Sure, why not, let’s talk Catholic theology in this blog about open social networking protocols. This week, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical on “safeguarding the human person in the age of Artificial Intelligence”. This publication has gotten a lot of attention for its focus on AI, the connections with Anthropic, and much more. But the Pope also makes some meaningful statements that have direct relevance to digital platforms, open protocols and how we should view data in the digital age.
The encyclical says that in the digital world the relevant power “is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life,” actors that monopolise “expertise, data and decision-making authority.”
I write Connected Places because I think it is important to understand how these open protocols interact with society at large. Open protocols tend to make a universalist claim, to function as the global social layer for everyone. But that global “everyone” is largely religious, while the people building these new decentralised networks and protocols are largely from specific subcultures that strongly skews secular. So reading the Catholic encyclical is a way to see how one of the most influential global traditions actually reasons about these technologies.
Also, because (surprise!) it turns out that the Pope is actually Catholic, this is a deeply religious document, with deeply religious reasoning. The encyclical makes statements that will likely resonate well with a secular audience, and it is tempting to lift those out of context and focus only on that part. But I think the much more interesting part is that, following deeply religious reasoning, the Catholic Church lands on fairly similar positions that are more common in the protocol community.
At last year’s Atmosphere Conference, Jay Graber built her case for atproto on Barlow’s 1996 cyberspace declaration: the danger is the Caesar and the captured platform, helpfully illustrated by her t-shirt, and atproto prevents that by creating a network that cannot be held hostage by a single company. The pope reaches a fairly similar conclusion about the dangers of concentrated digital power, but gets there via Augustine and a few millennia of church doctrine instead.
If you have spent any time around the fediverse or the atmosphere, you’ve seen a single type of arguments continue to pop up, that looks very different on the surface but shares a common denominator. Questions like: when should an instance defederate from another, or whether atproto’s shared infrastructure effectively introduces centralisation. These are questions about what independent actors owe each other. The fediverse and the atmosphere have managed to create networks of independent nodes, but are much less clear on how these independent nodes should actually relate to each other.
The reason for this is that the dominant thinking that decentralisation is built upon has lots to say about the threats of concentrated power, but has little to say about social obligations. Cyber-libertarian tradition can tell you why no one should rule the network, but it cannot really tell you why the individual pieces should be together once it does.
This is the part where the Pope has a lot to say in the encyclical, and leans heavily upon when describing the problems of concentrated digital power. This is largely done through the concept of subsidiarity. The idea of subsidiarity is that whatever a smaller unit (family, community, etc) can handle, should not be decided by a bigger unit, and that the bigger unit’s job is to help the smaller do its thing rather than absorb it. The Church formalised this all the way back in 1931, and the thing it was worried about was the all-consuming State.
The Pope says about subsidiarity that it “stems from the very same understanding of the human person that has guided our reflection on dignity and the common good. If every woman and man is called to take ownership of his or her own life and to contribute to the formation of society, then social institutions must also respect and support this responsibility.”
Power should not pool at the top, not mainly because the people up there might abuse it (although the Pope certainly warns about that as well), but because pooling it strips everyone below of the responsibility they exist to exercise.
What this current encyclical adds, is that it expands its concerns from the State to Digital platforms. About the digital world, Leo XIV writes:
“Here, the highest level is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life. This level, which monopolizes expertise, data and decision-making authority, involves companies and platforms that define conditions for access, rules of visibility, forms of interaction, and even economic opportunities.”
For remedies, he wants these processes to be “directed toward the common good with transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation,” spelled out as “independent checks, transparency regarding algorithms, equitable access to data and avenues for recourse.” He also warns against processes “imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral manner.” Subsidiarity, for Leo, means “avoiding people being presented with decisions that have already been taken,” so that “people can participate in the decision-making process.”
So far, this matches up fairly well to a libertarian frame for decentralisation. But Leo XIV goes one step further, and refuses to let subsidiarity stand on its own, and pairs it with solidarity. “When subsidiarity is not linked to solidarity, it ends up becoming merely the protection of particular interests; when solidarity is not supported by subsidiarity, it degenerates into a form of welfare that does not foster responsibility.”
If you read that statement with the fediverse and the atmosphere in mind, this is almost a diagram of the two ways the project can fail. 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. This is exactly what we see in the fediverse right now: sure there are a lot of servers, but the collaboration between instances on things like moderation is virtually nonexistent. There is no form of federated diplomacy, or even a mental framework on how servers should interact, besides defederation when you get too annoyed with another server.
Solidarity without subsidiarity is the benevolent provider of infrastructure: one big network that takes care of everyone and quietly removes their agency. This bears resemblance to what we’re seeing in the atmosphere, Bluesky PBC as the benevolent provider of both the infrastructure for 99% of the network, as well as doing all the costly moderation, that other actors can profit from. Bluesky gives all the tools for people to start their own AppView/PDS/Relay/labeler/whatever, but marginally few people take them up on it and actually run their own services. This is solidarity without subsidiarity in practice, where people feel they’ve been stripped from their responsiblity, and won’t take “ownership of his or her own life”. This dissolves in people yelling perpetually at the mods with the mods being perpetually frustrated people don’t use the tools for agency that have been provided for them. The Pope actually has a fairly specific comment on this, saying that “subsidiarity calls for protecting the ability of communities to make choices and corrections, rather than confining their role to mere oversight after the standards have been set elsewhere.”
What is striking is that the two ecosystems struggle in opposite directions, where the fediverse has subsidiarity without solidarity, all autonomy and no way to govern the commons, and the atmosphere has solidarity without subsidiarity, a commons that almost no one shares responsibility for. The fediverse does not need more servers, it needs reasons for them to act like they owe each other something. The atmosphere does not need better tools, it has those, it needs the autonomy those tools enable to actually be taken up.
The same logic shows up again when the encyclical turns to data, where Leo places data under what Catholic doctrine calls the universal destination of goods, the principle that the world’s resources are given for everyone’s use, not a few. “Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few,” but managed “as a common or shared good.” The encyclical sharpens this into a description of data-colonialism, data as “the new rare earths of power”. The task the Pope sees ahead is “restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit.” Compare this to Bluesky’s original atproto announcement: “A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph.”
This is the framework of subsidiarity and solidarity again, with data portability as the subsidiarity half: it stops your data being held hostage. But the point of the Pope is that data portability is only half the answer. Data is collectively produced, the network is a commons, and a commons needs a shared idea of how it is governed. Both the fediverse and the atmosphere have built effective exit doors, but not the mechanisms of solidarity and collective governance. The protocol world has been trying to solve the problem of how to leave, and the next step is working on how we can stay together.
