<nettime> Il Manifesto: Let's get the network data

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EDITORIAL
Let's get the network data

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=it&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Filmanifesto.it%2Ffacciamoci-dare-i-dati-della-rete%2F

Open Letter to the Italian Government and the European Institutions.
Without the cooperation of the OTTs and the platforms, we grope in the
dark and the virus is uncontrollable. The appeal of journalists to
mobilize the country's databases: the virality of the network against
the virality of the epidemic


***

EDITION OF THE
03/25/2020

POSTED
24.3.2020, 19:12

We are a group of journalists who want to join the country's effort
against contagion.

We understood that our world, that of information and digital
relations, is today the main battleground.

We want to make available to the country the experience of a
profession that, for better or for worse, has always played a role
in the national emergency, making vital information transparent and
shared.

Today we learn from the head of the Civil Protection Borrelli that at
least 10 real infected people go around our cities for every single
infected person who is intercepted by the health system.

This differential translates into hospitalized, intubated and,
terribly, deaths.

We cannot continue to go blind hunting for asymptomatics.

The Italian government and Europe have opened up the technological
front.

It takes projects, ideas, solutions to limit the infection.

But as information workers we know that all of this will be a dead
letter if we don't have the data to power these tools.

Without data we die.

Government and European institutions must ask those who have these
data to make them available to health and administrative authorities
to limit the damage.

The great service providers: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, know
a lot, if not everything, about social relationships, mobility, the
mood, the physical conditions, of millions and millions of Italians,
we talk about those Italians of more dynamic and competitive areas,
living on the net, constantly talking to the net.

We need to know what happened in February, how it is possible that
the volcano exploded in Italy, and above all we must now enclose the
contagion areas, identifying the most dangerous groups precisely in
the passage from north to south of the wave of the coronavirus.

Only the databases of these profiling powers would allow us to
hopefully fight this war.

As the European Commission claims, it is not a question of
expropriating anyone.

We ask these large corporations for collaboration, we want
institutions to get attention for concrete cooperation.

We would like the government to get positive answers from those who
are partners in the public administration, from companies that are
collecting invaluable masses of data for the movement of a large part
of the population on their e learning and smart working platforms.

We have read that Mark Zuckerberg fears a collapse of his servers
due to the excess of users by quarantined citizens. Then he too
should bring these people out of the house by shortening the time
of isolation, help governments to georeference the real areas of
transmission of the virus.

A platform that gathers almost half of the earth's population is in
itself a common good, a universal service.

Let these great technological brands gain the honor of being an
essential part of our lives by using the virality of the network
against the virality of the disease.

They know a lot, if not all. They know where, how and when the
contagion opportunities have arisen, the rush of the virus has
accelerated.

Can all this be made available to the country right away?

Owners of these platforms can elaborate, trace calculate the crisis
points, developing graphs that make us understand in Lazio or Campania
or Sicily what is about to happen.

Let them independently give us the results of this elaboration.

We don't want to get our hands in their drawers. Let the owners of
these drawers make us win this battle, to save victims, to limit
suffering, to save their users.

We know it can. We know they can.

We do not want to resign ourselves today to the observation that,
as Capitalism of Surveillance Shoshanna Zuboff writes, these
technological groups "know too much to be free".

We want to hope we can share with them the vision that these groups
are free because we can know everything.

Moreover, most of these giants were born in California, in an
extraordinary season of dreams and creativity, in which software
became the language of freedom and the sharing of a single connective
intelligence. How can they forget where they come from?

As a great Italian like Adriano Olivetti predicted, in 1959:
information technology is a technology of freedom. Believe us, we
practice that lesson that announced us how software and databases are
instruments of freedom from the threat of death and suffering.

Who can hide these hopes behind the futile reason, especially in this
moment, of private interests?

We hope that the Italian and European institutions can, at the end of
this terrible adventure, show us that the great powers of calculation
are free precisely because we can all be happy with knowing.

Show us you protagonists of this season of wonders of science and
technology that we are right.

Give us today the data that are needed by the Ministry of Health and
civil protection to support the shoulder of the epidemic. Analyze
them, decipher them, explain how to use them.

Let's all win this battle of humanity together.

And we agree together that, as Albert Einstein said, "things that
count cannot always be counted and things that can be counted do not
always count".

First signatories

Michele Mezza, Marco Mele, Lazzaro Pappagallo, Giorgio Balzoni,      o
Alessi Buzzanca, Vanna Palumbo, Morena Mancinelli, Paola Bergami,    o
Vincenz Campo, Mario Fatell                                          o


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