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2023 Retrospectus

Paper Summer of Protocols
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The 2023 Retrospectus is a collection of essays from the Summer of Protocols initiative examining how protocols function across social, economic, and technological domains, featuring contributions on topics ranging from killswitch mechanisms and protocolized economics to memory-making and emergency response systems. The volume presents a multidisciplinary exploration of protocols as generative frameworks for organizing collective behavior, coordination, and cultural production in both digital and physical contexts.

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Talk

Salon II: ARC Regenerative Communities - 2024 Protocol Symposium

Kaliya Young and 'day' present research into the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a case study in regenerative governance, tracing its origins from the 1969 ARPANET through the 1992 governance crisis that shifted power from Vint Cerf's 'kitchen cabinet' IAB to open working groups organized around 'rough consensus and running code.' They map IETF practices—nomcom's randomized leadership selection, open RFC documentation, dispatch meetings, and ritualized in-person gatherings—onto three pattern languages (Group Works, Wise Democracy, and Social Permaculture) to argue that openness, transparency, and voluntariness are structural necessities, not limitations, for sustaining a healthy digital commons.

case-study governance nomcom-random-leadership-selection

Kaliya Young, day

Talk

Building Psychohistory: An Infrastructure Field Report

Aneesh Sathe presents an infrastructure field report on 'World Machines Theory,' a framework for reading history as the interaction of long-cycle civilizational 'machines' (Modernity, Divergence, Liveness), and demonstrates the two systems built to operationalize it: the Oracle, a multi-agent RAG pipeline over a shared knowledge lake that generates oracular 'prophecies,' and the Prime Radiant, a typed knowledge graph of ~500 historical 'machine cards' that can be simulated forward to project future institutional ecologies. He frames this as an Asimov-inspired but decentralized, commons-based reimagining of psychohistory, contrasting it with Seldon's mathematical, control-oriented original. The talk opens with context from the Contraptions Book Club, introduced by its host.

machine-cards oracle-rag-knowledge-lake organizations

Aneesh Sathe

Talk

Guest Talk with Trent Van Epps | Capital and Enclosure in Software Commons: Linux & Ethereum

Trent Van Epps, researcher at the Ethereum Foundation and steward of Protocol Guild, presents a framework distinguishing capital and commons modes of production, then applies it to case studies of Linux (and Red Hat's gradual enclosure of CentOS) and Ethereum. He argues Ethereum is unique among software commons because it contains embedded capital circuits (proof-of-stake ETH, MEV, liquid staking) and produces a single globally-bound state object, raising the question of whether this containment stabilizes or dooms the commons to capture, and proposes Protocol Guild's unaffiliated funding model as a partial countermeasure.

anti-rival-and-symbiotic-goods commons-vs-capital-modes-of-production embedded-capital-circuits-in-ethereum-l1

Trent Van Epps

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organizations protocols research summer-of-protocols