Is Bureaucracy the Answer of the Law to Digital Technologies?

One of the most prominent fears related to the debate on AI is the moment when it stops offering services and starts demanding from the user. Today, the dystopian scenarios represented in literature and cinema describe totalitarian regimes dominated by technology in which the individual is a system of data interpreted by the machine. It is here described a world with no politics or right, but only technology and protocols that the citizen is endured. How can a technology that claims to be human-centered and a guarantee of tailor-made services intended to support man and his well-being, as communication on AI tells us, be a source of despotism, tyranny and technological oppression? If the reason lies in a rational, impartial and impersonal application of technology to civil life, then reasoning in terms of bureaucracy can be useful to understand the limits and responsibilities of the actors involved: the citizen, the politician, the scientist, the technician, the businessman. In fact, while bureaucracy is committed to ensuring the achievement of a collective goal through implementation procedures, which verify that the interests of the individual and the community are realised in accordance with the legal principles of a given state system, we know that bureaucracy can also turn into the blind application of vexatious rules. Through the analysis of a short film series called Screening Surveillance (2019–2022), the paper investigates a bureaucratic use of technology, while the bureaucratic implementation of AI and the bureaucratic approach to the regulation of digital technologies will be discussed also in the light of recent developments in EU law (such as the two tiers of the “Digital Services Package”, and April 21, 2021 proposal for an “Artificial Intelligence Act”)