The course aims to provide a critical analysis, both from an ethical and political perspective, of the emerging artificial intelligence and the main challenges related to the current architecture of digital platforms, from access rights and privacy to the issue of monopolies and the growing accumulation of economic power.
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The course is organised in a series of lectures where broad class participation will be required. At the end of the course, there will be a section for individual presentations by students.
The examination is oral. It will be based on the mandatory texts, the course notes and the presentation made in class by the students.
The following topics will be covered in the course:
1) What are the media: not mere means of communication
2) A brief history of consumer society
3) Democracy in the age of social media
4) Political narratives in the age of social media
5) Authoritarianism and the media
6) Surveillance, discipline, biopolitics
7) Surveillance capitalism
8) The market in the digital world: the question of monopolies
9) Geopolitics of cyberspace
10) How to rethink freedom of expression in the digital world
11) Cinema and artificial intelligence: how the world of images has thought the future
12) Marxism, critical theory and existentialism: what tools do they offer for analysing the digital world?
Mandatory Texts:
N. Srnicek, Capitalismo digitale, LUISS University Press, Roma 2017.
G. Giacomini, Il trilemma della libertà. Stati, cittadini, compagnie digitali, La Nave di Teseo, Milano 2025.
One paper to be chosen from:
E. Fisher, “Personalisation and the Libertarian Roots of Populism”. Triple C, Vol. 23, No 1, 2025.
G. De Ruvo, “Alhorithmic Objectivity as Ideology: Toward a Critical Ethics of Digital Capitalism”. Topoi 44, 2025.
The students will then submit a personal bibliography for their presentation.
