Pope Leo XIV, in his first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, wrote a sentence that every developer, entrepreneur and policymaker should take seriously: “Technology is never neutral.” The statement comes at a time when artificial intelligence is reshaping economies, labor and society. The Vatican isn't talking about generic ethics: it's laying down a concrete political principle.
Why does this matter differently? Because it confirms what we at Meteora Web see daily. Non‑neutrality means that every framework, every CMS, every cloud service embeds design choices favoring a specific business model. In Italy, small and medium enterprises are often at the mercy of foreign platforms: a Google algorithm update can wipe out months of SEO; a Meta policy change can make a local brand invisible. We see it in our clients’ books: an e‑commerce store on Shopify pays fees and commissions but owns neither the database nor the customization flexibility. We see it on servers: those renting SaaS without control end up with missing backups and escalating costs. One of our e‑commerce clients had images several MB in size – we optimized them, cutting weight by 60% without quality loss, saving bandwidth and improving load times. That’s not just tech: it’s economics.
We managed an apparel store’s ERP system from the inside – margins, inventory, seasons. When we build a fashion e‑commerce, we know how retail works, not just design. Technological neutrality is a dangerous illusion because it hides real costs: maintenance, updates, vendor lock‑in. That’s why Italy’s digital divide must be closed with awareness, not subsidies. Southern Italian businesses deserve first‑class technology, not second‑rate.
Our position
We, at Meteora Web, have always thought this way. A website is not a showpiece – it’s a tool that must sell. But if the tool is owned by someone else, you’re never the master of your business. That’s why we chose open stacks like PHP, Laravel, custom WordPress: full control, no lifetime fees, data always ours (and our clients’). We built a proprietary platform to manage social presence for multiple clients – auto‑publishing, editorial calendar, integrated invoicing – precisely to avoid becoming a third‑party intermediary. When an SSL certificate auto‑renewal broke on a server, we fixed and automated it without taking the client offline. Because if you don’t control technology, sooner or later it controls you. Magnifica Humanitas reminds us that technology is political. And we choose our side: the side of those who own their digital means of production.
For those reading – developer or entrepreneur – audit your technological dependency. How many subscriptions do you have? How much data is in third‑party hands? Can you migrate to open‑source solutions? Demand contracts with portability clauses. Invest in internal training. Technology is not neutral: either you govern it, or it governs you. Choose.
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