A centre for man and law

The digital revolution is also a spatial revolution. It radically transforms the places we live in and the way we experience them. It changes the forms of everything that takes shape in space - nature and city, man and society, economy, democracy and law - to the point of making us lose the very notion of space. This spatial revolution is, therefore, an existential revolution, of constitutional, that is, foundational significance. In some ways superhuman (like Leopardi's silences), because of the way in which the digitally redefined container space seems to redefine the ontology of the world.

The digital space, the metaverse, stretches out before us as a new promised land, an interminable land (Leopardi again comes to the rescue), of infinite possibilities and potential, at the same time abstract, almost experimental, as the adjective virtual (that which is in power) seems to suggest. In which to host the twin of us and the world (the many digital twins), in which to mirror ourselves and know ourselves (transformed into idols, images, éidolon), in which to find refuge from the finiteness of the world, from the scarcity of resources, from the concreteness of need, from distance and time. A world at our fingertips, digital in fact, which seems to place itself, with all that it offers, in our hands and under our control, mouldable on demand. A new world, in short, in which we can expand (expand is, in fact, the etymological meaning of space, from the Sanskrit root spa-). And it is precisely through this extension that on-life (Luciano Floridi) is taking shape, life, that is, between real and virtual, according to a path of ever closer integration, even of rediscovered unity. A path that law too pursues, giving us a new identity (the digital identity), new forms of citizenship (the digital citizenship), of equality (the so-called digital republic), of democracy (the so-called e-democracy), new forms of government (the so-called government as a platform).

Yet, this digital space, for that mixture of infinity-abstractness-virtuality, deludes us. It gives us an illusion of freedom, a freedom that is only apparent, if it is true that we approach virtual space mostly as mere consumers, as followers, as users of customisable services (indicating, in fact, a personalisation designed for consumers); an illusion of liberation, of liberation from need, from the other, from the different, from the scarcity of resources, from the limits that only in physical space become tangible (think of the logistics of the virtual economy); an illusion of knowledge and innovation, which makes us satiated and fulfilled, as if, by entering the digital space, with its pocket-sized oracles (the Ai Chatbots), we had knowledge and 'the new' at our disposal; an illusion of the future, if it is true that the supposed generativity of the Ai, of a probabilistic kind, keeps us anchored to the past and to what can be extracted from it (in the sense of the Greek spãn, from which space).

In this attractive game of illusions, we abstract and estrange ourselves from ourselves and the world. There is, in fact, something in the physical space, with its sometimes annoying concreteness and finiteness, that forces us to put ourselves in the mirror of each other, in the mirror of nature, to recognise each other (the ethics of the face that Lèvinas speaks of). And again: to the sense of the physical limit we owe freedom, equality, responsibility, respect, care. This is a dangerous abstraction/extraction also because it corrupts physical space, our cities, simply consumed, abandoned, traversed, instagrammed (the idol city, image); it corrupts political space, with an abstract and alienating, non-generative politics; it corrupts juridical space. After all, it is in the earth that law has its mother (Carl Schmitt): a symbiotic relationship, which we find again today, overbearingly, in the normativity of climate change and common goods. A right, this one, which stems from a need to re-shape and make sense of space.

Like man and law, digital space also needs boundaries. An end and an end. In short, the time has come for a true urbanisation of digital space, capable of ensuring a permanent centre of gravity for man and law. After all, it is in man, vir, that virtue and the virtual have their common denominator.