I have always found it quite reasonable to think that the large-scale use of do-it-all machines produces collective value that deserves to be fairly distributed. In my cyborg anthropology, citizens, now emancipated thanks to the reprogrammable infrastructures that they always carry with them, are economically supported by the state to be able to contribute to the management of public affairs. Constantly reeducated by the informational reverb they feed on, like arendtian Greek aristocrats they move into action to fulfill themselves in the public sphere. At the same time, they contribute to the real-time emergence of the volonté générale in a perfect synthesis between direct and representative democracy. The good news is that this redistributive universal basic income already exists. In Italy, it takes the perverse forms of early retirements, permanent positions with an extremely low productivity rate, and in my case, of modest unemployment benefits for precarious university researchers. Having now reached the age of Our Lord and guided by a well-established antiwork faith, faced with the devastating idea of spending yet another winter in northeastern Italy, with the fog and particulate levels far above the legal limit, I remind myself that the scraps of the sweet welfare state are urging me to travel abroad to affordable destinations. That little bit of extra passive income helps; all that remains for me is to organize a local network of people. I chose the South American continent for linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical reasons. The big question the native asks Jared Diamond — why does Europe have so much cargo? — is explained by Cortés’s competitive advantage: the conquistadores arrive in the Americas with steel weapons and immunity to disease thanks to livestock domestication. Fascinating geographical determinism. South America, a vast and messy continent, ends up looking sufficiently uniform to European eyes. Go to South America, thus my friend Jordi, and you’ll see what capitalism without a welfare state looks like. A modern Chatwin with a smartphone and the fear of having it stolen, I tell myself as I pedal over the cobblestones of the limited traffic zone in a former Renaissance city. In search of the Milodon and on the threshold of the breakdown of the United States’ accumulation cycle. Empires in decline have always fought tooth and nail, thus Fidel Castro to Allende who, faithful to democratic principles, sacrificed his life to fascists backed by the CIA, I tell myself as I sit at lunch at my aunt’s, an excellent menu unchanged for generations: tagliatelle, sides simmering in pots, Merlot. Yes, researching the trajectories of digital sovereignty in the region has many advantages; it’s a good story, captivating, marketable. Understanding its struggles, its spaces of resistance and emancipation, the stories of those who live in it from a pharmacological perspective. Even better, its tribulations, I tell myself, a special word when pronounced in Veneto dialect by my creationist grandmother with Parkinson’s: no sta farme tribolar – where, because of the tremor, the sentence seemed to emanate not from her mouth but from her hands. A phrase later taken up by my mother: te ghe trent’ani e anca adesso te mantengo; par mi te sì na preocupassion; te me fa tribolar. (You’re thirty and I still have to provide for you; you’re a burden on my mind; you make me struggle). A word present in Revelation 7:14, where the Great Tribulation is the period our Lord speaks of to indicate the time of the end. Which I read as the end of the suffering arising from the concern of having to sustain oneself financially, from the specter of having to stay soto paròn (under a boss) in a region where the too rapid shift from a peasant society to wealth, the Catholic inheritance, and the land consumption of a choke-chain progress have led to immense disasters. There is no real work without suffering. It’s better to think of a Plan B.

There is something obvious with our obsession with computation. With the invention of the wheel, humans began to imagine the entire world as a spinning wheel, an endless cycle of seasons, lives, and realms. In Indian cosmology there is samsara, the continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth through which living beings pass. With the invention of writing, the whole world becomes a book. In Judaism, God is the Author of Being and inscribes our names in the Book of Life. Saint Augustine speaks of the Liber mundi as the incarnation of the divine word, with human beings as sentences running between margins already drawn. The parchment medium becomes the message: in the beginning was the logos. With the invention of the engine, a gear turning on other gears, the entire world becomes mechanical. God is the Divine Watchmaker, the planets revolve along predetermined trajectories, and the universe is reduced to a precision machine. Leibniz imagines the cosmos itself as a calculating machine. It is no accident, then, that we now ask what computation means for the organization of society, what are the consequences of computation, and that we are inclined to think of the world as simulacrum. Truth be told, it took very little for us to fall in love with digital technologies in the name of efficiency. In North America, in 1964, during the Berkeley protests, Mario Savio still used the metaphor of the bureaucratic and military machine in a negative sense, calling on people to throw their bodies upon the gears to stop it. But only a few years later, the computer had become a tool of emancipation and community-building, celebrated by the counterculture of experimentation. In the Soviet Union, computers moved, starting in the 1950s, from being dismissed as a product of American pseudoscience to being hailed as machines of communism. Nowadays’ calculation, central both to centralized planning processes and to the market economy, operates at planetary scale and at the speed of electrical immediacy. And Stafford Beer’s early‑1970s insight remains unsurpassed: to use computation only to optimize and streamline firms is a great waste. It must be collectivized to rethink the bases of sociality and to guarantee freedom that is effective and computable. A project naturally implemented by the malign genius of capital through advertising in a formidable process of self‑renewal that has made both users and state forms dependent on digital rentiers. In this journey, digital tribulations name the lived struggles created by platforms whose business is to arbitrage human time, certain states’ attempts to redirect platformization – the quest for digital sovereignty – and popular organization that seeks to reclaim time and autonomy.