Politics is the defining aspect of networked technology. AT corresponds best to the kind of institutional structure that is key to large scale democracy. AP is a better match for smaller, village-style governance, which is very valid but not the problem I care about.
Ronen Tamari
Can everyone building on atproto please answer this question? 😇
Feb 27, 2026 at 8:35 PM
Why Online Democracies Fail - Eclectic Corvine Muses
A compendium to my upcoming proposal for community infrastructure within the AT Protocol
Eaten by the Internet
This book makes internet infrastructure visible as a force of political power, which is transforming the social world, from the bottom up—through fifteen chapters contributed by a global set of researchers, activists, and techies. We are living a unique moment: internet technologies are the default infrastructure for society, not just how we communicate but also how we organise our social life, politics, and economy, all the way down to our material environments, like cities. Our world is eaten by the internet. This means that those who control the internet control the bounds of public speech, economic production, social cohesion, and politics, making its infrastructure a core political terrain in the networked age. The book’s chapters cover a wide set of topics, spanning from the global politics of content moderation by internet infrastructure to the colonialism inherent in the race to plug the moon, from the harms wrought by blockchain companies in rural America to the particularities of online censorship across Asia. The chapters take on thorny topics, discussing power consolidation in the advertisement and cloud industry, the role of internet infrastructure in the war in Ukraine, and tech’s environmental impact—amongst others. In doing so, this book roots contemporary technology debates in the politics of internet infrastructure and urges us to ask how can we ensure our infrastructures sustain us, rather than consume us?
Plurality
A book by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and the Plurality Community exploring how technology can support and strengthen democracy.
Technically Radical
Over 2024, we saw major tech investors and company owners overtly turn toward the right, overtly backing Donald Trump in his electoral campaign. This group of individuals, which commentators have taken to calling the “Tech Right”, are motivated by various concerns like the attempts by the Biden administration to regulate them and a general backlash against “wokeness”. Representative individuals and their respective justifications can be found in things like Marc Andreessen's essay The Techno-Optimist Manifesto or books like Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, and Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic.
The politics of purely client-side apps - Paul's Leaflets
There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere
SimPolitics
For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics, Fenw...
@proto @fosdem · Luma
The AT Protocol is an open, decentralized network for building social applications. https://atproto.com/ Start your FOSDEM with a convivial evening of casual…
The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms
The Networked Leviathan is a book by Paul Gowder, Professor of Law at Northwestern University, which offers a case and a roadmap for democratizing major internet platforms.
Minimum viable decentralization – John Backus – Medium
If you want people to use your product, decentralize the bare minimum. Lessons from Freenet, I2P, Darknet markets, and Reddit.
Tech Policy Press - Technology and Democracy
Tech Policy Press is a nonprofit media and community venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. We publish opinion and analysis.
AI, Agency and Protocols_ Power and Governance in Open Social Networks.pdf
Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities
Governance in online communities is an increasingly high-stakes challenge, and yet many basic features of offline governance legacies--juries, political parties, term limits, and formal debates, to name a few--are not in the feature-sets of the software most community platforms use. Drawing on the paradigm of Institutional Analysis and Development, this paper proposes a strategy for addressing this lapse by specifying basic features of a generalizable paradigm for online governance called Modular Politics. Whereas classical governance typologies tend to present a choice among wholesale ideologies, such as democracy or oligarchy, Modular Politics would enable platform operators and their users to build bottom-up governance processes from computational components that are modular and composable, highly versatile in their expressiveness, portable from one context to another, and interoperable across platforms. This kind of approach could implement pre-digital governance systems as well as accelerate innovation in uniquely digital techniques. As diverse communities share and connect their components and data, governance could occur through a ubiquitous network layer. To that end, this paper proposes the development of an open standard for networked governance.
people and governance
researching power and contestation in transnational media infrastructures
Rudy Fraser on Blacksky, Mutual Aid & Reclaiming Social Media
I wrote up my talk at @localfirstconf.com as a blogpost The AT Protocol is a high-scale network by design. It works by codifying proven architectures into a protocol. If you've ever used kafka to connect some backend services, then you basically know how atproto works.
Starting from scale in the design of the AT Protocol
pfrazee.leaflet.pub
