They sold us the illusion of a global public square, a digital agora where everyone could express themselves freely, to be felt, to count something. But in reality the season of illusions is over. In reality, the platforms of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon (gathered under the acronym Gafa) are nothing more than private planetary condominiums, owned by a few oligarchs of the Silicon Valley, who decide who can speak, who must be silent, what content to bring out and which to make disappear in the mists of the algorithm. By now they have such a power that allow themselves to intervene at the cabinet meetings of Donald Trump in the White House (which owes them a lot for its election) presenting themselves in “casual” estate, standing, ideally mocked all the main collaborators of the President of the United States. One thing never seen.
Europe, and with it Italy, realizes too late to have ended up in the spider web of this technological dependence. While in the United States they had been preparing to govern the digital revolution for decades, here there was helpless to the progressive computer colonization. Today the infrastructures for the transmission, storage and processing of data are in the hands of American companies, of which Donald Trump, with its power and his cryptocurrencies (yesterday the news is the only one who is the only one who has gained us, at the expense of 800 thousand investors) is the political terminal. And it is on these infrastructures that the very concept of sovereignty is based. They are no longer the material boundaries, but the immaterial, digital ones, which collide in cyberspazio. The data is what in ancient Rome was salt, in the sixteenth century the sails and cannons, in the 70s oil.
Without data control, Europe is not a power, but a digital colony. Already in the past we have entrusted our security to the nuclear umbrella of the Americans, and it was right so, and today we agree to make ourselves protect under the digital one, abdicating any ambition of independence. It will be said that it is now late, that we cannot compete with the Giants of Silicon Valley. But this means accepting to be subjects, and not citizens.
And then there is the question of power. Big tech are not simple companies: they are new empires. Imperre under the guise of democracy. They have the power to influence the elections, to guide public opinion, to decide who exists and those who disappear in digitally. With the advent of Trump they have thrown the mask: they show arrogance and brutality never seen before through various exponents, starting with Elon Musk: they support neo -Nazi movements, raise their arm to the conventions, attack Europe by forgetting an Atlantic alliance that has lasted for over 70 years and for which they have died tens of thousands of young people in Normandy.
The big tech decide those who deserve visibility and those who have to stay on the edge, out of the flow of information. A power that does not respond to any democratic rule, which does not admit contradictory, which feeds in the fog of the digital invisibility that runs in the ether and on the transoceanic cables.
Europe has a choice in front of it: to continue making the tenant in a house that does not belong to them, passively accepting the rules imposed by the digital masters, or begin to build their autonomy. We need an independent technological policy, concrete investments in European digital infrastructures, regulations that resize the overwhelming power of web multinationals. Because without digital sovereignty, without the control of our data and our information, there is no democracy or freedom. There is only submission to a power that is not seen, but that governs us every day, without us noticing. Brussels has announced an investment plan on artificial intelligence of 200 billion euros. Just figures to impresses or finally something concrete? Will we still have time?
