There is something obvious about our obsession with computation. With the invention of the wheel, human beings imagine a circular world that turns and turns again, an endless cycle of seasons, lives, kingdoms. Indian cosmology imagines this as 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. For Judaism, God is the Author of Being and writes our names in the Book of Life. Saint Augustine speaks of the Liber mundi as the incarnation of the divine word: human beings are sentences flowing between margins already traced. The parchment medium becomes the message of the word; in the beginning was the logos. With the invention of the engine, a gear turning upon other gears, the whole world becomes mechanical. God is the Divine Watchmaker, the planets revolve along predetermined trajectories, and the universe is reduced to a precision machine. Leibniz hypothesizes the cosmos as a calculating machine.
Since today’s society rests on the planetary-scale distribution of reprogrammable interfaces, it is no accident that we think the world is a simulacrum, nor that I am here asking myself what the consequences of computation are for the way society is organized. 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, urging people to put their bodies on the gears to stop it. But only a few years later the computer becomes a tool for emancipation, a builder of communities, celebrated by the counterculture of experimentation. In the Soviet Union, computers move from being a product of American pseudoscience in the 1950s to “machines of communism.” Calculation—central both to planning processes and to the market economy—now has planetary scale and the tempo of electrical immediacy.
Yet Stafford Beer’s intuition in the early 1970s remains unsurpassed: using computation only to optimize and make companies more efficient is a tremendous waste. It must be collectivized in order to rethink the foundations of sociality and to guarantee a freedom that is real and computable: designing freedom. A project, needless to say, carried out by capital’s malign genius through advertising, in a formidable process of self-renewal that has brought users and state forms into dependency on digital rentiers.
Personally, 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 more fairly distributed. In my cyborg anthropology, citizens—organisms now emancipated thanks to the reprogrammable infrastructures they always carry with them—are economically supported by the state so they can contribute to the management of public affairs. Constantly re-educated by the informational reverberation they feed on, connected, they move into action to realize themselves in public space like Greek aristocrats. At the same time, they contribute to the real-time emergence of the volonté générale, in an imperfect synthesis between direct and representative democracy.
The good news is that, in Italy, this redistributive universal basic income already exists. It takes the perverse forms of early retirements, permanent positions with an extremely low productivity rate, and—in my case—modest unemployment benefits for precarious university researchers. Having now reached the age of Our Lord and guided by a well-established anti-work faith, faced with the devastating idea of spending yet another winter in northeastern Italy, with fog and particulate levels far above the legal limit, I repeat to myself that, while waiting for the chômage de prospérité Gorz spoke of, the scraps of this sweet welfare state are urging me to travel abroad to affordable destinations. That small amount of extra passive income makes things easier; all that remains is organizing a local network of people on the ground.
I chose the South American continent for linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical reasons. The great question the indigenous person asks Diamond—why does Europe have so much cargo?—is explained by Cortés’s competitive advantage: he arrived in the Americas with steel weapons and immunity to disease thanks to livestock breeding. Fascinating geographical determinism. South America, a large and chaotic continent, ends up looking sufficiently uniform to European eyes. Go to South America, my friend Jordi tells me, and you’ll see what capitalism without a welfare state looks like. Declining empires have always defended themselves tooth and nail, so Fidel Castro to Allende who, faithful to democratic principles, sacrifices his life by handing Chile over to CIA‑funded fascists, I tell myself as I sit at lunch at my aunt’s: an excellent menu unchanged for generations—tagliatelle, sides simmering in pots, Merlot. Chatwin set out in search of an extinct animal that probably never existed in order to explore a continent, whereas I set out with a smartphone and the fear that it will be stolen, I tell myself as I pedal over the cobblestones of the restricted traffic zone of a former Renaissance city. 
The search for my personal digital Mylodon takes the form of the industrial policy projects of South American governments I heard about while living in New York. I leave to understand Latin America’s tribulations, the spaces of resistance and emancipation, the stories of those who live it. Tribulations, I tell myself—a special word when pronounced in Venetian by my creationist grandmother with Parkinson’s: non sta farme tribolar (Don’t put me through this / Don’t make me suffer.), where because of the tremor, the phrase 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 support you; you’re a constant worry to me; you make my life hard.). A word present in Revelation 7:14: the Great Tribulation is the period Our Lord speaks of to indicate the time of the end, which I interpret as the end of the suffering that comes from the worry of having to sustain oneself economically, from the specter of having to star soto paròn,  (“To be under a boss,” i.e., stuck under an employer’s thumb), in a Veneto where hypocrisy, the overly rapid passage from a peasant society to wealth, the Catholic inheritance, and the land consumption of “strangling progress” have led to immense disasters. All property must be made to yield income. There is no real work without suffering. It is better to think of a plan B.
I choose to research developments in digital sovereignty in South America from a perspective Bernard Stiegler would call pharmacological—one that sees technology at once as poison and antidote. In South America, on the threshold of the collapse of the United States’ accumulation cycle, given the absence of a strong welfare state and the greater economic precariousness of the masses compared to Europe, platforms that offer zero-cost services, like WhatsApp, have an astonishing penetration. Not only private individuals, but all businesses use it too. If this is in continuity with the history of colonization and expropriation in Latin America, I tell myself, on the other hand this continent is also more accustomed to that dynamic. What, then, should we say of Europe, ever more subordinate to the United States, which has gone from colonizer to colonized?
The first element to start from, then, is that counterbalancing Latin America’s open wounds, as Eduardo Galeano puts it, there is a tradition of struggle and of developing creative solutions: knowing how to get by with what one has at hand, what Brazilians call gambiarra. Second, it is precisely in South America that a different vision of the public interest and the role of the state sometimes surfaces—perhaps by mistake. This has led to the development of interesting public digital infrastructure projects. Truth be told, there are not many examples. In debates on the topic one often ends up citing Aadhaar, India’s controversial biometric digital identification system. For the Global North, habituated not only to the market’s fake naturalness, as Polanyi teaches, but also to the fact that its logic extends to every aspect of life, public digital infrastructure becomes difficult to imagine. China comes into view, where projects exist—such as the Food Basket Project—through which the state decided to partially decommodify food, guaranteeing access at stable prices and good quality—and it does so, of course, not only out of benevolence but for social stability.
There is the case of ANTEL, Uruguay’s telecommunications company, which represents a global exception, having resisted privatization thanks to a popular referendum that transformed connectivity from an extractive commodity into a component of national welfare. Moreover, Brazil developed an app called PIX, the first and revolutionary public fintech, which in a very short time radically changed Brazilians’ relationship with money and made payments easier for poorer classes: putting an end to the fake competition among PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, money can be sent instantly and without fees. Beggars offer their PIX number or a QR code.
On this journey, researching digital tribulations means researching the room for maneuver generated by platforms whose business is arbitraging human time; the attempts by some states to redirect platformization in pursuit of a longed-for digital sovereignty; and the forms of popular organization that seek to win back time and autonomy. 
In other words, it is not only a matter of asking how to limit digital colonization and create institutions capable of producing public value, but also: how to reroute the power of computation toward an anthropology of emancipation?