Welcome Rushi, everybody. Thanks everyone. I feel like I can't see over my computer. Yeah, my name is Arushi, and I'm a founder and CEO of Habitat. And today I'm going to be talking about why we're building habitat. Is everything okay? Okay. Cool. I believe that App Protocol gives us a chance to fundamentally reimagine what connecting with each other online means and through that process, rewilding the internet. So I'm gonna try to get this right. Okay. It's a loose agenda. In this talk, I start with some questions, talk about my dreams for the web, and use some quotes from writers I appreciate to guide my thinking.
We're just doing this. Okay, cool. So if you go to approto.com, this is what the website looks like. The first time I read this, I kind of had the question what actually is the social internet? The term the social internet came around before my time, and even though I've heard it many times, I never reflected deeply on what it meant or what it referred to. Uh sorry. Um yeah, so this is what the internet does, right? It connects two computers together. So my question was how can the internet not be inherently social? Why is the social internet separate from the internet itself?
Of course, this is not exactly how the internet works in order for two computers to share data with each other. Typically they connect to a shared server. Oh sorry, which could be across the ocean. And that is how you get a platform. Sorry about this. So as I started to read more about this time before myself when the internet transitioned from unsocial to social, what I realized is that when people use the term the social internet, what they actually mean is the platform internet. When the web transitioned from web 1.0 to web 2.0, it allowed users to publish pieces of data, including social data, and platforms were the primary way to do so.
And to be fair, several of the articles I read were by Kyle Cheeka, so maybe it is Kyle pushing this agenda. But I think generally speaking, what people imagine when you use the term the social internet is platforms like earlier MySpace AOL in the first era, and now we have like X, Facebook, Instagram, even Bluesky and BlackSky. Um people use the term social in social internet, what they typically mean are billion user social media platforms. But I don't think that's what the social internet is or what it can be. And I think app protocol gives us the chance to imagine beyond that.
Okay, sorry. So Ursula M. Franklin is a Canadian scientist who in 1989 gave a series of lectures titled The Real World of Technology. In it, she talks about how technology is not just the technological artifact that we put out into the world, but also how it affects the world, which in turn affects new technologies. This is kind of like the feedback loop that Rudy from BlackSky was talking about yesterday in this talk. Um so Ursula says, as I see it, technology has built the house in which we all live. The house is continually being extended and remodeled.
More and more of human life takes place within its walls, so that today there is hardly any human activity that does not occur within this house. All are affected by the design of the house, the division of its space, and the location of its doors and walls. That was written in 1989, but I think it's clear where I'm going with this metaphor. The internet is the house we live in. We are all affected by the hopefully it's playing the division of its space, the location of its doors and walls, and how it is continually remodeled. And I think that's why the artist Spencer Chang's work resonates with a lot of people, because it makes the movement through this internet house visible when it is so often invisible or goes completely unnoticed by us.
So if that is the case, if the internet is now the house we all live in, then what is the role of technologists? The way I see it, we build not only the house, but we also dictate how the house gets built and by whom, through things like standards and protocols. And the decisions we make not only affect the internet itself, but also reshape our physical reality, as in the c as in the case of Airspace, a term that's also coined by our friend Kyle Cheika, to refer to how the platform Instagram caused cafes and restaurants to all merge into a homogenous aesthetic.
Okay. So there's this thing I say, which is I want to make app protocol the default way to build on the web. And when I say that, I don't necessarily mean app protocol of today. I mean whatever future iteration of AT Protocol it is that actually enables this to be the case. And many of you in this room might be agreeing with me, but the question we should really be asking is why. Oh my god, so sorry guys.
What real world conditions am I trying to create by making this statement? Or rather, what is the house that I'm trying to build? And these are questions that we must answer. So Lawrence Hoff, who I think is here, wrote in a recent essay that in the older protocols of the web, the silence about purpose was a politics of non-interference. And this led to governance being controlled by whichever actor had the most resources. So I think it's great that as an ecosystem, we are already asking some of these hard questions. Yeah, so I was trying to find the article by Langdon Winner, do artifacts have politics?
And I just thought this was funny. It's 2026. We know that artifacts do have politics, and not just because the AI overview is telling us. Rather than shy away from dealing with the realities of our jobs, I think we should get really clear on what we are trying to build and why, on the power dynamics encoded in what we build, and on the types of conditions that those give rise to. Okay. So in this talk, I'm going to pitch a possible vision for the internet. Ruha Benjamin in her recent book said, those who monopolize resources also monopolize imagination.
So I think it's important for us to recognize that the current internet constrains what we imagine and collectively resist that in order to imagine alternative futures. So in my internet, we are not followed wherever we go. Platform dynamics make tracking possible because the two computers must use an intermediary server. Hence the whole field of peer-to-peer.
The things we do are also human-sized and human shaped. So here I'm thinking a lot about Aaron Cassane's idea of oversaturation and how the bodily experience or affect of using the social internet social internet today is not really conducive to a living human being. Oh, I skip the slide. And these conditions that I described are radically different than what we experience today. So we don't know what it feels like to have that internet or to live in that internet house.
And I think changing those conditions is what fundamentally gets us past skew morphism. So we can't just throw new products into being that are non-schomorphic without first changing the conditions that cause people to actually make them useful and needed in the first place. Okay. Sorry about this. Okay, I'm just gonna go with it. Yeah, so that's kind of like the hard part is the direction setting. Um, and that that's why the older protocols had a politics of non-interference, because it's hard to do this. It's easier to step back and say this is just the protocol. But once we do that, we can articulate what we need to build and therefore what the protocol needs to provide.
So the internet of my dreams can only exist if there's no data hoarding by default. So like the easiest way to build on the web is privacy preserving. This is not the case today. In order to serve a social experience, you need to store user data. I believe the types of software and user experiences that are delivered on the social internet today are limited because it's software engineers and tech companies building them. When people talk about web 1.0 and what feels like to me the glory era of the internet, they talk about how what drew people to the web was the fact that so many different types of people, technical and non-technical, were creating websites.
I think we need to do the same thing for web 2.0. And then reflecting on the idea of what it means for the web to be human-shaped. I think a big part of what is missing on the internet is this idea of communities or groups as a first principle rather than using platforms to then build relationships or communities on top. Okay. So what does this mean for the protocol? I think an iteration of the protocol that enables this should support privacy by design and default. Thanks. Should be usable, maintainable, extendable beyond protocol people, and should be flexible enough to support group self-management.
So I really believe in this idea of leveling up people rather than dumbing down technology. Okay. So all of this stuff is what I think about every day, what my collaborate collaborators and I at Habitat think about every day. And it's funny because even though I think about it, writing this talk really clarified me what to me what Habitat's mission is as reimagining the social internet. Oh my god. Okay. So at Habitat, we are trying to lower the barrier of who can build on the social internet. Sorry, you can never find that. One no.
In the traditional web, people who build platforms create the social internet. App proto changes this with PDSs, custom feeds, and other levers to tweak experiences on platforms. But to build a new type of social experience or modality, oftentimes you still need to build an app view. Habitat wants to see if we can go even further. What kinds of protocol level or shared infrastructure do we need to make it as easy to build a social experience as it is to build a website?
We believe building the social internet should not require sacrificing user privacy. So one step we're taking in this direction is trying to give users agency over this data. So in Habitat, you can see and say who, as people or both apps, have access to parts of your data, and we're trying to give people a way to search over all their data in one place, which is something you should be able to do today on the web, but is pretty much impossible.
Okay, and then third, we're thinking about this community piece. So I quit my job at Figma a month ago to work full time on Habitat. And one thing I think about is how at Figma, the tools I primarily used were Slack, Google Suite, and Zoom. I'm a part of this wonderful organization called Collective Action School, and it's an experimental school for tech workers to reshape the industry from inside of it. So there, the primary tools we use to communicate are also Slack, Google Suite and Zoom. And when building Habitat, the easiest tools to reach for were also Slack, Google Suite and Zoom.
So when I think about data agency and self-determination for groups, but specifically collective action school as a community, my goal and what we're really trying to build at Habitat is that communities can create their own spaces for their own context rather than have to use a particular platform for a particular tool or use case. So I imagine possibly building something like this for collective action school where we have our public-facing website, but when you log in, there's a space that's members only. And it doesn't look like any other chat or syllabus or schedule like any other space on the internet because it's made specifically for collective action school.
Okay, cool. I wouldn't be a good CEO without a little shameless plug. So we do have a version of permission data that actually looks quite similar to what the Bluesky team put out, I think, and will be forwards compatible with what they do. So if you have use cases for permission data, we'd love to chat. And we've been building out products on top of our permission data and other tools and services to show what you can do with Habitat. Um our first toy app is docs, if people want to play around with that. But we're also building out a control plane to actually see what it looks like for users to have agency and transparency into their data.
Thanks.
Okay, but back to the title of the talk. In ecology, rewilding is a process where humans do an initial intervention in a given place or land in order to restore the ecosystem. And the hope is that these seeds of intervention will seed natural processes and increase biodiversity. So I think in a lot of ways that our work as developers in and of this protocol is to make these little seeds of intervention on the web in order to enable others to use and build on the web as a sort of natural and organic process on its own.
So I care, I care about all of these things, but I really care about the second point that builders on app protocol and on the web for social experiences shouldn't just be software engineers and companies.
This idea of biodiversity or diversity in general comes up not just in ecology but across disciplines. In the dawn of everything, David Graber and David Wengrau reconsider the narrative of human history. So this history is usually discussed as a straight line from hunter-gatherer society to agricultural revolution to industrial revolution to now. The Davids challenge this notion and point out how during the long time where humans were thought to be hunter-gatherers, there's not too much evidence of what they were doing, so it's easy to spin a bunch of narratives on top of that. But if you do look at the evidence, there seems to be a plurality of societal forms.
So there are hunter-gatherer societies, but also nomadic farmers or chiefdoms or different combinations of this depending on seasonality. So they say maybe the real question is how did we get stuck? How did we end up in one single mode. Wendell Berry is another one of my favorite writers and a lifelong farmer, and he talks about the importance of diversity to farming, both at a local level where a diversity of crops is needed to sustain soil, but also at a global level, where each farm being in harmony with the land lends to a diversity of ways of doing farming, as opposed to cash crop or industrialized farming that treats all land as the same and therefore depletes it.
And in this essay, Maria and Robin, who I think is here today, write that ecologists know that diversity is resilienced. I think this concept goes beyond ecology. I think this is true of the internet as well. An internet where one data center going down means the web goes down is not resilient, and where one platform in shitifying means everyone's experiences are in shit if it is not resilient. So I think the key for app protocol to survive as a protocol and ecosystem is for us to be resilient by supporting the necessary diversity of infrastructures, technologies, social networks, and communities that human life demands.
Right now, this lack of diversity online is a really strongly felt experience. In the physical world, your library doesn't look or feel like your kitchen, your bedroom, your school, your patio, et cetera. But online, this is absolutely the case. My hope is that with app protocol we can shape our digital habitats with as much agency as we can, our physical ones. So in the real world of technology, Ursula M. Franklin talks about how hard it is to define technology as a concept. However, one definition we might be able to agree upon is technology as a way of doing something.
So if the current state of the web is just one way of doing the social internet, then let's build the social internet differently. Thank you.