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.
The Protocol Institute is building itself around AI adoption, using bots like C3PO and Humboldt to handle research discovery and organizational tasks rather than traditional human-led infrastructure. The organization's approach treats AI tool proliferation as a generative process, allowing practical patterns to emerge through experimentation rather than top-down design.
Timber Stinson-Schroff
The Memory Research Group convened over six months to read texts about memory in reverse chronological order, from classical techniques through digital AI systems and back to physical substrates, tracing which contemporary memory problems are genuinely new versus recurring under different names. The group met biweekly with interdisciplinary participants from neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, architecture, and design to understand how memory operates differently across contexts rather than develop a unified theory.
Kei Kreutler
This anthology explores how protocols function as distributed coordination mechanisms that generate emergent patterns rather than hierarchical structures, using real-world examples like traffic jams to illustrate how protocols operate across interconnected layers of infrastructure, behavior, and rules. The work argues that understanding protocols requires examining the complex interactions between human actors, physical systems, and institutional constraints rather than treating protocols as top-down designs.
Drew Austin