Editorial Staff
Insurgencia Magisterial
August 17th, 2025
Maurizio Ferraris’s The Webfare Manifesto (2024) proposes a new framework for understanding digital capitalism and the social value of data. Building on his theories of New Realism and documentality, Ferraris argues that everyday human activities—such as consuming, browsing, moving, communicating, and expressing preferences—continuously generate digital traces that can be recorded, interpreted, and capitalized.
The manifesto challenges the neoliberal principle of merit as the basis for social distribution and proposes need as a more universal criterion. Since data are generated collectively through everyday life, Ferraris argues that they should be understood as a form of common, renewable wealth rather than a resource primarily controlled by digital platforms.
This leads to the concept of Webfare, conceived as a digital evolution of traditional welfare. Its objective is to redistribute the economic value generated by users’ data through mechanisms including data protection, ethical data management, civic interpretation, and redistribution.
However, the proposal remains largely theoretical. Ferraris provides limited detail on the institutional, technical, and legal mechanisms required to implement such redistribution and may underestimate the structural power of digital platforms. Nevertheless, Webfare offers a significant shift from criticizing data capitalism toward imagining a more equitable and collectively oriented digital economy.
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