Thought position

The digital age did not only give us new instruments. It gave us new environments. And environments do more than help us act: they teach us what to notice, what to ignore and who we are allowed to become.

In 2017 I wrote Oratio Hominis Digitalis. Not as a technology manifesto, but as an attempt to ask an old question again: what does it mean to remain human in a world that is increasingly designed?

At the time, that question still felt abstract to many people. The dominant story of the digital age was optimistic. Technology meant progress. Platforms meant connection. Artificial intelligence still mostly belonged to TED Talks and investor presentations.

Silicon Valley presented technology as neutral infrastructure. As a tool. As inevitable progress.

But underneath that optimism, something else was already happening.

Digital systems were no longer only supporting human behaviour. They had begun to shape behaviour itself. Interfaces determined what we looked at. Feeds determined what became visible. Platforms determined which emotions were rewarded. Algorithms determined which realities became more likely.

Back then, this still felt like an observation at the edge.

Now, almost ten years later, Pope Leo XIV publishes his first encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas. A text about artificial intelligence, human dignity and the civilisation that emerges inside digital systems.

What makes this moment remarkable is not only the subject of AI. It is the deeper historical reversal underneath it.

Five centuries ago, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola argued that the human being had not been given a fixed form. The human being could shape itself.

No predetermined identity. No static place in the universe. The human being as possibility.

To understand how radical that was, you have to know the worldview it opposed. In the order Mirandola inherited, every being had its fixed place. Minerals, plants, animals, humans, angels: a ladder of being, from low to high, and every being stood on its own rung, forever. That order was not only a way of describing nature. It was the basis of authority. Where someone stood determined who had authority over whom.

Mirandola did not break that order by claiming a new rung for humanity. He broke it by saying that the human being had no rung. The human being was the only creature without a fixed place, and therefore received the ability to reach every place. Hence the image he used: the human as a kind of chameleon, able to shape itself toward plant, toward animal, or toward something approaching the angels. Not given. Chosen.

That idea was dangerous. Some of Mirandola's theses were condemned by Rome as heretical or suspect before the public debate for which he had written them could even take place. He had to answer for himself for years before he was rehabilitated. The idea that people could actively form meaning themselves challenged the authority of institutional systems.

There is another connection between that time and ours. Mirandola's ideas did not spread in a vacuum. They spread through a new technology: the printing press. For the first time, texts could multiply outside the control of the institutions that had previously determined what could be read. That technology was not neutral. It changed who could think along, what could circulate, and ultimately what became thinkable.

Today we have our own printing press. Only now it is not only text that circulates. Attention circulates, behaviour circulates and, increasingly, meaning itself circulates.

The same printing press that spread the writings of humanists also spread propaganda, indexes of forbidden books and the religious conflicts that would tear Europe apart for generations. New information technology does not automatically liberate. It mainly raises the stakes, in both directions.

And now that same church, centuries later, warns against systems that threaten that human autonomy. Not through religious dogma, but through technological environments that continuously shape behaviour, perception and attention.

This is no longer a technical discussion. It is a question of civilisation.

Because technology is no longer only a tool we occasionally use. We now live inside designed realities.

Spotify increasingly influences what we listen to. TikTok shapes how information spreads. AI systems determine which answers feel probable. Social platforms determine which emotions are amplified.

And each of those systems carries assumptions about what a human being is.

That attention is measurable. That behaviour is predictable. That preferences can be optimised. That efficiency equals progress.

It would be too easy to dismiss that worldview as merely cynical. The promise of optimisation has also produced real things. Recommendations that help people discover music they would otherwise never have found. Information available within milliseconds that once required a counter, an office or an institution. Services that became more accessible for people who were previously dependent on luck, networks or patience.

And the underlying logic is not unreasonable in itself. If behaviour shows patterns, and patterns can be measured, then it seems responsible to use those patterns to improve service. Why keep guessing if you can measure?

The problem is not in that logic itself. The problem is where that logic stops, and how silently it jumps from platforms to almost every other environment in which people need something from a system.

Because measurability and meaning are not the same. A system can register exactly how long someone looks at a screen, which button they click, how quickly they complete a form, and still understand nothing about what that person actually needed. Optimisation optimises what is measurable. Not necessarily what matters.

Designed realities are not reserved for platforms with advertising models.

A government website also designs a reality. The structure of a portal determines which questions a citizen can ask, and which questions remain invisible because there is simply no field, no category, no entrance for them. A digital form translates someone's situation into a fixed set of options. Whoever does not recognise themselves in those options does not exist for the system.

An automated system that routes reports carries an implicit model of what a 'problem' is, and of who is responsible for it. If a report falls exactly on the boundary between two departments, or if a situation does not fit a category, no error appears in the system. The system does exactly what it was designed to do. It is reality that does not fit.

And that may be the most unsettling thing about designed realities: they rarely feel like design. They feel like the way the world simply works now. A citizen who does not receive a fitting answer rarely doubts the form. They doubt themselves. Did I explain it correctly? Did I use the right words? Am I knocking on the right door?

That doubt is not accidental. It is the result of a system that determines which experiences fit, and makes that choice invisible.

With Spotify or TikTok, you can still click away. A citizen cannot click away from government. If the designed reality of a platform does not fit you, you miss a recommendation. If the designed reality of a government system does not fit you, you may miss access to something you have a right to.

Perhaps that is the greatest myth Silicon Valley exported over the past decade, not only to other companies but to every organisation that adopted the same logic without asking whether its task can even be translated into that logic: the belief that optimisation naturally leads to progress.

But technology has no morality. No culture. No meaning. Only incentives.

That is precisely why this moment matters. Not because religion suddenly has the answers to artificial intelligence. But because the conversation has become philosophical again.

What kind of human being emerges inside these designed realities?

That was ultimately the central question of Oratio Hominis Digitalis.

No fear of technology. But the awareness that digital space has become human space.

That UX was never only about interfaces. That systems shape behaviour. That interfaces shape culture. That design always carries an implicit image of the human being.

Perhaps we do not need a new wave of technological acceleration now. We may need a digital renaissance.

Not anti-technological. Not nostalgic.

But free from the myth that optimisation alone creates civilisation.

The original Renaissance rediscovered the human being in the face of closed religious systems.

The digital renaissance may have to rediscover the human being again. This time in the face of closed algorithmic systems.

After the invention of the printing press, it took generations before new institutions, new forms of education and new habits emerged that did justice to what that technology made possible, and to what it threatened. Perhaps we are now at the beginning of a similar period. Not a period of even faster technology, but of slower, more human work: redesigning the institutions, habits and values that fit this new reality.

That redesign does not begin with new technology. It begins with a question that has been skipped for too long: what image of the human being is hidden inside this system, inside this form, this algorithm, this interface? Who is seen here as capable, as responsible, as worthy of being heard? And who is not?

Not by rejecting technology. But by taking back the values we should never have outsourced to platforms, predictive systems and engagement models.

Because ultimately this is the defining question of this century:

not what AI learns about the human being,

but what the human being still wants to determine for itself.