The project is inspired by the physicality of the internet. In the age of the cloud, we forget that the internet consists of mountains of metal elsewhere.

Rather than hiding this, the server installed at post-office in Amsterdam leans into its material reality. As present IRL as it is URL, it forces people offline to get together online.

Forcing people offline to get together online.

The "password" is multiple people being present

The server demands people get together. In a sense, the password is multiple people being present.

Like most servers, the Social Server can be "read," or downloaded from, from anywhere in the world, but it's the chance to add to it, to upload, that requires physical presence.

Only when multiple people are on the local WiFi of the community space, can it be uploaded to. Meanwhile a blinking red light indicates activity and encourages users to strike up a conversation about what they might be uploading.

Without care, the server’s contents decay

The server also allows its users to upload a single shared expression: an image that is reflected both on the server's online window as well as on an e-ink display in the physical offline window of the space.

But without care, the server's contents decay. Server-side, the image increasingly deteriorates every few hours until, after a few days, the image has fully disappeared.

This creates another demand on users to connect IRL; to not only keep the image updated and legible to the wider world, but to shape their sense of community.

Related Research

APOSSIBLE is interested in the potential of intentionally adding friction to technology. There are undeniable benefits to file-sharing and digital visual expressions, but the physical reality this relies on should be a feature, not a bug.

Rather than smoothing out every inconvenience, and outsourcing it to people we don't see or think about, we could embrace it. In fact, championing the upkeep this infrastructure requires is the kind of social activity we so often fear the internet is flattening. Online connections can be in tandem with offline ones.

Plenty of research points this way from the Social Server's artist's own 2022 essay on New Dependencies, to the 2005 paper Sharing intention by Tomasello et al. or the 1995 paper Designing Calm Technology by Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown.

For more theoretical and practical references explore all of Social Server's connections below.