In every professional experience it comes a point when you're willing to transfer and share your knowledge with the next generation. That's what happend to Alessandro Ciofini, italian ICT expert, with the talent of writing. The book "Consigli a un giovane sviluppatore" (Advice to a young developer) published in the second half of 2025, tries to tell his story. With a preface by Denis "Jaromil" Roio, a well-known activist and producer of free software, this is a book that talks about how to find your way in the most varied work environments, but also tells of the values and principles of one of the most creative professions of all. The ones that work on the applications of our phones, our cars, the websites. Ilaria Vanni interviewed Ciofini for The Meta Economist.
Ciofini: A Life at the Intersection of Technology, Art, and Politics
Born in Arezzo in 1971, Alessandro Ciofini grew up as the eldest son in a family with deep rural roots, shaped by post-war transformations that brought his parents into the booming local textile industry. Raised in a Catholic household, he showed an early fascination with design and engineering—passions that would define much of his multifaceted career.
After graduating from the Experimental Technical Institute “G. Galilei” in 1989 with a self-designed remake of the iconic game Simon, Ciofini enrolled in Electronic Engineering at the University of Florence. Though he left just two exams short of completing his degree, his thesis on telecommunications was later published at the VTC-2001 conference in Athens.
Alongside his academic pursuits, Ciofini explored his artistic side. He studied voice and piano privately in Arezzo and Florence and, in 1996, co-founded the Hesperimenta Vocal Ensemble, performing across Europe.
In the 1990s, Ciofini launched his professional journey as an IT consultant, developing some of the first websites for international clients. A lover of strategy and logic, he was also a competitive bridge player, representing his local club in national and international tournaments.
The early 2000s marked the beginning of his entrepreneurial path. He first tackled large-scale European agricultural monitoring projects in central Italy before relocating to Milan in 2006. There, he founded Osteodata, the country’s first integrated management system for osteopathy schools and clinics—possibly a global first at the time.
Balancing demanding roles at leading companies such as Ogilvy, Alkemy, Triboo, and Reply, Ciofini also navigated family life, raising two children during a particularly dynamic phase of his career.
In 2012, his interests expanded into politics. Drawn by values rooted in hacker culture—privacy, digital sovereignty, and freedom of expression—he joined the Italian Pirate Party. In 2019, he organized the 5th European Pirate Party Council Meeting in Milan and was elected to the party’s executive board, where he continues to serve as Treasurer. That same year, he ran as a candidate in the European Parliament elections for the North-West Italy constituency.
A polyglot and lifelong learner, Ciofini married in 2020 following a separation, and he is now expecting his third child with his Siberian-born wife.
Today, he works as a business and innovation consultant, supporting both startups and public institutions. He is preparing to release his first book, Advice to a Young Developer, a heartfelt tribute to the collaborators who have shared his long journey through code, creativity, and community. His debut novel is slated for publication in 2025.
How did you choose your career path?
Did I? Jokes apart, although I am a very straightforward and I like planning, I honestly don’t think we can 100% choose our life path: believe it or not, we can just follow our destiny or fight it. At the beginning, when I was a kid, I got totally fascinated by computers, electronic and all that stuff. That’s why I studied Electronic Engineering in Florence. But then something happened: despite my good results, the other “me” tried to move me away from being an engineer. What I was studying seemed to me so far away from what I desired. So I quitted. I turned into the working times, starting to be a developer. And then I followed the flow, without fighting anymore: this is how I came into many different roles, in my whole career, all related to information technology, from developing software to managing complex systems and being a C-level consultant nowadays. I was lucky to be ready to switch and adapt from one to another, but I have never betrayed my principles: work hard, love my job, be radically honest and trust people. This doesn’t mean everything went always well, but to remind a very important belief, I genuinely think that everything is happening to all of us is not entirely by chance, and more importantly it often comes for the better. This is always how I approached my career: en avant. N’import ou.
Does the role of an IT consultant still exist?
Exist?!? The hell yes, or I would be unemployed! And I will tell you more: nowadays it exists more than ever. Of course, if you have in mind the old fashioned IT consultant that ruled the 70s, well… maybe you’re a bit far away from reality. Many things changed, even dramatically changed I admit, so probably those who haven’t adapted lost their positions, jobs, careers: that’s totally fine. But for all the others, they most flexible ones, well I think these days are the most exciting ever to practice the IT consulting. We are really living a world plenty of opportunities: micro services everywhere, complexity all around the corner and now also artificial intelligence! Can you imagine? From one hand, we are oversimplifying and cutting repetitive and unproductive tasks. From the other one, we need more and more brain forces and out-of-the-box thinking, to be able to accept modern challenges. That’s exactly where the IT consultant role stands today. No matter how big the projects (and so the companies or the stakeholders) are, IT consultancy is still a prominent and key role spread everywhere due the to fact that IT matters are almost in everyday life activities. Of course you have different goals, budgets, ambitions if you’re working in a startup or in a huge corporation and you have to adapt to different organisation, different teams, different way of working. Nonetheless there is an increasing need of people who can see the problem at once (and eventually solve it!). Here it comes the IT consultant.
What is meant by digital rights, and what is happening at the international level? Which country is making the most progress?
When you talk about digital rights you have to refer first of what happened in the last 30 years: the global network made another human revolution. Billions of computers all connected using the same simple protocol, a peer to peer connection where everyone can be connected to everyone else. That’s what internet revolution is all about. In this way, everyone can potentially have access to digitalisation and so the digital world that was emerging from the 80s. World digitalisation couldn’t be so lucky without internet revolution. And here we are then, reflecting on digital rights. You can group them all into a simple sentence: whenever you’re putting aside the individuals from their digital footprint, you’re violating their rights, their digital rights. Some examples? Let’s talk about the right of sharing digital contents: if I buy a book, it’s mine. I can give it to you, so you can also read it. If I buy I e-book, I cannot give it you, you can’t read it: you have to buy it yourself. Or let’s talk about geolocation: internet is a protocol where everyone can be connected to everyone else, do you remember? So why I cannot access to a digital content (let’s say a movie) from France and I can from Italy? Is this something up to Netflix to decide? I paid for one month subscription, why I cannot access to movies from a different country? Let’s talk about communication then: governments from everywhere are repeating the mantra that “for security reasons” they want to have access to all your digital communications, breaking the messaging encryption: do you have an idea of the consequences? The right of having private communication is the ultimate and sole way to guarantee freedom of expression and free thinking: do you want to lose it forever? Long story short, digital rights are now fundamental because we are living in a full scale digital world: digits are the new air. Speaking about the most digital rights oriented countries in world I have to admin that the situation is bad almost everywhere: except some few countries, like Switzerland, Iceland and also Finland maybe; US, UK, EU and basically all the rest of the world is a digitally unfriendly environment. The reason is very simple: nobody wants it, from governments to Big Tech, and nobody thinks its important, except for a niche among citizens (where I stand, by the way).
Are privacy protection and freedom of expression truly guaranteed by Big Tech?
Nothing can be truly guaranteed by Big Tech. It’s always an act of faith. Remember: never trust, always verify. And how can you verify if you have no access to code, neither to servers? In a centralised architecture (i.e. client-server, where we are clients and they have servers), how can any kind of protection be truly guaranteed? Of course not all of them are practicing the same policies, true. But at the very end, even if sometimes they oppose to reveals personal data to governments, they have those data and they can always access them. Everywhere, every time. So in such a way they are defending people from governative authorities, because they still need user’s trust. On the other hand, they cannot prevent to be invasive with user’s data, because they need them. Unless we collectively switch to a full decentralised, open source and end-to-end encrypted model, we will never be free and guaranteed, in terms of digital rights. You may object that at the end the global network is not in people’s hands, so if we go to a lower layer we will never be really free. True, but at least let’s make it more difficult for them all that what it is right now: shutting down internet wouldn’t be a great deal for anyone, I guess.
How do you interpret the endorsement of Big Tech leaders for the Trump administration?
Well, as far as I remember they were endorsing Biden administration no more than five years ago, so there is only one reasonable interpretation in my honest and humble opinion: they simply go with the flow. They go with the power because they go with the money. Big Tech’s primary goal is to make money, the more the better. Without judging, if you follow this principle you don’t almost really care about who is in charge, democrats or republicans. You need to stay in a relevant and dominant position, you need to remain a great lobbyist or you will fail your main goal. I find this very transparent and this transparency makes it acceptable, at the end of the day. I personally dislike more those you would like to appear true believers with rock solid ethical principles and they completely act in a different way, in the shadow. If the question then is moving forward to estimate the actual return, in terms of profits, by endorsing Trump administration I think that all of them will benefit for sure, but probably not in the same way. Even if everyone in GAFAM is not just a corporate but an ecosystem (with a GDP of a real country), I think that Amazon could lead the advantages, compared to Google and Microsoft. Not to mention the “outsider” Musk, for obvious reasons.
Speaking of digital rights, is Europe really ahead after the AI Act?
With pleasure I see we are entering more and more in the techno-politics area, where I love to be involved. So, speaking of digital rights, I don’t think European Union is really ahead after the so called “AI Act”. In the tentative to regulate the complex and vast area of uncertainty around all artificial intelligence to protect citizens, what really happened it that the EU over regulated critical aspects of free market and companies, while under regulated government’s behaviour and possible abuses from police. First and foremost, there are exceptions for biometric and facial recognition and the massive use of AI for “security reasons” for member states, that will transform the EU in a wide scale mass surveillance continent. Public spaces should be free of mass surveillance systems or citizens everyday life will be at stake. There is also another critical issue about police predictive systems, that could dramatically impact people’s freedom of expression, movements, enforcing society polarisation and biases. Last but not least, there are also several concerns about privacy and anonymity, speaking about the huge amount of personal data requested for high risk services: remember that without anonymity, there will be no freedom. So, what’s left? Well quite a lot of limitations for companies, quite a few for governments. Basically the result will be that digital rights will be violated anyway and Europeans will be stuck on innovations, with US and China (and maybe also Russia) always ahead: instead of concentrating all efforts in protocols and fostering collaboration, so that this emerging technology could be in everyone’s hands, European Union decided to remain out of the new Era, leaving its citizens to follow extra EU company’s AI solutions and proposals. To summarise, in my opinion AI Act is a lost chance (remember that no law is always better than a bad law).
What does artificial intelligence mean today when applied transversally to the world of work?
Well, for sure artificial intelligence is quickly replacing the old search engines, for everyone in everyday life. This means basically that instead of typing in a search engine input box we ask the AI and it’s up to the AI to do the dirty job for us and more importantly also to choose for us what is relevant and what is not. Of course we also have specific fields where artificial intelligence is more prominent and apart from suggesting it can do some tasks autonomously (the emerging world of AI-agents). But if we restrict the field of our speculation to the latest category, it won’t last long: the truth is that nowadays for all critical issues and for many not critical ones, human intervention is not only highly recommended but also mandatory. Or at least it should be, in my opinion: let’s think for a while about medical diagnosis, trials and generally speaking all human’s interactions where life or any kind of environment is at stake. Why should we? Let’s remind that first of all AIs can allucinate (and they do allucinate). Secondly but nonetheless still important, AIs are biased and because we don’t know actually which prompt they have in place, LLM’s algorithm are not transparent (e.i. they are not fully open source) and they cannot be verified, you can never trust 100% any AI. Then we have a third pillar to reflect on: whenever you create a new attitude, you become a new man. This is valid also whenever you lose it: we are all prone to avoid boring and repetitive tasks and we are all very happy to leave them to the AI, aren’t we? But applying this transversally everywhere, especially to the working places, could lead to a dangerous human laziness: brain laziness. Once your brain is not used for its primary purpose (i.e. thinking), well you could face terrible consequences in the long run. We are humans, we are problem solvers, since the first day we came on planet Earth. We should continue, no matter what.
Where do you stand in the debate on ethical issues related to AI?
I stand on human side. Always. Now the thing is: which side is it, the human side? Well, for me it’s the one with principles. The crucial part of all human beings is related to principles and values: we built entire societies and communities on them. We cannot withdraw or we won’t be human anymore. So now the questions is: how can we handle this emerging technology that we, the humans, discovered in order to take full advantage of it but without losing our core values? This is the challenge now we have to deal with. It’s not a question of losing jobs or not, it’s more how to prevent that we can continue to evolve without losing our identity. Maybe it won’t be possible and at a certain point we will have to take drastic decisions. More likely, we will create an new hybrid way to carry on our knowledge, something that hasn’t existed before and it won’t exist in the future. Even if I’m not a luddite, I think that the use of AI should be regulated, especially in the public sector. But even if we will try to regulate it, it won’t be enough: we need to create an ethic AI by design. That’s the only solution with a valuable future. Unfortunately in this field big corporations have an enormous advantage but again, open source and decentralised AI would represent a way out to all the trojans that AI is injecting nowadays in everyone’s life. It’s a huge topic anyway, that would be great to discuss in a dedicated sessions. What I always repeat, the most important thing is to remain in control: let’s be as light as a feather, not as a bird.
Ilaria Vanni is a TV journalist for italian broadcasting and coordinator of The Meta Economist portal. She has a philosphy degree and she's now studing the economic and technological issues connected to the new frontiers of the metaverse.
