Rome, January 29th, 2024 – It is an agile pamphlet to tell the invisible “dictatorship” of algorithms, the transformation of work and the consequent redefinition of social groups. The book is called La Dittatura degli Algoritmi. Dalla lotta di classe alla class action (The Dictatorship of Algorithms. From class struggle to class action), and the author is Paolo Landi.
All in the illusory mobility that the fictitious democracy of the Internet encourages, while models and aspirations change, towards a future where homo novus will be a “digital twin” redesigned by technology.
What do algorithms have to do with class struggle?
Algorithms were already talked about in the 9th century AD. given that the term is the Latin transcription of the name of the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi; today the word is surrounded by an aura of modernity, revived by the computer calculations that govern our digital lives.
The class struggle, however, seems such an obsolete expression that resurrecting it to make it an instrument of analysis of our era is the challenge of this pamphlet, an attempt to explain the communication of current social phenomena in a simple way, as an eternal competition between the submission and power. In social networks, divisions, antagonisms and hostilities persist: they only undergo psycho-sociological updates.
The algorithms, committed to bringing together the people of the web into statistical units and subsets, are the modern masters of the masses, they orient them, maneuver them, and the masses – who are dependent on social media to the point of using them on 91% of the earth’s crust – continue to be exploited by digital capitalism but in a new way, without them realizing it.
About Paolo Landi
Paolo Landi, author of the recent Instagram al Tramonto (La Nave di Teseo) (Instagram at sunset – Theseus’ship) deals professionally with communication and has published various books on the conscious use of media (published by Lupetti, Sperling & Kupfer, Einaudi, Bompiani, La Scuola). He collaborates with newspapers and magazines and regularly writes for the online magazine Doppiozero.
The book is available on the Krill Books website or on all online stores and bookstores.
