What Eli said at the Vatican
Lessons on the design of spaces and our multi-faceted identities
Feb 09, 2025
In late January, New_ Public Co-Director Eli Pariser traveled to the Vatican, at the invitation of Pope Francis, to speak at the Jubilee of the World of Communications. Going back to at least the 1300s, about every 25 years the pope has hosted a jubilee — a year of penance and repair expected to bring as many as 10 million extra visitors to Rome this year.
There are pilgrimages scheduled for different walks of life, and the World of Communications was for journalists, graphic designers, and yes, even bloggers. For Eli, it was a chance to share his perspective on the future of social media, and what New_ Public is working on, with these communicators, as well as church leaders and bishops from more than 80 countries.
In a Q+A below, we go behind the scenes on what this invitation means, why Eli went, and why he used this opportunity to explore the design of spaces, offline and online. You can read his complete speech here.
–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public
Click here to watch the speech.
What it meant to be invited to speak at the Vatican:
This was much broader than my normal group of people, who are nerds about the design of social media. Life is increasingly lived in digital contexts, and those digital contexts are hurting our ability to see each other, and also our souls to some extent. And so, that’s a different level of talking about it and situating the issue than tweaking bits of social media from within the industry.
Spiritual communities, for thousands of years, probably as long as humanity has been around, have been experts in getting people together and helping figure out how to build a healthy community.
And then, as I was reading up on where the Catholic Church has been messaging on social media, I was really inspired to see how much alignment there was between how we've been thinking about it at New_ Public and how the Church is thinking about it.It was deeply meaningful, because this is an institution that affects many hundreds of millions of people's lives very directly and plays this kind of moral leadership role in the world.
How New_ Public’s work intersects with religion and spirituality:
Ultimately, we need digital spaces that recognize the full human being, and this spiritual aspect is sort of left out of the conversation. It's so obviously not met by a lot of the current social media, but it's a really important part of being human. And so, figuring out how to engage people who have thought a lot about that, bringing them into this conversation, is really important.
And I certainly have my deep disagreements personally, philosophically, with the Church. But one of our values at New_ Public is around pluralism, and that means being able to work constructively with people on some things while deeply disagreeing with them on others. I also feel like that's going to be true when we're building public spaces. We're never going to be building public spaces with people with whom we 100% agree.
And so to me, that's part of the ethos of the movement, figuring out how we can work across those differences. I'm generally excited to reach out to whatever kinds of new constituencies want to be part of this movement for better digital spaces.
How Eli crafted his speech and thought about what he wanted to communicate:
I got on a Zoom with some of the women from the Dicastery for Communication, which is basically the communications department of the Vatican. And number one, it was just a group of really smart, thoughtful people, most of whom had multiple PhDs in something related to this.
One of them said, in this beautiful Italian-accented English, “Eli, people are feeling a lot of despair about what's happening online right now. I think your job is to explain, why we should not just close the door and go back to the age of stones?”
That was such a good question, so I took it from there. Why shouldn't we just turn it off? And what is the alternative to that? I was trying to speak at that level and explain why I thought there was this really hopeful and important path forward that we've built New_ Public to serve and that a lot of other people are walking on as well.
Why Eli zeroed in on the design of spaces for his speech:
Thinking in terms of spaces is useful because it gets us immediately into some really important areas that are often neglected in conversations about internet design. It gets us into the social, emotional dimension of life and it also gets us into these questions about containers for sociality.
What are spaces designed for and what are the incentives that create those designs? So when you talk about the design of a cafe, that's a container that creates pathways for certain ways of interacting and not others. You can't have a dance party in a cafe.
So, it helps vividly contextualize the way that we live our lives as people with bodies in the real world. Some of these questions about design are otherwise very abstract. You can talk about data, capitalism, and surveillance, but it's really hard to tell: how does that feel and how does that shape behavior? And I think when we talk in terms of spaces, it's much more evident why people might behave badly in some kinds of places and why they might behave better or more thoughtfully in others.
How Eli’s speech was received:
After I spoke, a nun from Papua New Guinea stood up and spoke really movingly about the violence that she was experiencing in the digital communities there. She was feeling really inspired by this notion that it doesn't have to be war forever and she was motivated to do something about it. That to me was very moving, because it's one thing to have a bunch of Westerners getting excited about this, but to hear this resonating with her really took it to a different place.
I talked to a bunch of folks from not just Europe, but also South America, Africa, and Asia who clearly resonated with the speech. I think that's my blind spot. I try to remember that the most attention is put into making the United States version of Facebook work, and if you live in Nigeria, South Africa, or Brazil, there are way fewer resources put into making it work for local communities. It was really nice to hear that resonance and people's excitement about this project.
Also, it was amazing to be there with Maria Ressa, who's this fearless journalist standing up to authoritarianism in the Philippines, and a personal hero of mine. She was highlighted by the Church as the kind of leader that was needed in this moment and she gave a really beautiful, compelling talk about what's wrong with social media right now and what we need to do to make it right.
What the trip means for Eli as a Co-Director of New_ Public, a father, a writer, a non-Catholic, and someone invested in changing social media for the better:
I hadn't really thought about it until now, but the talk was really building on this premise that the self is better understood as a series of different parts, or personas, and that you can understand behavior much more easily that way.
And then I was kind of occupying way more different roles than I normally do on this trip because I had brought my son along who's 10. I wanted to tell the story in a way that would make sense to a 10-year-old.
These platforms are part of many people’s lives right now and everyone is feeling the consequences of that. If we can't speak to that, and speak to what's possible, then we're just missing a lot of the potential audience. So I was trying to talk in a way that spoke to him as well as to the bishops.
And then I was an American in Italy, a Jew in the Vatican. I was in this beautiful, ancient place that was Rome, and walking into these churches and town squares that had been around for hundreds of years, or the Colosseum, which is thousands of years old, which all served certain kinds of sociality.
I hadn't fully clocked that I was giving this talk about what's possible with architecture at a place that has been demonstrating what's possible with architecture for thousands and thousands of years on a world scale. That was a really awesome thing for us to experience as people — walking into these awe-inspiring, really power-oriented spaces and feeling what that's like.
Usually when I'm doing my work I'm just in this very narrow “work” slice of me, and I just couldn't do that in that place, with that set of experiences. It was different.