knowledge in favor of the preservation of power relations underlying their production. A social theory research path allowed us to identify, in the current massive datafication processes, two centrifugal forces: the strengthening of benefits in appropriation, selection and use of value produced by data for the owners of the technical macrosystems; the weakening of individual as knowing subject, led to delegate algorithms the legitimization of choices which he is no longer able to take responsibility for. The first dynamic develops through fluidization of markets and the digital disintermediation. The latter seems to empower tech companies ruling digital platforms that replace the agencies (industrial or public bureaucracies) that guaranteed middle-class labor. If a small group of corporations is able to set up an oligarchy, workers find themselves at crossroads between a narrow skill-biased tech labor market or a “forced” self-entrepreneurship in a sharing economy relabeled as “rental economy”. The second dynamic manifests itself through the slow but constant shift of decision-making power to AI devices that sum up the “behavioral surplus” caught by tech companies on the net to sell a valuable predictive product called “constructed human choices”. The thematization of the digital asymmetry seems to be a preliminary step to frame a democratic debate about the restoring of a public management of data accumulation processes with the aim of slowing down the two described centrifugal forces through a redistribution of access to data and a collective enhancement of digital skills.