Atmospheric Computer

atmospheric.computer is a work-sharing member cooperative (Dunbar-bounded, ~150 members) for practitioners at the intersection of computing, art, and open infrastructure — inspired by aesthetic.computer and loves.bruessels.

The cooperative operates under a five-point constitution:

1. No central data processor. Each member stewards their own PDS (Personal Data Server).
2. Collectivized backup. Infrastructure care is shared labour.
3. Portable identity and portable institution. Governance records — not just identity — travel with the cooperative.
4. Dunbar-scale membership. Capped at ~150, the cognitive limit for stable, trust-based relationships.
5. Acting within the Atmosphere. Members act as nodes in the wider Atmosphere, not only inside their server.

The Atmosphere is the commons; the tilde is a stewardship group within it.

The dominant experience of AI today is menu-selection: a platform offers capabilities, and users choose among them. The menu concentrates authority.

atmospheric.computer is a site where members move from selecting to specifying — defining their own filters, assistants, and interaction patterns rather than inheriting platform defaults.

Concretely: collective sense-making over the Atmosphere’s firehose, moderation that surfaces flags for human review (never autonomous decisions), and lexicon work — naming the artifacts cooperative practice produces — treated as a first-class cooperative activity.

Pilot domains

• Poetic computing
• Dance improvisation
• Theater
• Glitch art
• Live coding
• Textile craft
• Pluralistic society

Each is a site where existing artifact categories break down (process vs product, distributed authorship). Submissions are evaluated on both workpiece and process of creation.

PDS hosting is the operational core. We onboard members on single-user PDS instances (via cirrus), graduate to a 10-account tier, and scale toward a Dunbar-bounded (~150) per-PDS ceiling — one community = one PDS at full maturity.

Several domains are purchased and ready; the team has prior experience running PDS on standard hosting platforms. Account delegation uses tranquil-pds.

Tentative — Cerebras’s high-speed inference is what makes the AI-UX affordances above practically feasible. No working partnership yet; if pursued, via separate application.