For an Ethics of Care Against AI-Maggedon

Source

Petition (draft) originating from Noesya Lab, June 2026:

• Numérique : l’ère du soin.

URL = https://lab.noesya.coop/publications/2026-05-27-numerique-lere-du-soin/

Text

(translated via ChatGPT)

Excerpted (last part) from a draft French-language Manifesto:

"We, the workers of the digital world, declare the Era of Care open:

We reject this (pro-tech AI) narrative. The narratives surrounding generative AI—whether framed as revolution, existential threat, or a race for competitiveness—feed a toxic agenda that primarily benefits the Big Tech companies marketing these technologies. We refuse the colonization of our imaginations by a handful of megalomaniacal overgrown adolescents. We have lived through other technological transformations: personal computing, desktop publishing, digital photography, the web, e-commerce... We will integrate large language models into our various practices calmly and responsibly, assessing both their real benefits (not the marketing narrative) and their real risks (cognitive, ecological, social, political, etc.). We are not behind in some absurd race toward the destruction of life; we are ahead in the necessary and inevitable process of digital de-escalation.

In place of this toxic narrative, we prefer the ethics of care, mutual care. We affirm that digital technology is primarily a matter of care. Innovation only makes sense if it allows us to care better and do less harm. This applies equally to living beings—human and non-human—and to the machines we design and use. What kind of care are we talking about? How can this ethic be implemented here and now?

• We care for digital projects

We must pay attention to the needs of users, with professionalism and empathy, which requires strong investigative skills. Every line of code should be written with the love of a craftsperson for work well done. Testing is necessary to ensure quality and robustness. And, as Tristan Nitot proposes through the “Eroom’s Law,” code should be optimized so that more can be done with fewer resources. A good digital project is useful, usable, and actually used.

• We care for interfaces

We produce high-quality design that respects people and their free will. We do not use deceptive design (dark patterns), nor do we encourage attention capture. We conduct user testing to ensure that services are genuinely usable.

• We care for typography

We respect the licenses of the fonts we use. We reject typographic services that include tracking mechanisms, such as Google Fonts, and host font files locally. We support small local type foundries, which are to typography what community-supported agriculture schemes are to farming. We encourage non-binary and inclusive typography. We seek to make non-patriarchal forms of creation visible by highlighting women typographers and emphasizing the fundamentally collective nature of typographic creation. We compose texts to facilitate reading for dyslexic people, without reinforcing masculine dominance.

• We care for licenses

We publish our code under free/open-source licenses or reciprocity-based licenses. We reject the privatization of software and regard the opacity of source code as a problem of transparency and democracy. We embrace the principle of “Public Money, Public Code,” affirming that all software funded with public money should be public.

• We care for cybersecurity

We do not put unmastered code online. We use security audits whenever possible. We implement good security practices in the systems we develop, proportionate to the level of risk. We do not impose disproportionate requirements that would create unreasonable costs and delays: a blog does not need to comply with the NIS2 directive.

• We care for personal data

Of course, we comply with the GDPR, but before that we question the very need for digital surveillance and profiling. We do not want welfare suspicion scores or China's social credit system. We reject the generalized surveillance of our lives.

• We care for our sovereignty

We do not want “trusted clouds” managed by Microsoft or Amazon Web Services. We are aware of the material reality of our dependencies—from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo to transatlantic cables connecting us to Silicon Valley data centers. We choose to loosen these ties and build others with genuinely French and European organizations such as Infomaniak, OVH, Scalingo, Scaleway, and Clever Cloud.

• We care for our tools

The right tool meets three requirements: it increases efficiency without degrading personal autonomy; it creates neither masters nor slaves; and it expands personal agency.

“Man needs a tool with which to work, not machinery that works in his place. He needs technology that makes the most of personal energy and imagination, not technology that enslaves and programs him.” — Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

We carefully choose tools that meet these criteria.

• We care for our organizations

Doing things well requires democratic organizations that privilege the long term and robustness. Care cannot flourish in a company concerned only with profitability. Profitability is a condition for sustainability, not an end in itself. Combined with limited profit distribution and low income disparities, it enables policies of care and common enterprise.

• We care for the people who make digital technology

Interns and apprentices are not cheap labor but a responsibility. As a professional community, we must ensure the proper training of those who come after us. This means mastering professional standards such as accessibility, eco-design, and security frameworks, but also embracing a long-term culture of apprenticeship that is incompatible with the purely mechanistic sale of billable days practiced in many IT service companies.

• We care for our peers

We support creative professions that make our world more beautiful, gentle, and poetic, as well as other digital artisans. We value their work, respect their time, and pay them fairly and promptly. We move from a logic of competition to one of sharing and collaboration.

• We care for education

We do not need people who merely know how to write prompts. More than ever, we need citizens with a broad digital culture and critical distance. Digital education, from secondary school to doctoral studies, should belong within the field of digital humanities. Beyond training in tools, we need a techno-critical approach that recognizes the political dimension of technology.

• We care for the habitability of the Earth

In digital technology, as in every field, sufficiency comes before optimization. We need to decide collectively what we want and what we do not want. To do this, we create spaces for technical democracy, allowing local debate and decision-making. There is no single solution to impose; instead, there should be situated solutions chosen by the people concerned.

• We care for our social world

A world concerned only with structures forgets its human dimension. We recognize ourselves in the broad notion of buen vivir, which moves beyond modernity in search of new ontologies and focuses on relationships among humans and between humans and non-humans.

• We care for digital commons

Resources governed by their communities are a perfect example of the diversity of possibilities. The public may know Wikipedia and perhaps Linux, but commons abound: OpenStreetMap, Open Food Facts, Panoramax, Decidim, CoopCycle, PeerTube, OpenFisca, Osuny, and many others. Supporting commons requires long-term commitment—not project calls or temporary funding schemes. Care requires time.

• We care for maintenance

Care is an ethical, ecological, and political issue. In the digital sector, we must move beyond ticket systems toward proactive maintenance and the reduction of technical debt. This is also the space of optimization, frugality, and dialogue with users. Maintenance is not repair. It is a more modest act, often invisible and stripped of heroic connotations. Yet it is essential.

• We care for public service

The private sector does not inherently do better; that is a myth serving private financial interests. It is both possible and desirable to articulate public services and digital commons.

• We care for public procurement

Whether drafting or responding to tenders, we encourage practices of care. Price is still treated as the dominant criterion in many public contracts, encouraging dumping and potentially intensive use of generative AI merely to reduce costs. Existing legal frameworks already allow social and ecological criteria to be given greater weight, including accessibility, environmental impact, cognitive impact, rights, empowerment, durability, and robustness.

• We care for what already exists

The project-based vision imposed by public tenders is ill-suited to a digital world conceived for the long term. Rather than creating and destroying every few years, we should progressively evolve systems through a daily practice of care. Genuine continuous improvement requires long-term commitments and humble, manageable projects rather than costly and over-engineered digital megaprojects.

• We care for people who do not want digital technology

We want the right to remain non-digital to be recognized at every level, from constitutions to municipalities. Digital inclusion policies have often been mere bandages on the wound of forced digitization. By maintaining physical human points of contact, we solve the problem of digital exclusion. Those who wish to learn should be supported, but digital technology must be chosen, not imposed.

• We care for equality between women and men

This means equal pay scales, active support for women in digital professions, and policies that recognize care responsibilities. It means maternity and paternity leave, flexible schedules, remote work, menstrual leave, menopause accommodations, and family-related expense support. Women's participation in work cannot be separated from recognition of the invisible labor they perform outside the workplace.

• We care for people with disabilities

We strive to comply with accessibility standards in all our work. But beyond scores and legal compliance, we aim for universal accessibility by including people with disabilities and those at risk of digital exclusion in our teams. Nothing about us without us.

• We care not to colonize

Digital technology is too often directed by white, heterosexual, cisgender men. We want a world large enough for many worlds, built by those who inhabit them. Digital decolonization operates at every level, from mining to use, from corporate structures to discourse. We follow the principles of Design Justice. We reject universalism and choose pluriversalism. If capitalism is indeed a civilization, as Fernand Braudel argued, then a civilization responsible for the sixth mass extinction has no lessons to give anyone.

• We care for the social and solidarity economy

Whenever possible, we work with social and solidarity economy organizations. France already possesses a rich ecosystem of digital cooperatives, associations, and mission-driven enterprises. Everything is already possible: using free software, cooperative electricity providers, ethical mobile operators, cooperative hardware management services, and nonprofit internet providers. The infrastructure of an alternative digital economy already exists.

• We care for the general interest

A digital technology serving the general interest must serve just ends, remain in its proper place, be democratically governed, respect the law, respect people, be built with care, and be resilient. Frameworks for evaluating the public-interest value of digital services already exist and should guide collective decision-making.

Every euro spent from a perspective of care is an investment in the future. Not only do we directly fund the kind of digital world we want, but the people contributing to it are themselves engaged in other initiatives of care. Their income supports further projects of care. It is the Keynesian multiplier of care. Everything is already in place; all that is missing is the spark that allows the transition."

(https://lab.noesya.coop/publications/2026-05-27-numerique-lere-du-soin/)