Blaine Cook on community and PanProto

An absolutely wonderful speech at AtmosphereConf 2026 from Blaine Cook, who is developing Roundabout for New Public. No slides, almost nothing about technology ... but lots of cheese.

The following distinction is essential to understand "what it means to build the sort of software we want to see in the world:

• Engineering trains you to specify desired behavior, build the system, and treat deviation as a bug. I believe this approach is incompatible with social software. Social systems are living, breathing things...
• Sociology, on the other hand, trains you to observe what is actually happening... understand what produces healthy outcomes. Only then can you cultivate those conditions. You don't define and control the system. You tend it."

Traditional cheesemaking reflects the second approach, while pasteurisation and mass production reflect the first. Pasteurisation has saved many not lives and was necessary 200 years ago, but today traditional cheese is actually safer, as illustrated by "traditional cheese making in the Auvergne region of France. They make raw milk cheeses made with unpasteurized milk, milked by hand ... looks like a food safety nightmare... no sterilization... [or] fully controlled environment, no standardized inputs. And yet these cheeses can be remarkably resilient... the microbial culture is already there... adapted over time to this place, this practice, this environment... Safety does not come from absence .It comes from presence, from a healthy, adapted, living biome."

Moreover, the cheese is so diverse: "Terroir is not just branding.It's microbial geography."

Pasteurisation, on the other hand, " wiped the site clean ... [replaced] the indigenous microbial ecology... [with] a simplified starter culture... produced by just two corporations globally".

Why is this relevant? After all, people aren't cheese: "Human communities are infinitely more complex ... The required diversity in a healthy cultural system is structurally impossible to encode from one place at planetary scale" - but that's exactly what we've been doing with first-generation social software: "At most half a dozen global platforms, each one operating as a single cultural pasteurization plant for hundreds of millions of people. One classification scheme, one starter culture, one idea of what safe means, one interface for the entire world... to pasteurize human culture".

And, later: "One company's cultural framework shaped by one country's norms applied as the default governance layer for billions of people who had no voice in its design."

Forget platforms, think about membranes

So how can we do it differently? He digs deeper into the biological metaphor by looking at how communities and living systems maintain a difference between inside and outside with selectively permeable membranes: "Living systems ... signal across those boundaries, not commands, but information that others can interpret and respond to in context. They adapt through feedback, graduated responses calibrated to situation, not uniform rules from above. And they differentiate, becoming this community with this character with these members, rather than a generic instance of one universal social form.

The opposite of a giant engineered monoculture is not disorder, it's ecology. Many bounded systems communicating across difference, adapting to local conditions, and persisting because they are healthy, not because they are controlled".

He sets out why atproto is only part of the solution. We must avoid that every community uses "the same schema, the same names, the same categories, the same assumptions... [or] we will have rebuilt monoculture at the protocol layer."

We need communities to be able to "describe their own reality in terms that are locally meaningful and still mutually translatable... PanProto is an attempt to create the conditions under which schemas can evolve, diverge, and specialize, and still remain in relation... by making translation a first class property of the infrastructure."

Mind the resources

It's not enough to get the technology in the architecture right, however: "A world of self-governing communities is not automatically a just world" - we must also ensure "that those communities have the capacity and the accountability to govern well", which reminds me a lot of Snyder's contention regarding freedom.