Algorithms at the government: digital communication and rights.

The information revolution, determined by the most recent information technologies, has caused a significant change in the understanding of reality and in subjective interactions. In this context, ICTs hold enormous computational power exercised in a virtual context in which the subject is part of the environment, through internalization processes that make the distinction between offline and online obsolete, in the on-life contiguity between the virtual and analog world. The result is a progressive anonymization and individual typification and the affirmation of a proxy culture establishing information correlations and predictions that are often contra legem and discriminatory, functional in procedures of loyalty of the individual understood as a consumer, as is significantly demonstrated by the increasingly frequent use of sentiment analysis and nudge, showing and amplifying the information asymmetry between supplier and user of online services. From this perspective, a pressing unknown is represented by the economic exploitation of digital data by a small number of public and private operators capable of controlling the vast wealth of information, exercising, in an implicit and often not very transparent way, equal power if not superior to that of national governments in guiding citizens' opinions and actions.