Living Stones, Living Membranes
What a papal letter on AI and the practice of open civic innovation turn out to be building towards together
There is a phrase that recurs through Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical letter on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas, a phrase that reveals the text’s broader social and political implications beyond any particular statement of faith. The Church, he writes, is “founded on Christ, the living stone,” and the work of our time is to build with “the many living stones solidly united” to that cornerstone. Stones that are alive. A wall that grows. It is a strange and lovely image for a document about algorithms, and it is the thread we want to pull, because it leads somewhere unexpected — to the heart of what those of us working on open civic innovation have been trying to say.
This essay is the attempt to read the encyclical through the lens of our own theory of change, and to let that theory of change clarify what the encyclical is actually proposing. Not to claim the Church for our project, or our project for the Church. The two stand on genuinely different ground, but we want to explore where the two traditions converge. The convergence is a signal. If both secular and systemic, religious and cultural analyses point us in the same direction, it tells us the structure they mutually point toward from different directions is load-bearing.
The fork, briefly
The encyclical is built on two construction sites. The first is the Tower of Babel — “a single language, a single technology, a single direction,” a project of pride that chooses “homogenization over communion” and ends not in the unity it promised but in dispersion. The second is the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, who “did not impose solutions from above” but convened the families, gave each a section of the wall, listened, coordinated, and rebuilt “not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all.”
Anyone steeped in the metacrisis literature will recognize the shape immediately. These are the three attractors. Babel is chaos and authoritarianism fused — dispersion on one face, domination on the other, both born of the will to reach heaven without anyone’s consent. Nehemiah is the third attractor: distributed coordination, local ownership of the work, coherence without command. The open civics framing of our moment — that the runaway feedback loops are pulling toward chaos, or toward techno-authoritarian control, or toward a narrow third path of “self-organization that is able to provide localized resilience to the many looming crises we face” — is the same fork, derived from complexity science instead of the Old Testament.
The Open Civics Movement framing puts the same contrast in the context of systemic transformations: from centralized bureaucracy to distributed coordination, from a market-dominated commons to a regenerated commons, from fragile trust to relational trust, from episodic engagement to everyday practice, from delegated responsibility to shared responsibility. Read alongside Nehemiah, it is almost the same story: everyone gets a section of the wall; relationships are rebuilt before stones; the city is woven daily by all. The encyclical’s own summary of the choice — to be “builders of communion, rather than architects of Babel” — could hang over the door of either tradition.
Living stones, or: why the wall must be alive
In the Open Civics corpus, the systems we build are not simply institutions. They are social organisms — and they are governed by living systems grammar: like autopoiesis, metabolism, self-repair, reproduction. Most provocatively, they have a full life cycle. They are conceived, they gestate, they mature, some reproduce, and then institutions are meant to decompose. Decomposition is not failure; it is design. When an organism has run its course, its parts return “back to the commons where they can be re-composed into new life,” and whatever proved life-affirming is carried forward, like genetic inheritance, into the next generation. The foil is named directly: the “zombie” institution, the one that “never dies or engages in reciprocal flows with its environment,” the structure that outlives its usefulness and keeps consuming. Behind it sits Jefferson’s line that “the earth belongs always to the living generation.”
For a while we held this as one of the places open civics was most its own thing — most post-institutional, least likely to find an echo in a 2,000-year-old institution. And then we noticed how Leo XIV describes the Church’s own teaching. The Social Doctrine, he insists, “is not an inert set of concepts, but a living corpus of truth.” It “is not a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a process of shared discernment” that “grows over time within the concrete interweaving of lives, communities and cultures.” The whole first chapter is a narration of development — how the teaching matured, changed emphasis, sometimes reversed. The most unflinching example is slavery: the Church, he writes, came to its condemnation only gradually, took “eighteen centuries” to see the full incompatibility, and for that delay he asks pardon.
Sit with that. One tradition says: organizations are alive, and must die and compost so the living can build anew. The other says: our core is a living body, not a fixed structure, and its legitimacy lies in its capacity to develop — to revise, to repent, to carry forward only what remains true. These are not the same claim. Open civics applies the life cycle to the organizations; the Church applies development to its doctrine while understanding itself as enduring. But they share a deeper conviction, and it is a radical one in an age of monuments: a body of practice that cannot revise itself is already a kind of death. Legitimacy is metabolic. The wall must be alive, or it becomes a tower.
This is why “living stones” is the right image for both. Not bricks set once and defended forever — living stones, united to something that holds, but growing, dying back, regrowing. A wall that is also an organism.
The mechanism the encyclical was missing
An encyclical names requirements; it does not write specifications. Magnifica Humanitas is unusually concrete for its genre, but it leaves a gap exactly where you’d expect. It demands, again and again, that communities not be “passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere“ — that they be able “to contribute to discernment and oversight,” to make “choices and corrections, rather than confining their role to mere oversight after the standards have been set elsewhere,” with “transparency regarding algorithms, equitable access to data and avenues for recourse.” It relocates subsidiarity into the digital age and insists the new “highest level” — Big Tech, not the State — must answer to it.
But how? By what concrete means does a community actually contribute to, and correct, the systems that govern it? This is the core inquiry the open civics innovation framework was designed to address. The framework offers a pattern language with four composable layers: patterns (reusable conceptual designs), protocols (detailed, consent-based operational procedures — objective, roles, steps, documentation), playbooks (scenario-specific guides), and civic stacks (modular blueprints that compose the rest into a deployable system). Open protocols are “openly documented and freely available for anyone to use, implement, and modify,” adopted through consent, and they spread by usefulness — measured, explicitly, by whether they improve quality of life. They are framed as an evolution of Elinor Ostrom’s work on the commons, turned into “a socio-technical engineering stack for the public itself.”
Set the two side by side and they complete each other’s sentences. The encyclical says: communities must be able to discern, oversee, and correct the systems that rule their lives. Open civics says: so make the playbook forkable. The thing the Pope insists on as a moral requirement is the thing the pattern language exists to make operational. His “avenues for recourse” is, in mechanism, the right to fork the protocol. His pluralism — Paul VI’s insistence, which he quotes, that the Church cannot “propose a single response that is valid in all contexts,” and the lovely image of truth as a polyhedron “reflected from different angles” — is the pattern language’s stated aim of “a plurality of solutions for a plurality of communities.”
From the outside, open civics can sound like it wants to abolish institutions wholesale — “parallel society,” “make the old system obsolete.” The encyclical, by contrast, defends the State’s continuing role and wants multilateral institutions reformed, not bypassed. We could interpret this as a clean divergence. But how the transition actually happens — “progressive protocolization” — is gradualist and, crucially, keeps a place for legitimate coordination: “there will still be a role for centralized leadership and direction, but this hierarchy will be built upon consent and driven by functionalism, rather than stemming from arbitrary power dynamics.” It even warns against treating decentralization as an end in itself. That is remarkably close to the encyclical’s own insistence that subsidiarity “does not justify the State’s disengagement,” because “public intervention is necessary precisely to enable all social actors to fulfill their mission.” The destinations still differ — open civics keeps its eyes on a long-horizon, post-nation-state, bioregional future; the Pope on renewed states and a reformed multilateralism. But the method — consensual, functional, subsidiary, building parallel capacity patiently rather than seizing or smashing the center — rhymes far more than the rhetoric admits. And this applied methodology is where the work of our time actually lives.
What protocols are for
There’s a subtlety in the open civics ethos that we think the encyclical helps surface, and that returns the favor.
There are two meanings of “protocol.” There is the thin, technical sense — a communication standard. And there is the older, richer sense it actually intends: in indigenous and living-systems contexts, protocols are “the practices and procedures of ceremony and ritual,” patterns that “produce intact relational fields” and “flows of reciprocity and right relationship.” It draws a line between high-context cultures, where “relationships are mediated through a greater depth of embeddedness within our ecologies and social relationships,” and low-context cultures “in which monolithic patterns are imposed... across diverse contexts.” Open protocols, in this telling, are “adaptive, contextual, and consent-based patterns of interaction that support sovereign and interdependent social interactions.”
That monolithic pattern imposed across every context — that is Babel again, “the pretense that a single language... can translate everything... into data and performance.” And the relational fields that good protocols protect are exactly what the encyclical fears AI will counterfeit. In one of its sharpest passages, Leo XIV warns that when machines simulate care and connection, “they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance,” and that the deeper danger is not deception but atrophy — that a person might “gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.” Both traditions are insisting on the same thing: relationship is real, embodied, reciprocal, and not substitutable. Protocols, rightly understood, are how a community tends its relational field — not how it automates it away. The encyclical affirms open civics a vocabulary for why the relational sense of protocol must never collapse into the merely technical one.
A shared picture of benevolent cybernetics
Because AI is the encyclical’s actual subject, it matters enormously that open civics has a concrete picture of what humane AI looks like — and that the picture matches.
The Pope’s positive program is to “disarm” AI: to free it “from monopolistic control,” to make it “human-friendly,” to restore it “to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” He addresses developers directly, telling them that “every design choice reflects a vision of humanity,” and asks that values be embedded “with transparency, responsibility toward affected communities.” He wants data “managed as a common or shared good, in a spirit of participation,” and justice built into systems “from the outset” rather than bolted on after harm.
Open civics describes, in detail, a system that does this. Its technology layer is built on “open protocols, federated networks, and community-controlled data,” with algorithms that are “auditable and transparent,” evaluated “by social and ecological benefit rather than profit potential,” designed for “minimum lock-in,” explicitly resisting “surveillance capitalism, corporate capture, and centralized control.” The open civics approach imagines AI as a servant of community self-organization: protocol libraries “eventually leveraged as training data for customized” models, so that “Artificial Intelligence assistants will be able to support community members and organizers to discover, learn about, and deploy open protocols in their communities.”
That is the Pope’s disarmed AI, specified. Not an oracle that decides who is worthy “without anyone bearing responsibility” — his nightmare — but an assistant that helps a community exercise its own discernment and adopt its own playbook, with the agency and the forkable protocol kept in human hands. The developer the encyclical addresses in its appeal is, almost exactly, the open civics “Innovator” — the one charged to embed values in protocols and contribute auditable, open-source tools to the commons. Two traditions, describing the same benevolent cybernetics from opposite directions: one from the ethics it must honor, the other from the architecture that would honor them.
The body that examines itself
One more convergence, easy to miss and quietly important. Open civics holds its participants to an ethics that is unusually granular — good-faith collaboration, honesty, feedback and accountability, “efficacy over ego” (shelving your own project if someone else does it better), inclusion and listening — and it renders its design values as adherence-and-violation scales, where the strongest violation of Choice is “designing walled gardens with no exit and no self-authorship.”
The encyclical does something structurally identical in its “examen for the Church.” Having laid out the principles of its social teaching, it turns them on its own house, calling for “a culture of transparency, accountability and evaluation” and “genuine, rather than merely nominal, participatory bodies.” It thanks the journalists who exposed the Church’s own abuses and refuses to “sweep it under the carpet.” Its synodal style — “a Church that walks together,” listening across difference — is the same instinct as the open civics participation rubric: the coordinating body must model the ethics it asks of everyone else. Both turn their principles into a mirror. And both name “walled gardens” — recourse, exit, the right to object — as the line that must not be crossed. When the Pope writes “let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the world,” he is naming, in four words, what an honest participation ethic is for.
Where the roads part
The ground is different, and stably so. The encyclical roots dignity in God — infinite because divine love is infinite, fulfilled not through self-sufficiency but through grace, “more than human” only in Christ. Open civics roots the same dignity in interbeing and living systems, and is explicit that its “sacred civics” needs no metaphysical claim to bind us to care and reciprocity. This is the deepest difference — and, paradoxically, the reason the convergence matters. The two are not agreeing because they share a metaphysics. They don’t. They are arriving at the same structure from opposite foundations, which is what makes the structure look less like anyone’s ideology and more like what coordination at planetary scale actually requires.
The destination differs: open civics keeps its gaze on a post-nation-state, bioregional horizon and systems that eventually outgrow legacy institutions; the encyclical reforms and renews them. And the posture differs in emphasis — the Pope foregrounds limit, finitude, and a wariness of the dreams of transcending the human; open civics foregrounds imagination as activism and is more at home with new technological substrates. There are also specific moral commitments — on the family, on the beginning and end of life — where the encyclical states positions, grounded in its anthropology, that an open and pluralistic civic culture would not adopt wholesale. We won’t pretend otherwise, and we won’t dwell on them either, because a coalition built on pretended agreement is brittle, and one built on real convergence, honest about its seams, can carry weight.
Healthy realism, post-tragic hope
The encyclical asks for a “healthy realism” that “avoids both political idealism and cynicism” — refusing the idealist who edits the facts to fit a worldview, and equally refusing the realism that “confuses observation with resignation.” Open civics calls its own version of this post-tragic — neither the numbing that denies how bad it is, nor the grief that swallows the capacity to act, but the third response that holds heartbreak and possibility at once and lets the one fuel the other. The Pope’s healthy realism and our post-tragic protopianism are two names for the same hard-won stance. Both refuse to lie about the darkness. Both refuse to surrender to it. Both insist the future is not a fate to be predicted but a construction site to be entered.
So the encyclical ends where it began, with Nehemiah — calling us to be not “passive spectators” or “mere commentators on what is crumbling,” but people who “enter the construction sites of history... to rebuild what has collapsed and protect what is threatened.” Strip away the difference in their grounds and that is the same charge open civics issues: start where you are, build what you need, share what you learn. Build, from your own section of the wall, with others, the living conditions of a shared and humane future.
Living stones. A wall that breathes, rebuilt by the living in every generation, coordinated through open protocols that anyone can fork and adapt, revisable when it stops serving life. That is not Babel. It is the third attractor, and it is what the encyclical calls the civilization of love. Two traditions, two foundations, one construction site — and a great deal of wall still to raise.
The grandeur of humanity, Leo XIV writes, is measured not by the power of our means but by the care we are able to offer — by our capacity to recognize the other as a face, and not a function. We could have written that line. That it was written in Rome, toward a future we are already building, is reason enough to pick up a stone.