Hybrid Solidarity

Thinking with AI  ·  March 2026  ·  pillar page

I call hybrid solidarity the form of social bond that appears when our interdependence no longer concerns other humans alone, but extends to technical systems endowed with growing autonomy. The concept extends Durkheim without merely repeating him: it does not use a prestigious reference as decoration, but names a real mutation in our collective condition.[1][2]

We already live inside this configuration. We search through engines, write with assistants, orient ourselves through algorithms, learn through platforms, and sometimes decide on the basis of rankings, recommendations or calculations that are no longer purely human. The issue is therefore not whether this interdependence exists. It is how to organise it so that it remains compatible with human emancipation, judgement and the common world.[1][3]

From Durkheim to hybrid solidarity

The novelty does not lie in the sudden existence of techniques. It lies in the fact that they now participate in the very texture of interdependence. The social body becomes a hybrid assemblage with increasingly porous boundaries: what once belonged to relations between subjects more and more often passes through systems that redistribute attention, authority, information and decision.[1]

An interdependence beyond the human circle

To say this does not mean turning machines into persons. Technical systems are neither citizens nor consciousnesses. But neither are they mere passive tools any longer. They become active mediations that alter what we see, the options that appear available, the way information is hierarchised, and the manner in which we are evaluated, oriented or recognised.

In ordinary life, hybrid solidarity manifests in gestures that have become banal: trusting a navigation recommendation, letting a search engine order knowledge, accepting that a system filters applications, relying on a platform to pace learning, asking a conversational assistant to reformulate, compare, summarise or orient. Each time, action remains human, but it is inscribed in a chain where initiative is already partly configured by technical mediations.

The question is therefore no longer only: what tools do we use? It becomes: what sort of society takes shape when our bonds of interdependence increasingly pass through such devices? Hybrid solidarity is not the celebration of mixture. It is the name of a new social condition that demands rules, institutions and heightened vigilance.

School as a laboratory of this recomposition

School is a particularly revealing place for this transformation. It is where one can most clearly see sources of knowledge, legitimate authorities, forms of accompaniment and criteria of success being redistributed. Uniformity yields to personalisation of pathways; vertical transmission combines with more horizontal learning; interactions between students, teachers and technical systems grow denser.[1][4]

This recomposition can enrich learning. Well-situated tools can open access, support differentiation, make exploration possible and provide some pupils with supports they did not previously have. But that promise only holds under conditions. If no one can still say who orients, who decides, who explains and who assumes final responsibility, school risks losing precisely what it is meant to institute: subjects capable of judgement.

In a school traversed by hybrid solidarity, the role of adults does not diminish; it becomes more decisive. They must explicate mediations, make dependence perceptible, teach students when to rely on a system and when to distance themselves from it, when to automate and when to take things back into their own hands. The right question is not: should there be technical systems at school? The real question is: under whose authority, within what limits, and in the service of what ends?

The risk of solidarity without rules

Hybrid solidarity is not automatically desirable. Without shared frames, it can drift into a suffered interdependence: subjects live with systems they do not understand, over which they have no real hold, yet which still redistribute their concrete possibilities. The same technical mediation may, depending on context, enrich an already formed autonomy or deepen a silent dependence.

This is where hybrid solidarity meets cognitive justice and the dispossession of the educational subject. If some learn to interpret systems, contest them and turn them into critical auxiliaries, while others are mostly exposed to their prescriptions, interdependence becomes inequality. It no longer binds subjects capable of lucidly coexisting with tools; it separates those who steer mediations from those who live under their hold.

A solidarity without rules is not a solidarity. It is an enlarged dependence. As long as understanding of systems, the right to explanation and the possibility of suspending a recommendation or reintroducing human deliberation are not distributed, the social bond is not recomposed: it is reconfigured in favour of actors who already master the codes of the new environment.

Organising hybrid solidarity

The task is therefore neither to reject technical systems nor to hand ourselves over to them. It is to institute this new interdependence. Organising hybrid solidarity means holding at least four requirements together.

Such an organisation requires trained adults, charts that carry meaning, rites of entry into digital life, uses that support digital metacognition and a more demanding definition of what success means. It is not enough for technique to be present everywhere. Its presence must still be thought, discussed, limited and oriented.

Hybrid solidarity is therefore not the last word of the diagnosis. It is already a political and educational proposal. It says that we must learn to live with technical systems that have become co-actors of our world without surrendering to them the power to decide in our place what matters, what counts and what engages our lives. Only under that condition can it become a step toward responsible digital autonomy, rather than yet another figure of submission.