Cyberspazio come dimensione politica. Origini, definizioni, trame socio-tecnologiche

This paper argues that cyberspace is not an immaterial elsewhere but a geopolitical infrastructure built upon shared imaginaries, control, power, and conflict. Emerging in the strategic literature as the fifth dimension of power and conflict, cyberspace interweaves technical-political materiality with symbolic imaginaries, from physical circuits to global platforms, constituting a digital and spatial configuration where polities (states, actors) and corporations compete for authority and strategic advantage. The paper reconstructs the debate on the semantic density of cyberspace, tracing its genealogies from the political lexicons of the imaginary to institutional and theoretical definitions (technological, politico-philosophical, and strategic) in order to show that, although volatile and partially intangible, cyberspace is not immaterial or external, but fundamentally political and constituted by forces, actors, and socio-technical, legal, and governmental entanglements. The analysis proceeds through three movements: (I) tracing cyberspace’s genealogy from cyberpunk literature to its institutional and disciplinary definitions, revealing the latent political dimension within imaginative lexicons; (II) employing conceptual clarification to eliminate pernicious definitional ambiguities whilst comparing how different technological configurations and political visions shape distinct understandings of cyberspace; (III) examining cyberspace as an eminently political space through the lenses of governmentality and strategic studies, positioning it as both a domain of asymmetric struggle and a fragile terrain of potential autonomy.