Pablo Marín
El País Chile
January 17th, 2026
The text explores Maurizio Ferraris’s concept of Webfare, developed in The Webfare Manifesto, and his broader reflections on digital capitalism, data, politics, and technology. Ferraris argues that the data generated by individuals through everyday online activities represent a new form of capital. While individual data may have little value on their own, large datasets can be aggregated and transformed into significant economic and social value. At present, this value is largely captured by major technology corporations, particularly in the United States, while other countries mainly contribute data without benefiting from their capitalization.
Ferraris therefore proposes an alternative model in which data are used to generate collective well-being. Instead of simply protecting data through individual rights, institutions could enable their responsible and voluntary use to address social challenges. He points to pension systems as an example: aggregated social data could potentially be transformed into economic value and used to support welfare systems. In this perspective, data become a collective resource capable of financing public goods.
This approach also has a political dimension. Ferraris argues that the traditional political focus on labour is becoming less adequate as automation reduces the need for human work, while human needs remain substantial. He suggests that progressive politics should therefore focus not only on defending rights but also on capitalizing and redistributing the value generated by citizens’ data. This could provide Europe with a third path between US-style platform capitalism and China’s model of state-controlled digital infrastructure.
The text also discusses Ferraris’s position on technology. He rejects both technophilia, which assumes technology will solve every problem, and technophobia, which portrays humans as powerless victims of technological domination. Instead, he advocates a form of “technosophy”, focused on understanding and governing technology pragmatically. Artificial intelligence, in this view, is not an autonomous force destined to replace human intelligence, but rather a tool whose outcomes depend on how people use it. AI ultimately functions as a mirror of human capabilities, intentions, and limitations.
Overall, Ferraris calls for a shift from seeing data primarily as a source of private profit or a threat to privacy toward understanding them as a potential collective resource. The challenge is to develop political and institutional mechanisms capable of transforming digital value into social welfare while preserving individual freedom and agency.
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