New Things, Old Arguments

I was intrigued this week when I read that Pope Leo XIV had established a Vatican commission on artificial intelligence. The commission brings together seven Church bodies charged with coordinating the Vatican’s response to AI. The announcement precedes Pope Leo’s highly anticipated first papal encyclical release, scheduled for May 25, reportedly to be titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or Magnificent Humanity — a guide for Catholic bishops and followers on the ethics and usage of AI.

What intrigued me was not the commission or the encyclical. It was a historical link to the pontiff’s namesake, Leo XIII — the pope who, in 1891, wrote Rerum Novarum, Latin for “New Things.” The landmark encyclical focused on the condition of working people in the industrial age — the same disruption Pope Leo XIV now draws parallel to in this modern era.

Rerum Novarum was Leo XIII’s response to a systemic failure. The industrial revolution made craft guilds irrelevant — the intermediary institutions that naturally organized labor, enforced standards, and gave local workers independence and collective voice. Nothing replaced them. And without those institutions, working people shifted from craftsmanship to factory labor, with no way to negotiate what was happening to them.

The encyclical’s argument did not condemn business or suggest that progress should stop, and I don’t expect the current Holy Father to do so. Instead it focused on what happens when technology leads transformation without addressing predictable harm. Then, like now, there’s a call for ethical and moral leadership in shaping a new economy.

One hundred thirty-five years later, history rhymes. And once again, the institutional scaffolding communities need to navigate what’s coming is being deliberately removed.

On May 9, 2025, the Trump administration, by a social media post, moved to cancel the Digital Equity Act — $2.75 billion in congressionally appropriated funding for digital literacy programs, community navigators, device access, and local capacity-building partnerships.¹ The Commerce Department terminated grants for programs already underway, citing unconstitutional racial preferences as the rationale. No court has agreed. The NDIA v. Trump lawsuit is active in D.C. District Court with a motion to dismiss denied.2

Today, 78% of Americans subscribe to broadband at home. Among those earning less than $30,000, that drops to 54% — and a third of that same group relies solely on a smartphone to get online.3 The goal of closing the digital divide remains critical, and yet it has been sidelined. The national programs to build capacity for full participation in the digital economy, society, and democracy simply stopped and remain in limbo.

This is not a story about last-mile connection. Broadband infrastructure — the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program — remains largely intact.4 The Digital Equity Act was what made broadband meaningful: the skills, navigators, and institutional relationships that allow communities to actively and meaningfully participate in the digital economy, not just receive a signal to get online. Without it, BEAD builds highways to communities that can’t yet drive.

Across the country, those same communities are now watching AI infrastructure arrive — data centers built with public subsidies and tax exemptions, negotiated without community input, and carrying no obligation to invest in the people already there. They get the infrastructure. They lose the intermediary.

This is where the structural parallel to the industrial revolution of 1891 sharpens.

In Leo XIII’s era, the missing institutional layer was labor protection — the capacity for workers to organize, negotiate, and hold business accountable. Without it, the industrial transformation produced enormous wealth for some and extraction for many.

In our era, the missing layer is digital and AI literacy — the capacity for communities to understand, negotiate, and contest the systems increasingly mediating their employment, housing, healthcare, and civic participation. AI is not coming to these communities later. It is arriving now, through algorithmic hiring tools, automated government services, predictive utility rate structures, and the data center infrastructure being built in their counties with public subsidies and minimal community input.

Nearly one-third of U.S. workers lack digital skills, even as many jobs require them. Without training, AI readiness, and access, workers cannot compete in today’s economy.

The Digital Equity Act would have funded the navigators, the training, the institutional partnerships — the modern equivalent of what Leo XIII called indispensable intermediary associations. Its cancellation doesn’t pause the transformation. It removes the protection while the transformation accelerates.

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Leo XIII was not writing a charitable document. He penned an institutional argument: transformation produces harm when it outpaces protection. His was not an argument against capitalism, but one about an obligation to close the gap.

The cancellation of the Digital Equity Act is a manufactured gap. These were Congressionally appropriated funds. Programs were underway. Partners identified and ready. And all of it was terminated through executive action, with no apparent legal authority to do so.

Community capacity-building will not move at the pace of AI deployment. It is slower to build, harder to restart, and deeply damaged by institutional betrayal. The cancellation did not just cut programs. It broke a promise at the exact moment communities needed to believe the institutional relationship was real.

That is the question Rerum Novarum left open in 1891 — and the one we are still answering: when transformation comes and the old protections are gone, what fills the gap?

Here is what we know: the gap is not inevitable. Right now, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, Public Knowledge, the National Urban League, the Hispanic Federation, and dozens of civil society organizations are doing exactly what Leo XIII prescribed — organizing, advocating, and holding the institutional line. They are in Washington this week. The lawsuit is alive in the courts. The FY2027 budget reconciliation — which includes a White House request to permanently cancel remaining DEA appropriations — is the next critical threshold. The advocacy window runs through June 8.5

If you’re in Washington this week, NDIA and Public Knowledge are on the Hill through May 21. If you’re not, contact your member of Congress directly and oppose the FY2027 rescission of remaining DEA funds. Call and email scripts are available here: https://www.digitalinclusion.org/blog/the-digital-equity-act-one-year-later/.

If your work touches AI deployment, broadband infrastructure, or community investment anywhere in this country, name the Digital Equity Act cancellation as a critical part of your analysis and advocacy. It belongs there.

Rerum Novarum is 135 years old. It was about new things. The argument is an old one.