AT Protocol, AT Fields, and the Liberation of the Social Graph
As ubiquitous as it is now, the social graph, or alternatively, social network or sociogram, which defines our connections and who we relate to in modern life in an almost totally formal sense, is less than 100 years old. It was invented in the 1930s by a Psychoanalyst and Sociologist named J L Moreno who wanted a way to quantify the relationships between people, originally in the hope of using this analysis to nurture a healthy “social atom” of connections for individuals, the friends, family and acquaintances who make life worth living and open up new possibilities for us in society. The past twenty years has cemented this formalization of social relations as we’ve become embedded in a cyberspace which requires specific syntax, in computer code, to make such connections.
The first generation of human integration into cyberspace had this formalization implicit, with email, phone and fax numbers, the real connections were made irl and this was simply a way to make them more convenient. It wasn’t long for these connections to be made explicit, with forums, and then social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, as well as multiplayer video games, and so on, where methods for forming new connections and organizing them were integrated into the user interface.
What’s become painfully obvious, of course, is that the instrumentality of these social graphs, which were made innately intelligible by these new technologies, was not to give people more healthy “social atoms”. The primary purpose of these networks became the extraction of profits mainly through ad revenue and otherwise finding other means to help companies sell actual products. If people did improve their social atoms, it was merely an accidental byproduct. This is how capitalism functions, things must be reproduced by securing capitalists a slice of surplus value.
But social media companies are somewhat unique because of their relationship to these social graphs, these actual relations between people. A social media company might own software, but what sets them apart from any similar software project is their ownership of these sets of connections which gives them staying power. People cannot easily jump ship without losing access to these sets of formal relationships and having to rebuild from scratch. In other words, much of our relationships are owned directly, not by us, but by these companies.
The kind of natural monopoly power this confers is what initially launched such sky high stock valuations for social media companies like facebook. It also, in the long history of the internet, created various authoritarian tendencies within cyberspace communities - allowing moderators and site owners to create policies and alterations to the digital architecture which are broadly disliked with minimal repercussions. These kinds of dynamics, of a lack of alternatives generating more authoritarian structures, is also what anthropologists identify as the source of state formation among ancient humans. In places where people can simply disappear into the woods when things don’t go the way they like, they would. When they could not, slavery, markedly unequal class societies, and spectacular violence from the ruling class to cement their authority, would ensue.
We can see the analogues in contemporary cyberspace in the way that Facebook’s algorithm changes effectively destroyed politically active nodes of relationships after 2017, or in the contemporary changes occurring on Twitter, as well as the multitude of petty dramas that have occurred on smaller forums over the years. It should be no surprise, as well, that after the experiences of the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS in the early to mid 2010s that mature social media companies became increasingly integrated with actual states in order to tamp down social unrest and further the Pentagon’s foreign policy concerns in particular.
But this situation in which human relationships are owned by a particular company is a contingent one, even within our present capitalist society. There is no reason that people couldn’t simply take these relationships with them wherever they went in cyberspace, as one would take a contact book of addresses, phone numbers and emails. The only issue, when it comes to social media, is the order of complexity. Bluesky’s AT Protocol aims to solve this problem, to create a way for people to simply migrate across social media platforms seamlessly without losing these connections, and, by the same token, allow app developers to create new platforms and systems for making connections without having to compete with the monopoly like power of mature social media companies.
It’s this potential for migration/account portability which makes the AT Protocol unique among other open protocols for social media, and why I believe it is, with minimal hyperbole, the future. Imagine standard microblogging, chatrooms, dating apps, or forums without having to worry about whether the connections and content you made will one day simply disappear because of a host’s arbitrary decision - such websites would be flat out better quality products than what exists now. At the same time, it would absolutely destroy the value of the existing social media industry. After a brief period of windfall profits for those immediately involved, the profits and revenue of the social media industry will collapse immensely, dropping to a level not far above what is required to reproduce itself with server and moderation costs.
It’s these kinds of dynamics which follow the adoption of a new technology standard in general. But the AT Protocol isn’t just any technology. The sudden liberation of the human social graph from the hands of capitalist firms will entail certain social changes. Some of which we have already touched upon, authoritarian moderation and ownership models will be forced out, cooperation with the security state by social media companies to tamp down social unrest will become much more difficult. The potential for revolutions and insurrections, as well as radical political agitation, to sweep into the digital public square will once again be possible. As securing a social media following becomes much more permanent, the popular influencer and freelancer as types will become much more powerful, politically and economically, and with that, the rate race to achieve such heights will become more intense.
In my opinion, the real potential of the AT Protocol is its effects on ordinary people, almost all of whom participate in cyberspace somehow nowadays. In the title I mention AT Fields, which, although are totally unrelated from an etymological perspective (as far as I know), are useful to conceptualize this impact. AT Fields are a scifi concept from the TV anime Neon Genesis Evangelion which stands for “Absolute Terror Field” - this is the social and psychological barriers that we put up between ourselves and others in order to maintain our individuality and sanity. Every creature with a living soul would have an AT Field. In the show these fields are given powerful physical force as a means to illustrate its Freudian themes.
I think the spirit of J L Moreno’s metaphor of the social atom meant to imagine an individual as a nucleus, and their relations being electrons, but perhaps a better metaphor is to imagine the bonds between atoms which allows them to form molecules - this allows us to make an analogy between AT Fields and Electromagnetic Fields. We are attracted and repelled by others according to our own dispositions relative to theirs, when we form bonds with others, the natural repulsions between substances of the same charge at the subatomic scale keeps ourselves coherent and individuated. Humans are, of course, social creatures, we naturally desire having other people around and in relations with us, but simply because we desire something doesn’t mean we materialize it - everything must be instantiated in a particular way. When we form bonds with others, it’s because of a particular encounter and the arrangement of our “AT Fields” at the time. In the Evangelion TV show, much of the themes center around the failure and difficulty of making human connections due to the forces of AT fields, the terror of all our human frailties being exposed to the Other, but, by the same token, the necessity of such fields in order to make real human connections.
The history of capitalism has been, among other things, a history of increasing atomization. Material reality, through the expansion of commodity relations into all spheres of human society, have conspired to make forming bonds more difficult. I wrote about this a few years ago, and pointed out how this atomization, which is most evident in its purely geographic, physical aspect, has also, needlessly, been extended to the digital world. This digital atomization is the result of the structural factors of present day social media technology - the lack of people's ownership over the information which encodes their relationships to others, and the algorithmic organization of all sociograms for the purposes of connecting people to commodities. Even within capitalism, this digital atomization is unnecessary.
We have up till now only seen imperfect and stunted forms of the social graph as an explicit and conscious method of organizing ourselves - beginning with J L Moreno's clinical interventions and ending with corporate social media. What I believe the AT Protocol can unlock is the full power of our AT fields, the equivalent of ferrofluid being poured onto our social-human electromagnetism, revealing its true, intended contours and volumes.
When AT fields become visible macroscopically they become a subject for our deliberate manipulation - this is a power which social media companies already possess through their network analysis of users for the purposes of the algorithm tinkering. The possibility of alternative algorithms, user created algorithms and owning the information of our own relationships is the radical opportunity for fulfilling the promise of the sociogram. That is, it's the possibility of using our scientific understanding of our connections to better form bonds with others, the vengeance of human love and friendship against over two hundred years of persecution.
In Neon Genesis Evangelion, child soldiers are taught to use the repulsive force of their AT fields as a weapon. In their hands, this Absolute Terror is a superhuman strength, an almost force of nature. This is the double edged sword which is our natural inheritance as Moderns - our terror is what makes it possible to build the kind of society we have: industrial, commercial, bureaucratic, ect. Our terror of being exposed in total to the Other is what transforms us into atoms, it is the kind of subject we are shaped into as we leave communal life and become bound to others not as free individuals seeking companions, or as a matter of our natural animal instincts, but as the result of social authority, whether embodied in individuals or more abstract concepts. Everywhere in society we turn to these authorities as fetishes of our own power and desires in order to justify seeking out other people, whether through churches, schools, jobs, political organizations and other institutions. These authorities can arrange humans, often cruelly, as complex and powerful molecules as instruments of their own design.
In Leviathan Thomas Hobbes lays out a similar scheme to our social electromagnetism, using the attraction and repulsions of individuals to lay the theoretical groundwork for the covenant with the State. According to Hobbes, these atomic interactions, left to their own devices, create the violent state of nature: the war of all against all. It’s only from these isolated humans that Hobbes can theoretically construct secular state authority. But Hobbes could only present atomization as a theoretical matter, the practical result of atomization has been the embodiment of these contradictions, of this war of all against all AND unlimited state authority. We experience this, for example, when we turn on the news and see headlines about the weekly lone wolf spree killer side by side with new, oddly tyrannical laws, as well as new revelations of the powers of the security state apparatus.
The digital world, by no means, has to directly mirror these dynamics. Why should it manifest state authority in its own arrangements of social relations? Why should we remain atomized as a matter of fact when we express our existence in a purely symbolic world, where all divisions are equally symbolic? Cyberspace should be a type of virtual machine for existing societies, that is, a sandbox where we are capable of creating all manner of different relations between people which would otherwise be difficult or impossible on our current irl social operating system. Of course, as the political movements of the early and mid 2010s showed, it is difficult to totally sandbox this virtual machine, humans don’t compartmentalize quite like computers do.
Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto singled out the rapid advances in the “means of communication” as one of the key drivers of globalization, the development of industry, and working class political organizing. For Marx, this meant the proliferation of telegraph networks and newspapers. At the time of the 1848 Revolutions, when The Communist Manifesto was written, Marx was a reporter, and his paper carried breaking news about the uprisings spread by telegram across Europe with the intention of fomenting them further. More than telephones, or 20th century mass media, 19th century newspapers are the closest analogue to social media today, due to the way their production and distribution created social graphs. The Social-Democratic movement Marx helped create in the late 1800s saw their mission to create an alternative civil society, centered primarily around these newspapers.
The AT protocol, by finally liberating the social graph from capitalist firms, is what could remove the final barriers separating social media from the 19th century newspaper ecology, complete with the re-creation of a pre-atomized world. It is for all these reasons that I keenly anticipate the full release of the protocol.