A Common Share

What if solidarity rode the subscription economy, and an agent carried the standard that governs it, in money and in time?

A Common Share imagines mutual aid in 2040 as continuous assistance shared through money and time. It builds on CASt — Continuous Assistance Standard v0.1, an independent, transferable impact standard first presented in The Infrastructure of Solidarity. This prefiguration imagines a fictional extension of CASt that adds donated time to monetary assistance, while keeping its focus on people facing economic precarity. People and local nonprofits remain responsible for decisions about who receives help and how it is delivered. The history and present-day signals are real; the 2040 system and its consequences are speculative. The existing Standard remains unchanged.

A standard is a shared set of commitments and measures. Different organizations use it to describe what they aim to achieve and assess their impact using shared measures, while each keeps the freedom to decide how it delivers its services. Think of the Fairtrade mark: producers work in different contexts, but common requirements define what Fairtrade certification means, and independent audits check whether those requirements are met. CASt applies that idea to continuous assistance — help that arrives regularly and predictably, rather than just once — by setting commitments and measures for its continuity and impact.

• Subscription-based platforms contribute. Each commits a share of its revenue every month.
• An agent carries the standard. Here, an agent is software that acts on a contributor’s instructions and follows the standard’s rules: it directs the contributions they choose and offers their available time for tasks published by local nonprofits. It does not assess need or decide who receives help; people at local nonprofits make those decisions.
• Circles co-create. Neighbours, colleagues, or a parish shape projects with local nonprofits; the nonprofits decide how assistance is delivered.
• Time counts as time. An hour given is recorded as an hour, alongside money and never converted into it.

The agent carries rules, directs contributions and offers your hours. You choose the task; the nonprofit decides how help is delivered.

Contents

1. 01Europe’s mission→
2. 02The 2040 system→
3. 03A week in 2040→
4. 04Roots→
5. 05Signals and drivers→
6. 06The agent and its limits→
7. 07Who governs the agents→
8. 08Circles, time and the clauses→
9. 09Technology premise→
10. 10What it costs→
11. 11What it changes→
12. 12Tensions to stage→
13. 13Open questions: grounding→
14. 14Design choices and sources→

Europe has committed to cutting poverty, and it is falling behind. That gap is the reason this prefiguration exists.

By the numbers

Why this prefiguration answers to it

On 6 May 2026 the Commission presented the EU’s first Anti-Poverty Strategy. It includes a coalition against poverty, dialogue with people experiencing poverty, and a 2027 proposal on easier and integrated access to services.

The Strategy asks for coordination across public, civic and private actors. A Common Share imagines what that coordination could look like in 2040: platforms contributing from revenue, citizens organized in circles, time counted alongside money, and public budgets building the shared rails. It sits halfway to 2050.

These policy commitments are the context for the speculation; they do not endorse it.

Projected from grounded signals (sections 01, 04 and 05). Subscription-based platforms pay from their own revenue; contributors direct where it goes. Your agent carries the contributor’s instructions and the standard’s rules, and offers their available time against published tasks. Circles co-create projects with local nonprofits, and the nonprofits decide how help is delivered.

On the platform side, an impact agent receives the request, sees only the amount and never where it goes, and pays the pool. Money goes from platforms straight to a steward pool at a regulated bank; neither the agent nor the circles ever hold it. The bank pays out the money; service providers are paid to deliver. Time goes from a person to a task a nonprofit published, and the person chooses whether to take it.

The line. Everything the agent does sits on the incoming side: finding platform shares, carrying out the contributor’s instructions, offering hours. Everything about need sits with the local nonprofit and is decided by people.

The common floor. A fixed share of every circle’s allocation goes to a common floor, which funds co-created projects first where circles are few or absent. There a nonprofit starts the project and circles from elsewhere can adopt it.

Reciprocity. A person who receives assistance this winter may give two hours next spring. Receiving is not a fixed status.

The 2040 system has a past in Piedmont. It is mutual aid, with agents doing the clerical work.

Società di mutuo soccorso

Members paid small regular dues into a common fund, topped up by philanthropists. The fund covered illness, injury, death and unemployment, and over time education and small loans. Their novelty was a secular principle of assistance in place of charity.

An official count of 82 societies, cited for 1862, found them mainly in Piedmont. By 1885, 707 of the 3,762 societies answering the national survey were Piedmontese, about 19%.

Banche dei tempi

Italian law has recognized time banks since 2000. Law 53 of 8 March 2000, Art. 27, lets local authorities support associations where residents exchange time for mutual help, and adds that these activities cannot take the place of the authorities’ own institutional duties. That is the same boundary CASt draws between community assistance and public provision.

What carries over

• Dues become platform shares that contributors direct.
• The common fund becomes the steward pool.
• Members both give and receive.
• Time is counted as time.

The speculation starts from things already visible. Signals are early examples of the 2040 system; drivers are forces likely to shape it.

Signals already visible

Drivers toward 2040

The agent executes a contributor’s own instructions. It does not evaluate, decide on or hold data about any person receiving assistance. Those decisions belong to the local nonprofit and are taken by people.

How this maps to the AI Act

Outside CASt’s scope. If a local nonprofit chose to use AI tools in its own casework, those tools would be assessed under the AI Act on their own terms. CASt neither requires nor supplies them.

Status: our reading, written for review, to be confirmed by counsel and checked against the Commission’s guidance on high-risk classification. Source: AI Act Service Desk, Annex III and Article 6.

People govern and maintain the standard; agents carry its rules. That holds for contributors’ agents and for platforms’ impact agents alike. Because agents act on the standard’s behalf, someone must certify them, audit them and be able to withdraw them.

Rules for the agents

• Certificates are time-bound. They expire and must be renewed, like the cast that comes off when it is no longer needed.
• Behaviour is auditable. Agents keep logs that assessors can check, in aggregate and without personal data about people receiving assistance.
• Withdrawal is public. A withdrawn agent leaves the registry the same day.
• Leaving is safe. A contributor’s instructions, circles and hours move to another conforming agent without loss.
• Public responsibility stays separate. Public bodies may reference the standard. They do not run it, so statutory duties never move onto it.

Circles co-create projects with local nonprofits, never choosing individuals. Circles bring money, hours and local knowledge and shape what a project is for; the nonprofit decides who is helped, how much and for how long.

Draft clauses

Working wording for the fictional extension of CASt, not final text and not changes to CASt v0.1. Each clause stages a choice readers can argue with.

CASt’s technology must leave more than it takes. Clean is the floor; regenerative is the aim.

Regenerative, not only clean. Under ministerial decree 414 of 7 December 2023, any premium tariff a renewable energy community earns above the set threshold must go to non-business consumers or to social purposes in the area where the plants stand. In 2040, CASt’s agents could run on those communities, and their social share could flow into the same steward pools to address energy poverty.

The tension to keep visible. Millions of agents use real energy. A standard cannot promise zero impact; it can measure it, cap it and publish it.

Public money builds the rails; solidarity fills the pool. Public budgets at EU, national, regional and local level each pay for part of the shared infrastructure; assistance itself is paid by platform shares that contributors direct.

Why split it this way. It keeps public responsibility visible: public funds never quietly become charity. It lets funds from AI, energy and digital budgets support CASt without bending their purpose. And assistance does not stop when a seven-year budget cycle ends.

Who does what, level by level

EU. Funds programmes and sets the frame: ESF+, the Social Climate Fund, Digital Europe and, from 2028, the national and regional partnership plans. Pays for the open agent, clean compute and independent evaluation.

National. Ministries and managing authorities channel EU funds, set the tax treatment of platform shares and the rules on volunteering, and keep statutory welfare, which CASt never replaces.

Regional. Regional ESF+ programmes and energy plans co-fund casework, volunteer matching and safeguarding, and the energy communities that power the agents.

Local. Municipal social services keep their statutory duties and their own referrals. They can host offline access points in public offices, convene circles and nonprofits, and co-fund local casework. They observe the standard; they do not run it.

Cost lines and who pays

EU instruments today

Signals as of November 2026, not commitments to CASt. By 2040 a later budget cycle will apply.

Tensions

• Mission drift. AI and energy funds want showcases. CASt has to take their money without becoming their demo.
• Budget cycles against continuity. Public funds come in seven-year cycles. That is why they pay for the rails, not for assistance periods.
• Who applies. EU money flows through national and regional managing authorities. Who holds the grant: the standard’s body, a city, or each implementation?

Six dimensions, one for each kind of participant and one for time. Evidence is reported only in aggregate. Experiences are gathered through voluntary, anonymous feedback collected by an independent evaluator, never linked to a person over time.

The piece shows these and leaves them open. A prefiguration earns its keep by making the trade-offs visible.

• The platform’s motive, the central tension. A platform’s contribution may be good for solidarity and good for retention at the same time. Is care bundled with a music service still solidarity, or customer experience? In 2040 the platform’s own impact agent sits at this seam: it sees how much each subscriber directs, and the clauses forbid it from using that to keep them. The piece keeps the ambiguity in view; it is part of the concept’s force.
• Retention economics next to need. Platforms give partly so people stay. A person’s continuity sits downstream of someone else’s growth targets.
• The act moves. If an agent gives, the human act becomes choosing your circles and your hours. Is that a loss, or how solidarity survives?
• Circles fund their own. Need is unevenly spread, and well-off circles cluster in well-off places. The common floor is one answer; readers may want a stronger one.
• Agents as collective power. Millions of agents asking platforms to commit shares work like a union of consumers. Who governs that power?
• Who builds the agent. Many conforming agents, or one dominant one. A single provider becomes a gatekeeper of solidarity.
• Time meets people. Money can stay anonymous; time cannot. Safeguarding, access and substitution (section 08) should be shown, not claimed as settled.
• Not the digital welfare state. The agent works only on what comes in. Need is never scored by a machine.

The agent carries rules, directs contributions and offers your hours. You choose the task; the nonprofit decides how help is delivered.

The prefiguration stays speculative; the arguments under it should not. These are the real-world questions that would make or break the 2040 scenario.

Design choices

• Horizon: 2040 like Prefiguration 01, or later (2045) so the two read as a sequence?
• Version: inside the fiction, is the extension named as a CASt variant or as a later version?
• Directed share: how much of each subscription can a contributor direct, and who sets the cap?
• Name for the person’s role: contributor, member, or attributor?
• Size of the common floor and of the cap on any one platform’s share of a pool.
• Should the fictional extension also cover in-kind help (goods), or stop at money and time?

Sources

1. Eurostat, news release on poverty or social exclusion, 30 April 2026
2. European Commission, EU Anti-Poverty Strategy, presented 6 May 2026
3. European Commission, factsheet on the EU Anti-Poverty Strategy, May 2026
4. European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan
5. Biblioteca Liberale, Mutualismo e cooperazione
6. ISTAT, Statistica delle società di mutuo soccorso, 1885
7. Legge 8 marzo 2000, n. 53, Art. 27 (Banche dei tempi)
8. Assolombarda, Decreto CER: DM MASE 414 del 7 dicembre 2023
9. Eurostat, paid online subscriptions, 27 August 2026
10. Stripe, Stripe Climate launch, 28 October 2020
11. Mastercard, Worldline and ING, press release, 2 June 2026
12. Philanthropy Together, In Abundance (2024), via Inside Philanthropy
13. La Poste Groupe, L’ARRONDI en caisse 2025, 2 February 2026
14. Teleborsa, renewable energy communities in operation, July 2026
15. European Commission, ESF+ data and figures
16. European Commission, Social Climate Fund
17. European Commission, Digital Europe Programme
18. European Commission, InvestAI launch, 11 February 2025
19. European Commission, EU budget 2028–2034
20. AI Act Service Desk, Annex III and Article 6

The locality, circles, platforms, figures for 2040 and operating arrangements are fictional. Present-day facts keep their reference year and source.