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Pack 5 · 團結力

Pack 5: Solidarity — Caring With

Whether the ecosystem rewards cooperation, exit, and public accountability over lock-in.

Hand-lettered comic page headed 'SOLIDARITY — PROBLEM': when people want different things we slip into negative-sum or zero-sum thinking — two chefs both want one orange, so they could fight over it and both end up worse off (negative-sum), or split it equally, which still assumes one side's gain is the other's loss (zero-sum); a win-lose diagram sits below.SOLIDARITYPROBLEM:Whenever folks want different things, we tend towards "negative-sum" or "zero-sum" thinking.What does that mean? Imagine two chefs who both want an orange:They could fight over it. And be both worse off: "negative-sum".Better to split the orange equally, but that still assumes my gain is your loss. If I get more orange, you get less, and vice versa. Gains add to zero: "zero-sum".But can we both gain? That is, "positive-sum"? It may not always be possible, but it'd be a shame to miss the opportunity. So, how to aim for "as win-win as possible" ?i winyou winyou losei lose* This orange story grew from Follett (1925), Fisher & Ury (1981), and Covey (1989).

When people want different things, the reflex is to treat it as a war to win or a pie to split. But most stand-offs are only zero-sum on the surface: look behind each position to the need beneath it, and a larger option can often satisfy everyone. Solidarity is the discipline of finding those win-wins and, more durably, of building an ecosystem where the cooperative move is also the easiest one.¶ 1

Traffic is safer because roads, signs and rules make safe driving easier than reckless driving. The drivers do not have to be saints.¶ 2

Even perfect local care fails in a hostile wider ecosystem. Solidarity equips the field so that civic behaviour wins by design.¶ 3

Start in your room

Ask, “Can we leave without losing the people and records we depend on?” Before making a system mandatory, have the people who use it try an export and a handover to another service. Cooperation needs agreements across groups as well as shared software.¶ 4

In Caring Democracy (p. 23), Joan Tronto’s fifth phase, caring with, asks whether care is consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality, and freedom for all. She takes the phase’s moral qualities, plurality, communication, trust, and respect, from Selma Sevenhuijsen’s Citizenship and the Ethics of Care and adds solidarity (p. 35). For Civic AI, solidarity asks a structural question: do the rules of the ecosystem make cooperation easier to practise than domination?¶ 5

There is a technical reading of that question. In the sequential social-dilemma simulations studied by Leibo and colleagues in 2017, independently rewarded agents could cooperate or defect depending on the game and their capabilities. Trivedi and colleagues’ Solipsistic Superintelligence is Unlikely to be Cooperative examines why unilateral optimisation can fail among interdependent actors. Taniguchi and colleagues propose a different objective: a collective term that no single agent can satisfy alone. This is one theoretical account of solidarity. It is no evidence that separately rewarded systems must polarise, or that this term is needed for civic cooperation.¶ 6

Definition

Why it matters

Local repair is fragile if the wider infrastructure rewards lock-in, opacity, and outrage. A system can be attentive, responsible, competent, and responsive inside one deployment while still being trapped in a hostile market or protocol environment.¶ 11

Solidarity means no one gets a structural exemption from caring. Tronto’s metaphor: “The first thing that we need to do is to collect all of those free passes out of taking care responsibilities seriously.” For AI systems, Tronto’s passes come back in new words: “we’re too big to regulate,” “users consented in the ToS” (the bootstrap pass), “we opened the weights,” and “we donated to safety research” (the charity pass). The passes AI adds of its own are named in Pack 2. Solidarity collects these passes by making cooperation cheaper than defection, without pretending the architecture makes capture impossible.¶ 12

Solidarity is where the framework becomes democratic infrastructure. It asks whether justice, equality, freedom, plurality, and mutual accountability are easier to practise because of the ecosystem, or in spite of it.¶ 13

Open stacks and anti-rival resources

Carnegie funded more than 1,600 public libraries in the United States. What made them democratising was the open stacks, where patrons browsed the shelves themselves and did not have to petition a librarian to fetch on their behalf. Vertical AI platforms that hold capability behind proprietary APIs reproduce the closed-stack model; open-weight models, open protocols, and shared eval registries are the open-stack equivalent: infrastructure that treats communities as capable actors who set their own terms.¶ 14

Knowledge, unlike oil, is anti-rival: Steven Weber’s term from The Success of Open Source, meaning that use enriches rather than depletes it. The same holds for open protocols: eduroam grows more valuable for every member as institutions join, with no participant capturing the gain. A solidarity-equipped ecosystem works the same way: when one city adopts selective-disclosure attestations, every other city can adopt the standard at near-zero marginal cost.¶ 15

None of this emerges spontaneously. It takes law as infrastructure: interoperability-as-public-good legislation, of which Utah’s Digital Choice Act is a live portability statute, not yet the 2027 continuous-forwarding duty. Solidarity is where the individual care cycle connects to the commons. It draws on Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for durable commons and her later account of polycentric governance: many centres of decision-making, overlapping, none sovereign over the rest.¶ 16

What it looks like in practice

We propose that coalitions of public buyers and intermediary institutions fund and require this common layer of permissions, provenance, redress and exit. No single lab should own it; this is a proposal for shared infrastructure, not an implemented system.¶ 22

From ideas to practice

  1. Stand up an identity custodian. Set up community orgs or public interest entities to issue and hold attestations; publish revocation and challenge endpoints.¶ 23
  2. Mandate portability in procurement. Public buyers require protocol interoperability, handover rehearsals and exit drills as standard contract terms.¶ 24
  3. Adopt uncommon-ground audits. Ensure platforms publish the uncommon-ground index and its supporting diagnostics quarterly; have third parties verify.¶ 25
  4. Join a safety federation. Contribute to and consume from a shared threat registry; localise enforcement.¶ 26
  5. Default to civic ranking rules. In civic contexts, make feeds reward reason-giving, contestability, and cross-group cooperation, and stop rewarding outrage.¶ 27

Buildable tools

One case: the flood-bot

This fictional composite is a teaching illustration. It records no actual deployment or measured results.¶ 33

The crisis deepens, and the community has now renamed the bot River-Steward: an attentive, limited-scope AI system stops looking like a product and starts looking like a neighbour.¶ 34

What could go wrong

Interfaces

A closing image: the quilt without a backing

Imagine a quilt that needs no single backing cloth to hold together. Each square is sewn by a different hand, for a different room, and the squares join edge to edge. Pull on one square and the rest come with it—not because someone commands them to but because they are joined. A federated safety network is a quilt: many local stewards, many local norms, one shared seam. The quilt with no backing is the image we hold for solidarity.¶ 47a

Sources for this pack

Hand-lettered comic page headed 'NOT: mutually assured destruction, BUT: as win-win as possible — SOLUTION': look behind each what to the deeper why, then craft a new what that satisfies both sides — the two chefs discover one needs the orange peel for liqueur and the other the juice, so both are fully satisfied with no waste; and Taiwan used the pol.is platform to turn divisive debates into win-wins — including the Employment Gold Card that welcomed scientists and artists, showing how better conversations help everyone gain.not: mutually assured destructionbut: as win-win as possibleSOLUTION:Take a step back. Behind the WHAT you want, ask yourselves: WHY do you want it? Then: can you create a new WHAT that fulfils both your WHYs?For example, maybe our two chefs say to each other...I need to make orange liqueur.Oh! I need orange juice....and they realise, they can both get 100% of their needs, no waste!peels & zest for liqueurpulp for juiceYes, that's contrived, but win-wins can often be found in real life! A few years back, Taiwan had an angry debate about whether to change its time zone:CHANGE: to make Taiwan more uniqueKEEP: because time zone change is economically costlyBut with the help of pol.is and participation officers, folks found a new WHAT to fulfil mutual WHYs: the Gold Card residency, to bring scientists & artists to Taiwan.forUNIQUENESSandECONOMICS???welcome, Creators!That's how better discussion can help us get to win-win!

←Pack 4: ResponsivenessPack 6: Symbiosis→

The Trace

Amended
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Audrey Tang · Caroline Green
with jdd-kami · Tenzin Yangtso
Amended
· 59 recorded amendments since 1 Oct 2025
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5.md · edit on GitHubhttps://github.com/audreyt/civic.ai/blob/main/5.md
CC0 public domainhttps://civic.ai/5/
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五：團結力——共同關懷
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