Notes
2026/07/25
There were echoes of Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, and Engelbart's “Mother of all Demos” throughout the Local First Conf 2026 in Berlin. Quite literally because of attendees wearing Bell Labs T-shirts, speakers from companies named after one of the famous research institutions, and participants who actually invented object-oriented programming at Xerox PARC. But even more so because the last day of the conference was focused on a demo of Ink & Switch's Patchwork that can be better described by comparing it to Engelbart's Mother of all Demos than to a regular conference talk.
That is not to say that there weren't extremely impressive technical talks over the course of the conference. (The excellent lineup included talks about Iroh, ATproto, and, as I've been repeatedly told, an amazing talk by Scott Jenson about local-first desktop UX that I missed because I had to check in to my accommodation...) But while some great talks focused on local-first software as the content, and others on local-first software as the structure that would enable a new form of content, the demo of Patchwork on the last day of the conference felt fundamentally different from the other talks. (I won't try to do the demo justice, you should watch the recording once the talks are online!) What stands out most about Patchwork is perhaps not that it forms a structure for malleable software, but that it exists in the first place, more specifically that a research lab managed to build the (research) structure to build this structure (Patchwork).
Building a genuinely innovative industrial research lab is no small task, especially against a cultural backdrop that has given up on any utopian visions in favor of sequels of sequels and corporate-friendly cinematic universes. Modeling yourself explicitly after a revered ancestor like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC is a great way to build an organization focused on the veneration of the dead, in the same way that trying to be the next Steve Jobs is a great way to build the next Theranos. Doing research at the frontier of computing, trying to imagine a future that is not just a gradual change from corporate computing, seems to have become an almost impossible task. The frequency with which the legendary research labs of the past are brought up shows just how rare a radical reimagining of our fundamental principles of computing has become. And yet the demo of Patchwork was just that: a vision of what a personal and malleable form of computing could look like, at a time when the tech industry is working overtime to commodify tech labor.
The sometimes almost paradoxical nature of the conference was beautifully captured by the juxtaposition of a talk by the biggest corporate sponsor of the conference on the one hand and Peter van Hardenberg's talk during Lab Day on the other. Not only was the corporate sponsor talk a superficial stroll through the wonders of AI, but the slides were full of AI slop, with the speaker jokingly disparaging how obviously sloppy they were. Not that this cynical detachment from ethical responsibilities is anything new in tech, quite the opposite, which is why Peter van Hardenberg's story of building malleable software in the age of “slop cannons” felt all the more like something too good to actually exist.
Far from being a conference about lofty utopian ideals, the three days were instead characterized by a (for the notoriously politically naive tech scene) surprisingly political atmosphere, an almost realpolitik understanding that local-first software is political, now more than ever. So in a way it felt fitting that the biggest corporate sponsor talk was as apolitical as it could have been, while also subsidizing all the tickets. And with it seemed to come the implicit understanding that while the slop-cannon-industrial complex was funding parts of the show, there were still ways of building a more personal, local, and malleable future. That excitement is what made Local First Conf so unique.
Maybe this was also why Todd Matthews' little corner for making and binding your own paper Ink & Switch notebook felt like such a natural extension of what the conference was about: a profoundly personal reclamation of craft in an age that is increasingly being hyped as the next industrial revolution. While it might turn out to have revolutionary consequences, Local First Conf was a reminder that there is a choice to be made when it comes to how we want to see this revolution play out. Automated slop factories might be one outcome, but there's still hope that a more personal space remains a possibility, one that feels like a kitchen for our own home-cooked software.