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In Digital Communism, Maurizio Ferraris argues that digital platforms generate value from users’ data and everyday online activities. He proposes Webfare as an alternative system based on voluntary data-sharing, collective ownership, and redistribution. Rather than rejecting capitalism or technology, Ferraris calls for new institutions, rights, transparency, and democratic control of digital infrastructures.

Webfare proposes treating user-generated data as a collective source of wealth and redistributing its value through welfare systems. Ferraris and Mauro Guerra suggest making Big Tech contribute to social security, potentially linking digital activity to pensions. The model aims to create a third path between US platform capitalism and Chinese state control.

Ferraris argues that digital technologies transform everyday actions into data and potential value. His concept of Webfare seeks to redistribute this value as a collective resource. He also introduces documanity, emphasizing how digital traces shape society, and advocates for “technosophy” as a balanced approach to technology and AI.

Maurizio Ferraris’s idea of Webfare focuses on transforming the value generated by collective data into a resource for public well-being, rather than leaving its benefits in the hands of major corporations. He suggests that large-scale datasets can be converted into economic capital and used to tackle social issues, including the sustainability of welfare and…

Ferraris proposes digital communism as a European alternative to US platform capitalism and Chinese digital authoritarianism. Data generated through everyday consumption should become collectively owned and voluntarily shared through European platforms, with profits redistributed according to need. This model aims to strengthen equality, privacy, digital sovereignty, and collective ownership.

Ferraris argues that digital capitalism extracts value from everyday life through the continuous production of data. Platforms capture this “documedial surplus value,” although users generate it. His proposal for digital communism seeks to reclaim and redistribute this wealth, shifting the focus from traditional labour toward human needs, life, equity, solidarity, and mutualism.

In The Webfare Manifesto (2024), Maurizio Ferraris argues that everyday activities generate valuable data that should be treated as a common, renewable form of wealth. He proposes Webfare as a digital welfare model based on need, data protection, civic interpretation, and redistribution, challenging the concentration of value by digital platforms.

The data generated through everyday activities has become the new raw material of the digital economy, yet much of the value created from this resource remains concentrated among a limited number of actors. The concept of Webfare proposes a new digital welfare model aimed at returning part of this value to society and redefining…