Pope Leo XIV has just signed the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Its core message: “Technology is never neutral.” This is not theology. It is a concrete warning for anyone who builds, buys, or endures software. Especially in Italy, where the digital divide hits revenue directly.
You don’t need to be a developer to see it. Look at what happens when a company hands its data to a platform it does not own. Lifetime fees, forced updates, algorithms that decide without transparency. We, at Meteora Web, see it every day: a client using a SaaS without control loses margin, flexibility, and eventually customers. That is not neutrality. That is dependency.
Our stance: choosing your stack is a political choice
We, at Meteora Web, have always argued that a business must own its system, not rent it. Because when the stack is yours, you control timing, costs, and direction. When you are dependent on an external provider, every change becomes a contract renegotiation. In an AI era that shifts every six months, lack of control means always chasing, never leading.
For Italian SMEs the problem is even sharper. The economic fabric of the South and islands — where we operate — consists of businesses that cannot afford legal advisors to read terms of service. They trust. And they often discover too late that that “neutral” free plugin was selling their data, or that closed-source CMS cannot be migrated. Technology is never neutral: it is designed by someone with specific interests.
And here the encyclical hits home: AI is no exception. A model trained on Anglo-Saxon data or short-term profit logic will produce outputs favoring those logics. A pricing algorithm on an e-commerce site may look neutral, but if it is tuned to maximize conversions without considering real margins, it is working against the seller. We know this because we have been managing budgets and KPIs for years: numbers do not lie, but the people coding them do.
The answer is not to reject technology. It is to choose it consciously. Open source where possible, data control, algorithm transparency. And, for developers, a code ethic that starts with the question: “Who benefits from this feature?” If the answer is only the platform owner, there is a problem.
So what to do? For an entrepreneur or developer in Italy: start mapping every digital tool you use. Ask: who owns the data? How much does it cost to leave? Does the vendor have an interest in keeping me locked in? If the answer is “I don’t know”, stop. Then, prefer modular and open source solutions. And when integrating AI, make sure you can audit it. This is not just ethics: it is economic survival. Neutrality is a fairy tale. Control is power.
Sponsored Protocol
