In its historical-etymological origin, testified to us at the highest level by the Tuscolane Cicero, the term culture indicates a process of elevation of an individual or a civilization through the cultivation of the intellect and virtues. It will later be, with the medieval canonistic and philosophical reflection, that the concept will take on a more figurative sense. In the subsequent moment of development of the proto-star and the opening of the large maritime spaces, it will return by the hand and pen of Pufendorf and Grozio to the sense already illustrated by Cicero but with a more peculiar breathing. In fact, culture will be a glue of the improvement of an orderly and peaceful coexistence, so true that Kant will write in the criticism of the judgment that culture embodies “the ultimate purpose that nature has reason to put in relation to the human species”. The de-individualization of culture will therefore lead her to be attracted to the canon of the recognition of a given people and a nation. It will be for this, often tortuous path, that culture, in Germany with Herder, in France with Comte, will take on the coloring of a lattice of elements conspiring each other capable of defining the nation, giving life to reflection on social processes and anthropology and sociology of culture, with Simmel and Durkheim. Culture takes on the appearance of an identification canon of a group, of a whole, in this way, in this way, connected in the most intimate way to the sovereignty around which the states would be germinated. This lesson that must be concerned in the maximum degree especially in digital society. In digital, the culture production factors are closely connected to great private subjects, who not only carry out culture in the sense of entertainment and training of the individual but also generate culture seen as we have described it so far, or as a common expressive code, as a fundamental rule. “The weakness of Europe” writes Luca Balestrieri in The World Platforms. The hegemony of the new media lords (Luiss University Press), “lies in the lack of their own champions: the global projection ecosystems that are also re-founding cultural production, that is, the platform-mundo platforms are US or in perspective even Chinese”. But there is another aspect in which culture connects to digital sovereignty: Roberto Baldoni reminds us in his recent digital sovereignty, published by Il Mulino. According to Baldoni, the maintenance of digital sovereignty in the cybernetic domain necessarily passes through full control of the data circulating in one’s own country and resides in technological capacity and human competence, in the awareness of risks by operators and all society, in the ability to establish connections with state and international institutions. Ability, competence, knowledge and awareness are nodal themes in the space of digital security and cybernetic sovereignty. “Without adequate awareness of the risks that could arise () it is not possible to evaluate the situation in which we find ourselves” notes Gabriele D’Angelo and Giampiero Giacomello in their cybersicacy, the mill. There is no doubt that to have full awareness, effective knowledge, true ability, basic glue is the development of an overall digital culture.
In the digital field, in fact, there is a return to culture for as understood by Cicero: work on itself to improve and refine the degree of full awareness, in the general framework of an interconnection that translates the founding elements of a state, as a set of citizens, from reality to virtual.
After all, that digital is not only an immaterial element and that on the contrary it has very solid real roots and equally solid real externalities, just like culture, it is historically postponed to us by a series of themes.
Groundedness, that is, both the truth of artificial intelligence training sources as the impact on reality exercised by high technology, to which Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt have dedicated an entire chapter of their genesis volume. How to navigate in the era of artificial intelligence (Mondadori).
The geography of the cyberspazio on which already in the early 2000s Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin had been exercised with their cyberspace atlas: the software, artificial intelligence, cyberspace, really devour the world, have their own transformative power, their topography, as the now dating back but still fundamental sentence of the American Supreme Court Reno VS ACLU, 1997.
The royal canon of digital is married with the equally real canon of culture, as a device to recognize a characterization of the social set and the sovereign state, according to the conceptual line already illustrated by Carl Schmitt or the concept of politician. It is not possible to maintain full sovereignty if a shared culture does not develop, fully conceived and known, of the presence in the digital field of what a state is, not mere intersection of borders but precisely a culture populated by aware individuals. Digital literacy, awareness of being one interconnected to others and that the damage of one can become systemic damage, a co -presence of micro and macro factors, development of a competitive innovation, in the sense outlined by crossbowmen, this cultural phenomenon par excellence.
For how many legislative, technical, bureaucratic, repressive tools, one wants to imagine and conceive in
Name of digital security, without the modulation of a culture of presence in the digital domain and the relationship of the citizen himself with high technology, no country will be able to truly be the master of their destiny.