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 whole field so that civic behaviour wins by design.
Tronto's fifth phase — her new addition in Caring Democracy — demands that "caring needs and the ways in which they are met need to be consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality, and freedom for all." This requires "plurality, communication, trust and respect." It is the political muscle of care: not just serving individuals, but ensuring the system itself is fair.
Collecting the passes
Solidarity means no one gets a structural exemption from caring. Tronto's metaphor captures this idea: "The first thing we need to do is collect all of those free passes out of taking care responsibilities seriously. No one automatically receives a pass out of caring because they are involved in protection, production, or taking care of their own, or are sufficiently wealthy to lift themselves by their own bootstraps or to give to charity."
For AI systems, the equivalent passes are: "we're too big to regulate," "users consented in the ToS," "we open-sourced the weights," and "we donated to safety research." The same logic of corporate irresponsibility — diffusing authority until no one is answerable — applies directly here.
Solidarity collects these passes by making cooperation structurally unavoidable. The "adopt-or-explain" mechanism (Pack 2) is one lever, but the "or-explain" clause has teeth only when the explanation is genuinely public and contestable. Without institutional culture to demand real accountability, explanation without binding consequence becomes a compliance gesture.
Core ideas
- Identity without exposure. Agent IDs assert "this agent is anchored to a human/legal entity" without revealing the person publicly (meronymity).
- Interoperability beats captivity. Portability and open protocols move competition to quality of care. Users export their social graphs in standard formats and keep personal audiences when leaving.
- Federation over monoliths. Share threat intelligence without a single chokepoint. Networks share textual threat intel and embed fingerprints through an open consortium; local policies stay local while defence compounds.
- Expression is not amplification. Recommender accountability is a civic duty. Bridging-based ranking rewards content that increases cross-group endorsement; content that only inflames a single cluster gets no algorithmic lift.
What good solidarity looks like
- Agent ID registry (meronymity). Agents (human/org/AI) have attestations held by trusted custodians; public proofs are minimal but verifiable.
- Social portability. Users export social graph and content; pass interoperability tests; keep personal audiences when leaving. The Utah Digital Choice Act is a working prototype.
- Bridging transparency. Platforms publish bridge indices — measuring cross-group participation and endorsement — as quarterly audits.
- Federated Trust & Safety (like ROOST for CSAM defence). Partners train local AIs to detect harm within their specific cultural context, share threat intelligence via federated learning, and keep enforcement local.
- Protocol-level norms. Machine-readable terms of cooperation: no scraping without consent, honour appeal webhooks, respect exit.
From ideas to practice
- Stand up an Agent ID custodian. Set up community orgs or public interest entities to issue/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 bridge feeds. Make bridging-based ranking the default feed for civic contexts.
Tools (buildable today)
- Agent ID schema (DIDs/VCs, revocation lists, proof formats).
- Portability harness (export/import scripts; fidelity checks).
- Bridge audit kit (compute and publish overlap metrics).
- Federated T&S hub (open APIs for threat intel; local adapters).
- Terms-as-code (policy schemas agents can check automatically).
Flood-bot story: Part V
- Agent IDs. Scammers begin impersonating aid workers to intercept funds, while real volunteer translators face harassment from stressed, displaced claimants. By shifting to meronymous IDs, the city verifies translators' credentials without exposing their personal phone numbers. Abuse drops; accountability rises.
- Portability. Survivors move their case files and contacts from the emergency bot to long-term housing services without re-entering everything.
- Federated defence. Scam reports from neighbouring cities flow in via the safety hub; the bot downgrades suspect links by default.
- Bridge metrics. Weekly public bridge index shows renters and homeowners co-endorsing more proposals than week one. Citizens have stopped calling it "the flood-bot" and started calling it "the River-Steward" — a sign that when an agent is attentive and bounded, people stop seeing a product and start seeing a neighbour.
What could go wrong
- ID creep. IDs become dossiers. Fix: Meronymity 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 with other packs
- 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.
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.