Post by Jess Scully

Protocols over platforms, ecosystems rather than champions. Can we draw from these early principles of our digital culture to remodel a foundation for digital infrastructures that are less extractive, less centralised, more read-write and less doomscroll? The authors of the Plural Stack paper suggest how - and if you're looking for a path towards digital resilience, competitiveness and independence, it's well worth your time. At the risk of showing my age, I remember the optimism of the late 90s and early 2000s internet: an era of IRC and Indymedia. That optimism came not just from novelty, but structurally from the internet’s early infrastructure: It was being built all around us on open-source protocols, rather than walled off in proprietary platforms. In a week where access to era-defining technology has been rolled back on a government’s whim, and a decade over which we’ve watched the every layer of the internet consolidate into the hands of a few major players, a renovation of an open, distributed approach has become urgent and necessary. But, as Andreas writes in his excellent blog post for RadicalxChange Foundation, "This vision is not driven by a nostalgia for an earlier internet. It is an attempt to redeem the internet’s founding ethos at scale.” While those OG open-source principles are part of the foundational properties of the Plural Stack, there are even more exciting emergent properties when this Plural thinking spans technical, social and economic dimensions. That's the next level which updates these ideas for this historical moment. A huge congratulations to the authors Andreas Fauler ⿻🚀⭐️👨‍🎤 Anja von Rosenstiel Jacopo N. Ferdinand Ferroli Arno Laeven Marina Markezic Vyara Savova, LL.M., Ph.D.-to-be Mateo Rodriguez Jack Henderson and collaborators. I highly recommend you start with Andreas' illuminating blog post on radicalxchange.org - link below.