«The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed».
——William Gibson

A lot of us live in a world that does not exist anymore, therefore operates with political strategies and mental frames that suited the old world, but are tragically inadequate to the new one. The old world was based on material capitalism, which built and exchanged things. Today, and even more in the immediate future, capitalism has changed face in a radical manner, and it is the exchange of information that rules and prevails. This causes unprecedented conflicts that need to be dealt with new tools.

In classic economy, to produce, reproduce and archive was very expensive, and the price of the product was included in these costs. In the intangible economy the only cost is the cost of production. Work hours are an unimportant variable, and the whole world becomes available «here, now».

In economic terms the returns of material economy were decreasing (it becomes harder and harder to exploit resources); in the intangible economy they are often increasing (once a model is established, it grows by itself and it becomes exploitable). All this requires a proper revolution in the management of future politics, something we are not prepared for.

The traditional conflict between work and capital has been overweighed by the conflict with information. Controlling the intermediation of social and economical relations, it presses bothand creates a new class conflict between intermediaries and intermediated.

This book gives us the basic tools to understand the scale of this Digital Revolution, using clear examples and with well analyzed dynamics.

Stefano Quintarelli (1965) is an entrepreneur, expert in communication and computer science and an Internet pioneer. He became a congressman in 2013, and for few years he devoted himself to politics, contributing to the modernization of the country, specifically through the creation of SPID (an access system to Public Administartion Services) and the formulation of a legislative proposal that introduced free access Wi-Fi to Italy. He is a member of the Leadership Council of Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the U.N. and part of the Group of high-level experts on Artificial Intelligence for the European Commission. He is also President of the Steering Committee for the Agency of digital Italy.