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Solidarity's Phenomenological Conditions under Technological Disruption

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Aliah Yacoub

Aliah Yacoub is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Utrecht University, where she is part of the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDiT) programme. Her research examines how emerging technologies transform our social practices, moral concepts, and normative understandings. Her doctoral project focuses on the relationship between technological disruption and solidarity, exploring how technologies such as large language models, digital labour platforms, and content moderation systems shape the conditions under which solidarity is experienced and practised. More broadly, her work engages with conceptual disruption in the ethics of technology, with particular interests in the phenomenology of social relations, the nature of solidarity, and the ethical and political implications of technological change. She previously worked in AI ethics and is interested in bringing philosophical inquiry into dialogue with contemporary technological developments and their social consequences.

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Solidarity has returned as a central concept in political theory, activist discourse, and AI ethics — yet it is rarely asked whether the digital infrastructures through which solidarity is increasingly enacted are compatible with solidarity's constitutive conditions. This paper argues that they are in structural tension with them.

The central claim is that socially disruptive technologies (SDTs) enact a double movement with respect to solidarity. On one hand, they generate the conditions that make solidarity necessary: shared adversity, exposed interdependence, fractured social arrangements. On the other, they simultaneously reorganize the phenomenological conditions under which solidarity becomes possible — reconfiguring embodiment, spatiality, temporality, and epistemic trust in ways that obstruct the solidaristic responses that disruption demands. This double movement is not contingent on how current platforms happen to be designed. It follows structurally from what it means to be a technology capable of reorganizing social arrangements at the speed, scale, and opacity characteristic of SDTs.
The paper develops this argument in three stages. First, drawing on Danaher and Sætra's technomoral change framework, it analyzes how digital platforms enable, suppress, and manipulate solidarity across decisional, relational, and perceptual domains — with case-based engagement across content moderation labour, platform-mediated activism, and algorithmic content curation. Second, it argues that this domain-level analysis cannot capture what is most philosophically significant: that SDTs do not merely alter the conditions within which solidarity operates but reorganize the experiential field — the lived structures of embodied exposure, spatial co-situation, temporal endurance, and intersubjective trust — in which solidarity becomes phenomenologically possible. Third, the paper offers provisional normative criteria for distinguishing substantive from merely symbolic solidarity under conditions of technological disruption, connecting the phenomenological analysis to the normative question the track centrally addresses: whether digitally mediated solidarity satisfies the substantive demands of solidarity or only its outward form.

Part of panel Technology and Solidarity