Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, arrives the same week a founder cracked a $20M raise by reframing his eSports startup as something VCs could recognize. Both moves are fundamentally about the same thing: how you name a thing determines who funds it, fears it, or worships it.
AI as Trojan Horse for Older Anxieties
As TechCrunch's Rebecca Bellan notes, the papal encyclical uses AI as a lens to diagnose concentrated power and eroding democracy. The Atlantic goes further, arguing the document lands firmly on the side of alarm, despite its hopeful framing. What Leo XIV is really describing is an attention economy where a tech elite shapes perception before the rest of us get a vote. That is not a new problem. It is feudalism with better latency.
The Pitch Trick Is Also a Naming Trick
Meanwhile, Lucra Sports founder Dylan Robbins did something structurally identical: he reframed his company's story in the language VCs were already primed to hear. The encyclical reframes AI anxiety in the language the Church was already primed to speak. Both are acts of translation under conditions of concentrated gatekeeping. The Vatican has cardinals. Startups have term sheets. TurboFund's breakdown of investor research mistakes flags exactly this pattern: founders who fail to translate their story into a VC's existing mental model rarely close the round, regardless of product quality. The Pope and the pitch coach are, unexpectedly, colleagues. A 2023 paper in New Media and Society by Plantin and Punathambekar found that platform power consistently reshapes discourse to serve infrastructure owners, which is precisely what Leo XIV is worried about and what Robbins had to navigate to get funded.