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.
Traffic is safer not because each driver is a saint, but because roads, signs, and rules make safe driving easier than reckless driving.
Even perfect local care fails in a hostile wider ecosystem. Solidarity equips the field so that civic behaviour wins by design.
Tronto's fifth phase asks whether care is consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality, and freedom for all. For Civic AI, solidarity asks a structural question: do the rules of the ecosystem make cooperation easier to practise than domination?
Definition
- Identity without exposure. Agent IDs should prove that an agent answers to a real steward without publicly exposing private details. Accountability should not require doxxing.
- Interoperability beats captivity. Portability and open protocols move competition to quality of care. Exit rights protect freedom by making it possible to leave without losing your audience or history. Utah's bipartisan effort to make social-media data exportable and interoperable points the way.
- Federation over monoliths. Share threat intelligence without a single chokepoint. Local policies stay local, but defence compounds across institutions.
- Expression is not amplification. Recommender accountability is a civic duty. Ranking in civic contexts should reward cross-group reason-giving and shared problem-solving, not only whatever inflames one cluster fastest.
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.
Solidarity means no one gets a structural exemption from caring. Tronto's metaphor: "The first thing we need to do is collect all of those free passes out of taking care responsibilities seriously." For AI systems, the equivalent passes are: "we're too big to regulate," "users consented in the ToS," "we opened the weights," and "we donated to safety research." Solidarity collects these passes by making cooperation structurally unavoidable.
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, not in spite of it.
What it looks like in practice
- Selective-disclosure identity. Agents, organisations, and people have verifiable attestations held by trusted custodians; public proofs stay minimal, but challenge and revocation remain real.
- Social portability. Users export social graph and content, pass interoperability tests, and keep personal audiences when leaving. Freedom becomes practical because exit no longer means social exile.
- Bridge audits. Platforms publish a bridge index — a public measure of cross-group participation and co-endorsement in shared decisions. Plurality becomes visible instead of being left to branding claims.
- Federated safety network. Partners detect harms in their own cultural context, share threat signals, and keep enforcement local rather than ceding everything to one hub.
- Protocol-level norms. Machine-readable terms of cooperation set common duties: no scraping without consent, honour appeal webhooks, respect exit.
From ideas to practice
- Stand up an identity custodian. Set up community orgs or public interest entities to issue and hold attestations; publish revocation and challenge endpoints.
- Mandate portability in procurement. Public buyers require protocol interop and exit-with-trust drills.
- Adopt bridge audits. Ensure platforms publish relational health metrics quarterly; have third parties verify.
- Join a safety federation. Contribute to and consume from a shared threat registry; localize enforcement.
- Default to civic ranking rules. In civic contexts, make feeds reward reason-giving, contestability, and cross-group cooperation rather than outrage.
Buildable tools
- Agent identity schema for selective disclosure, revocation lists, and proof formats.
- Portability harness for export/import scripts and fidelity checks.
- Bridge audit kit to compute and publish cross-group participation metrics.
- Federated safety hub with open APIs for threat intelligence and local adapters.
- Shared cooperation rules that agents and platforms can verify automatically.
One case: the flood-bot
- Identity. Scammers begin impersonating aid workers to intercept funds, while real volunteer translators face harassment from stressed, displaced claimants. The city shifts to selective-disclosure IDs so translators can prove their role without exposing personal phone numbers. Abuse drops; accountability rises.
- Portability. Procurement rules require case files, consent records, and contacts to move from the emergency bot to long-term housing services in one export rather than being typed in again.
- Federated defence. Scam reports from neighbouring cities flow in via the safety network; the bot downgrades suspect links by default.
- Bridge audit. A weekly public bridge index shows whether renters and homeowners are co-endorsing more shared remedies than at launch.
What could go wrong
- ID creep. IDs become dossiers. Fix: Selective disclosure by design; minimal proofs; independent custodians; strong revocation.
- Portability theatre. Exports are unreadable or lossy. Fix: Exit tests in contracts; penalties for fidelity failure.
- Federation capture. One big player dictates norms. Fix: Polycentric governance; open standards; rotating stewards.
- Federation as attack surface. Without security hardening, a network of local agents becomes a decentralized botnet waiting to be recruited. Fix: Mandate sandboxing, least-privilege execution, and input validation at every node (Pack 3); federated security audits; shared vulnerability disclosure.
Interfaces
- From Responsibility (Pack 2): portability and exit clauses are referenced in every engagement contract.
- From Responsiveness (Pack 4): repair culture feeds trust across organisations.
- To Symbiosis (Pack 6): solidarity provides the treaties local agents need to cooperate.
Public measure
Bridge index is the headline public measure for solidarity. The public question is whether shared decisions show real cross-group participation and co-endorsement rather than separate silos. Supporting diagnostics include portability success, accountable-identity coverage, and federation participation. See Measures.
A closing image: the well-marked interchange
Imagine a well-marked interchange — many lanes, clear signs, safe merges — where travel is smoother because the road is built for sharing.
