Stephen Downes

The Pope's Magnifica Humanitas encyclical is viewed as a treatise on AI,  writes Laurens Hof , but "this week, the Catholic Church also wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling." We might call this the 'framework of subsidiarity and solidarity'. By 'subsidiarity', we refer to a basic principle of decentralization, which pushes power don the hierarchy to the smallest unit where it makes sense (in the Papal view, that would be the family; in the libertarian view, that would be the individual). But the other part of this is solidarity (which libertarians pretend doesn't exist). "Subsidiarity without solidarity is fragmentation: a thousand instances each guarding their own place, with no shared obligation or collaboration, with no place to maintain the commons that is the network itself." True, but incomplete. Solidarity is about more than just governance. It's about how we communicate, how we interact, and how as a community we develop ideas and values and more.