The emergence of algocracy – understood as the government of algorithms in production and organisational processes – brings about a structural transformation of employer power. This is because it does not merely introduce new technical tools, but redefines the very architecture of decision-making in the employment relationship: from personnel selection to performance appraisal, from assignment of tasks to termination of employment. And so, in the new era of algocracy, command becomes opaque, distributed and mediated by automated systems. In this context, the lexicon of ‘algoretic’ – often evoked to indicate a supposed ethics of algorithms – risks constituting more of an ideological veil than a real critical category. There is, in fact, no ethics of algorithms in the proper sense, since algorithms are not moral subjects. Rather, there is a human responsibility, which must be translated not into ethical statements (subject to individual impulses), but into precise and effective legal constraints.
Hence the need to rethink the intertwining of algocracy, ‘algorethics’ and digital citizenship from a labour law perspective, shifting the centre of gravity from ethics to juridicality.
Algocracy: the metamorphosis of employer power
Algocracy marks the shift from visible employer power attributable to a physical person to mediated power embedded in technical systems that operate as decision-making infrastructures. So-called algorithmic management organises work through metrics, scores, reputational systems and predictive models. This produces a new form of subordination, which we do not hesitate to define as ‘informational subordination’, since the worker is not only dependent on orders, but on data flows and computational logic that no one, least of all the worker himself, is able to control or fully understand.
This transformation has two fundamental implications. First, power does not disappear, but is concealed, since the algorithm is not an autonomous subject, but a device that conveys human decisions, often removed from transparency and contestation. Secondly, the traditional asymmetry between employer and employee is amplified, since the former not only holds organisational control, but also possesses and manages – almost always, moreover, without full awareness – informational and predictive control.
The Critique of Algoretic: the Insufficiency of Ethics
In this scenario, recourse to ‘algorethics‘ as a set of ethical principles tout court (transparency, fairness, non-discrimination) appears, on closer inspection, insufficient and partly misleading. To speak of the ethics of algorithms implies an undue personification of technology, as if it were the bearer of values of its own. However, algorithms are not moral agents: they are artefacts designed, trained and used by human subjects and tech organisations.
The real problem is not, therefore, to make algorithms ‘ethical’, but to subject those who design and use them to stringent legal obligations. Otherwise, ethics, in this field, risks operating as a form of soft regulation, entrusted to the goodwill of companies or to codes of conduct lacking effectiveness and cogency in the fullest sense of the term. Otherwise, algorethics can easily turn into a strategy of deresponsibility, so that ethics is invoked to avoid law.
The perspective therefore needs to be reversed: not an ethics of algorithms, but a legalisation of their governance, ensuring a shift from general and often undefined principles to binding rules, effective controls and judicial remedies.
Workers’ digital citizenship and new legal status
It is precisely in the tension between algocracy and its insufficient ethical response that the need for a new ‘legal figure’ emerges, anchored to the concept of ‘digital citizenship’ of the worker. However, to fully grasp its scope, it is necessary to start with the concept of citizenship tout court. It is traditionally understood as that legal, political and social bond between an individual and a State, from which derive civil, political and social rights, as well as reciprocal duties. Citizenship thus takes the form of the attribution of a status that defines the individual’s membership of a politically and territorially determined community.
Transposed into the digital dimension, this notion undergoes a major transformation: digital citizenship is no longer rooted exclusively in a physical space, but is constructed within virtual environments, technological infrastructures and platforms. In this context, it leads to the delineation of a new status of the worker whenever he or she operates in the network, through digital platforms or by means of artificial intelligence systems.
There is no doubt, in fact, that new civil and social rights are taking shape in the digital dimension, as well as new and as yet unexplored reciprocal duties between worker and employer (or, more precisely, between worker and algorithmic work organisation). Talking about digital citizenship therefore implies not only recognising the existence of these rights, but also identifying and typifying them, while at the same time tracing a sort of ‘material constitution’ of the digital dimension of work, within which these rights can find effective application and guarantee.
In this perspective, the worker’s digital citizenship is configured as a true ‘algorithmic labour subjectivity’, characterised by rights that we could define as ‘fourth generation’, not because they are new in an absolute sense, but because they derive from the technological transformation of power. These include rights such as those to the effective transparency of decision-making systems; to the explicability of decisions affecting the employment relationship; to the contestation of automated decisions; to real, not merely formal, human supervision; to non algorithmicdiscrimination, with appropriately redistributed burdens of proof.
These rights should not be conceived as ethical concessions, but recognised as protected subjective legal positions, enforceable in court and protected by sanctions.
Digital citizenship, technocivism and technological participation
If digital citizenship of the worker defines a status, technocivism represents its dynamic and participatory dimension. It can be understood as the set of practices, rights and duties through which subjects – and in particular workers – actively participate in the governance of the technologies that affect them.
In this sense, technocivism marks a further departure from the purely defensive logic of labour law. Alongside the aforementioned rights of transparency, explainability, contestation, supervision and non-discrimination, a ‘co-constitutive’ role of workers in technological processes must be recognised. This implies, to give an example: forms of collective involvement in the design or adoption of algorithmic systems in the company; rights of access and control over the data that feed these systems; instruments of technological collective bargaining, capable of affecting algorithmic logics; practices of participatory auditing and widespread control.
Technocivism, then, translates digital citizenship into action, transforming the worker from a subject exposed to algorithmic power into a subject that contributes to defining its limits and modes of exercise. In this perspective, it stands as a response to the crisis of ethics: where ethics limits itself to stating principles, technocivism demands institutionalised spaces of intervention and control, rooted in law and industrial relations.
The transformation of labour law
The emergence of digital citizenship of the worker implies a profound transformation of labour law. Firstly, there is a shift from the right to protection to the right to participation, allowing the worker to move beyond the passive position of recipient of protections to being able to affect the algorithmic processes that affect him or her.
Secondly, personal data must take on a new centrality. It is no longer merely an object of protection, but becomes a constitutive element of the labour relationship, so that the legal management of labour also protects the worker when handling his data.
Thirdly, a revision of evidentiary techniques and legal presumptions is required to prevent algorithmic opacity from resulting in a vacuum of protection. Transparency, in fact, cannot be left to employer discretion, but must be imposed as a legal obligation.
Finally, the principle of worker dignity – which is a cornerstone of labour law – must be reinterpreted in the light of technological mediation. This means that it is not enough to prevent human abuse, the abuse embedded in technical systems must also be prevented.
Beyond ethics, towards law.
The intertwining of algocracy, algorethics, digital citizenship and technocivism does not lead to a harmonious synthesis, but to a critical stance: ethics is not enough. In a context where power is exercised through algorithmic infrastructures, regulation cannot be entrusted to voluntary principles or declarations of intent.
The real challenge is to build a labour law capable of governing algocracy, making automated decisions accountable and granting the worker full citizenship even in the digital environment. This means recognising that the algorithm is not a new sovereign, but an instrument that must remain subordinate to the law.
In this perspective, so-called algoreticism must be brought back to its authentic core: not an ethics of algorithms, but a legal responsibility of the human beings who design, employ and benefit from them. And technocivism is its necessary complement, constituting the transition from a responsibility imposed from above to an active and participatory citizenship in the governance of technologies.
Only then can the digital citizenship of the worker become not a promise, but a reality.