







There's a surprisingly nuanced discussion in development about the political economy of clients and servers in the Atmosphere
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
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
Social platforms are not neutral - Paul's Leaflets
So they need to be interchangeable
Institute of Network Cultures | Ben Grosser: Planning the Exodus from Platform Realism
Thinking about the current state of platforms, I’m reminded of Mark Fisher’s articulation of capitalist realism, the idea that we don’t imagine or build alternatives to capitalism because we can no longer envision a world without it. Big tech, in a few short years, has managed to instill within the public a similar state of platform realism. So many are unable to imagine how global communication, media, search, etc. could ever function without the platforms. Despite a growing malaise, it’s become difficult for many to consider a world without big tech platforms as a viable conception of the future.

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?


Consumerism | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Decentralizing the Economic Power of the Web (A Reading List)
We recently hosted a panel discussion as part of our MozFest’s Dialogues & Debates series focused on interrogating the web’s reigning business model — d…

Trust and Faith in Our Web
I’m not Brennan, but I’m very interested in decentralization and a fan of AtProto specifically, so I’d like to weigh in. First I should mention I’ve personally never been able to get into microblogging, so I haven’t touched bluesky myself, despite having an account for ATProto reasons. But I agree it’s concerning that the company chooses to continue to host the content of harmful individuals and calling that act “neutral”. I’m certainly against the idea of the “marketplace of ideas” as it’s cle...

Platformonomics - Dining Preferences of the Cloud and Open Source: Who Eats Who?
TL;DR: If the cloud didn’t eat Hadoop Inc., Pivotal and Red Hat, what explains their diminished prospects? Marc Andresseesssen’s “software is eating the world” has given rise to an entire technolog…

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
So I finally finished reading this and while I agree with the recommendation, I’m a little wary of some of the context it’s rooted in ideologically and I’m wondering if others have thoughts on these things. Equality in the marketplace I think the main problem with the text is that it relies heavily on the idea of “marketplace of ideas,” leaning heavily on the idea that protocols are actually good for markets specifically because they make competition more perfect (because there’s better knowled...

Is Bluesky's "Decentralization" Real? – The Empty Promise of DIDs and the Path to a WordPress-Style Ecosystem - Nightflight
Becoming the Product - Set Margins'
€24.00 In stock Becoming the Product quantity Add to cart Category: Books Tags: #designwriting, #institutionalcritique, #internetcritique Description Additional information Description In Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual, the evolution of critical internet research takes center stage. By examining the pioneering work of early net critic Geert Lovink and the influencer-style […]

A brief 🧵 for all outside the #atproto bubble on why, from a digital industrial policy perspective, this step is deeply bewildering. There's @eurosky.social – open source, non-profit, fully aligned with the EU's open source strategy. It provides all that W has, & more. And yet, the Commission...
European Commission
We have now joined W, a new European social media network. We’re present on 15+ platforms, and are especially happy to join one based in Europe and with the ambition to foster open and safer online conversations. Keep the conversation going - whether from W, Bluesky or other compatible apps.
multiple ways of understanding the atmosphere are good - you can store extra stuff in your bluesky account : good - an open file system for your social graph : good - an ocean of possibility created by freeing data from the clutches of big tech : good different approaches reach different people
Since early this year I've been explaining *the atmosphere* to friends, activists and prospective customers. It usually goes something like this..
The Atmosphere, Explained
notes.erlend.sh