Digital Geographies and Digital Surveillance Technologies: Power and Space in the Italian Society Under Control for Public Health

Over the past decades, digital technologies have been exploited to supply traditional measures employed to trace people's behavior. This chapter aims to discuss the current field of actual surveillance and the age of surveillance capitalism with its contradictions. The main focus is on the Italian technology solutions deployed to tackle the spread of COVID-19. This chapter analyzes the interaction between the procedures shaped by the Italian surveillance technologies implemented to discipline (e.g., social distancing) and control (e.g., prescribing spatial behavior) forms of governmentality. Another aspect of this research explores the very complex stratification of public and private spaces producing new spatiality during the pandemic. A preliminary analysis of surveillance technologies deployed to struggle COVID-19 is reviewed and their biopolitical power in the current exceptional state discussed in the specific case of Italy. Two perspectives, a biopolitical one and data justice, provide an essential lens of reading to understand the effects of surveillance technologies in the Italian society during the pandemic, leading to a further progress in the phenomenon of surveillance capitalism to which we have all been subjected for a long time.