I thought it would be nice to introduce myself to the Atmosphere community by telling a little bit about how I got interested and what I hope to contribute. Because getting into the Atmosphere got me fired up, and I think ATproto and the developers, thinkers and designers working with it could provide the foundations the open and democratic institutions of the future.

How it feels to own your digital life

Just before the summer I moved my account and data repository from Bluesky to Eurosky. From American servers to European ones because well... Let's say that I like the idea that I'm in charge of my own online life and that it's not subject to the whims of King Trump who doesn't shy away to weaponise American technology companies.

I had been following ATproto since it was still a project inside Twitter, and I had made a Bluesky account as soon as it launched.
But that was it. Although I liked the ideology behind the whole project, I hadn't really engaged with the medium itseld (or should I say protocol?), being kind of tired with the social media landscape in general. But when I moved my data to Eurosky, and saw that everything was still working, all my data, my connections, everything was still there! I was indeed in charge of my own data! And it quickly turned out that there was more! On the Eurosky portal and the ATstore I discovered a growing collections of apps that all worked with my ATproto account and data. I started to try them one by one. Logging in, looking around and trying them out. All the while knowing that whatever I did in these various apps -every bookmark I saved, post I wrote or link I shared- would be sitting in my own repository on the Eurosky's PDS (Personal Data Server). What I shared online was still mine. I wasn't giving my data away to a tech company. I felt like a full online citizen. What I liked about ATproto in theory now had turned into lived experience. And I liked it!

It felt a bit like I had discovered a new world, or more accurately, it actually felt like rediscovering an old world that I had kind of forgotten about. Surfing the Atmosphere brought back memories of the Web 2.0 days. When social media was just getting started. The days of RSS, the Blogosphere, Yahoo Pipes, Del.ico.us, Google Reader, Last.fm and other staples of that era of the Internet. A time in which interoperability was still the norm and a way to grow the social web.

It was also a time in which I worked as web-editor and webdesigner. Basic stuff: building websites with HTML/CSS, mashing and hacking stuff together to make things work. One of my favourite things was that I turned my homepage into a feed aggregator of my personal online life pulling feeds from flickr, cargo, tumblr, delicious, google reader and twitter.👇


But I also trying to connecting the online world to the physical world with a project called prss-release; a paper feed reader that I distributed on uni so i could introduce my fellow students to the weird and wonderful depths of the blogosphere. Every other week me and a friend collected the 10 best things we've read online dumped it into a template we had made in Indesign and printed a couple of dozens out on the printer in our lab, and put the PDF up on prss-release.com.


The web was brimming with energy an possibility for anyone willing to engage! But alas, those days have passed. Social media networks consolidated into platform-empires, and the open social web waned. From a niche for the tech savvy the web became the mainstream cultural engine of our time. The center of gravity of the entire media landscape has move online. Everything news and media outlets do is digital first and to a significant degree dependent on the search, social and AI platforms of Big Tech.

The Universal Data Commons

But since then a lot has changed. Two decades ago I was studying to become an architect, and today I work run a studio for historic-futuristic research and design (Studio Monnik). With my studio we research and develop future-scenario's that allow us (and our clients) to engage in strategic discourse. We do this with our own historic-futurisc framework, the World Tree Model, that we've developed over the last decade —If you want to know more check out our substack dechrononauten.nl (in Dutch, and to be moved to ATproto in the near future).

One of the scenario's we've been developing over the last couple of year is called the Universal Data Commons, and resonates strongly with what ATproto and the larger open and decentralized social community is concerned with. In short, the recognition that our digital lives should be our own, and that the web should be governed and developed as a public sphere, a commons that should benefit all.

The Universal Data Commons (UDC) is a speculative prototype for both a network protocol and the institution(s) that should govern. The purpose of the UDC-scenario has been to get policymakers, journalists, educators and professionals who mostly work in public, social and cultural sectors to realise how deeply digital technology is changing our societies, and in particular the public sphere and communal life. On the one hand it has radically enlarged the public conversation to include perspectives that have been marginalised. It has had democratised media access. Which is a good thing. On the other hand it has has turned our public discourse into a spectacle and it has gamified social connections. Public discourse has not only been digitised but it has also been commercialised at an incredibly fine grained resolution at a planetary scale. If you work in tech this is nothing new, but even public regulators approach the Internet basically as a market, and regulate it like one. Although they set limits and guardrail, both digital regulators and companies both agree on the framework: the online world is a market. We think this is not the correct lens. The web is not a market, it is primarily a public sphere: a place where community takes shape, where culture is produced, where social movements emerge and where we collectively figure out what hold true. It is a space where a culture aligns its norms and values through debate and discourse.

Today we let commercial interests determine the dynamics of social interactions and public discourse, and it turns out that anger, fear and spectacle on are good for business. Truth, civility and ethics on the other hand, not so much. Which brings us to where we are now a digital public sphere that is not really conducive to healthy civil discourse and actively work against aligning cultural norms and works as an accelarant for polarisation, identity politics, culture wars, etc. The provocative angle of the UDC-scenario is that is basically says: this is not something you solve with another piece of market legislation, this is something that needs public works that address these issues at the technological level, the protocol level. The online world is too vast, too complex, too automated to manage with legal instruments. You need digital public works. Democratically stewarded, managed and governed layer in the Internet. The Internet is too important to leave just to the market.

Below a video we made of a ficticious press-conference in which the EU announced the UDC and what it should achieve (It has English subtitles). To be clear: this is meant as a provocation to a non-technical audience, not as how we would exactly want to do it. Disagreeing with (parts of) it is fine!

If you'd like to dive deeper into the Universal Data Commons. You can read this story I wrote a while back (2022): The Emergence of Open Government, Civic Craftsmen and Boring Politics.

When we present the UDC to non-technical audiences who mostly work in bureaucratic organisations, it usually results in a mix of confusion, inspiration and suspicion.

  • Confusion because even though we try our best, for most it is still quite technical and at the same time very different from the digital world we all know, and thus hard to wrap your head around.

  • Inspirational because is does offer solutions to how we could regain autonomy over our digital lives while at the same time strengthening democratic public culture.

  • Suspicion because it presents a technological solution and a speculative institutional entity that is given power over this new infrastructure. The is scary because people are afraid of the unknown in general, but in particular people feel very ambiguous about the role of technology -in particular social media and screens- in our personal lives and society at large.

But the biggest challenge is often that the UDC proposal feels too fundamental to be even considered for implementing or working towards because it questions the very foundations of the organisation or institution we happen to be presenting it to.

When I discovered the Atmosphere community I thought, what if I flipped the script. To not work with those who approach society top-down, but work with those who engage with is bottom-up. Those who are actually building and developing it out of a personal drive.

To be clear. It is not about pushing the UDC to become a reality. It is to discuss and explore with a community of builders what kind of future internet we want to build. What kind of affordances our digital tools provide should provide for civic life and communality. What kind of social institutions we would need so we van bring to about an inclusive, sustainable, flourishing and adventurous society that we would like to be a part of.

From: Everything will be alright - Amsterdam 2091 - Impressions from the Rooted Age (to appear in 2027) - a future guide to an inclusive and sustainable Amsterdam Studio Monnik is working on with illustrator Jan Cleijne.

And all though I am not a developer, I hope can contribute some meaningful insights, ideas and frameworks down the road to inspire discussions on the topics above. Both locally (Atproto.nl) and to the Atmosphere community at large.

That's it for now — more to come.

♥️ Edwin

PS: Feel free to get in touch if anything above has peeked your interest! And or to leave a comment if anything above is unclear.