This is a polemical visitor's guide to a mysterious geographical site called the Disposition, written by an anonymous author who has observed it for forty years and disputes official narratives about its nature and nomenclature. The text rails against deliberate campaigns of misinformation and mischaracterization by institutional authorities, establishing the author's preferred terminology and framing as the correct interpretation of this contested place.
Public transit systems reveal the cultural values and trust dynamics of cities through their protocols governing payment, space control, safety, and social interaction. By examining how different cities organize their transportation infrastructure, we can understand the deeper "national protocol characters" that shape urban life.
An edited essay version of a June 2026 talk unpacking the Protocol Institute's core thesis: New Nature = AI and Protocols entangled at planetary scale. Develops the Humboldt analogy, the Evil Twins Thesis (AI as irresistible force, protocols as immovable objects), the three-circle Venn of AI/Protocols/Planetary, and PI's positioning as a Context Tank in the priceless-planetary quadrant.
Slide deck from the June 17, 2026 New Nature talk. Covers the Humboldt parallel, the Evil Twins Thesis (AI vs Protocols), the three-circle Venn diagram of AI/Protocols/Planetary, PI's Context Tank positioning, and the Special Interest Group research model. Companion to the essay at protocolized.io/features/new-nature.
Protocolized announces its fourth creative contest, the Jamverse Jam, inviting artists and writers to extend an interconnected fictional universe comprising four intersecting story cycles exploring themes of protocol-driven futures and stigmergy. The contest seeks submissions of in-universe artifacts that build out and connect this shared world inspired by science fiction's focus on systemic consequences rather than individual innovations.
fiction protocols
Sachin Benny, Spencer Nitkey, Elizabeth Maher, Randy Lubin
Elizabeth Maher's world-building series continues by reimagining American folklore through a protocolized lens, focusing on characters like Janice Spurlock who use systems and protocols to construct and maintain power. The narrative explores how protocols—from lumber company accounting methods to the management of human belief—serve as tools for control and social order in the American frontier tradition.
Venkatesh Rao introduces the Protocol Institute Challenges program, designed to catalyze fresh research efforts around protocol science problems by moving beyond repackaged thinking and cosmetic applications. The program aims to develop practitioners who think natively in protocols rather than superficially applying protocol concepts to existing problems.
Matthew McDowell-Sweet and Mike Travers discuss Stewart Brand's book 'Maintenance: Of Everything,' exploring how systems are kept going and evolve over time. The conversation connects Brand's legacy of systems thinking from the Whole Earth Catalog to contemporary questions about maintaining complex systems at scale.
The 2026 Protocol Symposium, the third edition of the flagship event for protocol studies, will be held online September 21-25 with the theme 'New Nature,' exploring the technological layer shaped by AI and protocols. Abstract submissions for talks and workshops are open until June 14, 2026, with registration to follow once the schedule is finalized.
Jason Collins explores how vineyards are increasingly delegating irrigation decisions to networked sensor systems and protocols, arguing that while data-driven watering can optimize vine health, we risk losing the embodied knowledge required to interpret the subtle signals vines actually communicate. The essay frames this tension through the Eastern European concept of stewardship—vineyards as systems requiring constant, attentive care rather than remote algorithmic management.
In a crossover between two protocol fiction universes, a passenger named Fu Kenan experiences progressive invisibility during a westbound journey on Sachin Benny's Unified Eurasian Train Line as it passes through Spencer Nitkey's Zoothesia. The narrative explores how the train's refined systems create a meditative passage through multiple territories, with sensory manipulations designed to make the journey nearly imperceptible to passengers.
A glossary of terms coined or specifically defined within the Protocol Institute corpus — from protocolization and hardness to Kafka protocols, dynamic non-events, and protocol dysphoria.
Timber Lenz, managing director of the Protocol Institute, introduces Season 4 of the town-hall series, which explores the intersection of protocols and artificial intelligence. The season frames AI and protocols as complementary technologies—protocols as infrastructure lattice and AI as the evolutionary vine—inviting researchers and practitioners to examine how these forces interact across industry, government, science, and society.
Venkatesh Rao outlines the Protocol Institute's research mission as a newly formed organization funded by the Ethereum Foundation to advance protocol science. The core job is to channel resources from funders to researchers and groups doing work that contributes to the broader process of protocolization.
Elizabeth Maher's debut story in the T.R.O.(L.L.) universe opens with a letter from a character explaining their family's desperate escape from the oppressive town of Kilgaren, where psychological and physical hardship forced them to flee in the night. The narrative establishes a world where staying means inevitable harm, and leaving—despite its brutality—becomes the only viable option for survival.
The Protocol Institute launches its first official collaboration with the Long Now Foundation through three participatory cross-disciplinary labs exploring how protocols enable civilizational durability, asking which protocols allow civilization to grow while managing tensions and how information technologies integrate after disruption. Applications are due June 5, with the initiative framed as an open-ended investigation rather than an attempt at historical prediction or a prescriptive checklist.
A practical guide to AI adoption developed by the Protocol Institute's Protocols for Business SIG. Presents a five-level maturity model from Shadow (L1) to Planetary (L5), the Play-to-Protocol governance lifecycle, and case studies from Samsung, Klarna, Boom Supersonic, and Protocol Institute projects. The canonical live version is at ai.protocolized.dev; this PDF is an archival snapshot of v0.5.
The Protocol Institute launches as a new organization dedicated to advancing protocol design, analysis, and stewardship across domains, with Protocolized magazine as its flagship publication. The institute inherits work from the Summer of Protocols program (2023-2025) and aims to build a field and global community capable of stewarding planetary-scale protocolization—the process by which human behaviors become standardized into civilization's coordinating infrastructure.
In part three of Sachin Benny's serialized world-building project, a secretive corporation operates beyond traditional legal jurisdiction through a transcontinental rail line, with protagonist Felix Lim observing his CEO's unusual behavior while navigating the sophisticated protocols that govern movement across multiple state borders. The narrative explores how compliance infrastructure and state surveillance become normalized within a self-contained mobile space that exists in jurisdictional limbo.
Venkatesh Rao expands on his vision of AI and protocols working together to create stable ecologies of distributed, diverse AI systems, where protocols act as the fabric weaving individual AIs into coherent planetary infrastructure. He illustrates this framework with concrete examples including TITLES, a generative art platform that creates fine-tuned models from individual artist collections, demonstrating how personality emerges from the combination of AI capabilities and protocol-based coordination.
Sachin Benny launches a bio-thriller series set aboard the UET-1, the world's longest single rail line connecting Lisbon to Laos, following protagonist Rowan as she recruits unsuspecting friends for an invisible war while maintaining a meticulously optimized body through advanced cosmetic procedures. The narrative explores themes of bodily control, hidden agendas, and the blurred lines between self-care and weaponization in a speculative future.
AI personalities in science fiction, from Adams' Genuine People Personalities™ to Banks' self-naming Minds, function as ecological markers that reveal not just individual dispositions but the social fabric of entire civilizations. Rao argues that these naming practices constitute a 'high-personality ecology' where names operate as true names disclosing fundamental social structures rather than arbitrary identifiers.
Mira Voskresenskaya works as a translator at the Bering Link, a shadow protocol that facilitates trade between Russia and Alaska by moving goods, data, and money across regulatory boundaries established after 2022 sanctions. When she discovers something she cannot unsee about the system she maintains, she faces a crisis of conscience about her role in this illegal but necessary bridge between superpowers.
Public sector institutions can escape the false choice between proprietary vendor dependency and expensive in-house development by adopting open protocols, which distribute control across multiple actors and allow governments to understand, participate in, and adapt their digital infrastructure. European governments are increasingly implementing open protocols for messaging, digital ID, and cross-border services as a way to achieve digital sovereignty while reducing both software costs and geopolitical exposure.
The Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group convened to explore how protocol fiction functions as a tool for observing how rules, standards, and institutions shape experience and constrain narrative possibilities. Rather than focusing on individual characters, the group examined stories that distribute agency across environments, procedures, and interfaces to make visible the background logic of systems.
Our special interest group in Protocol Fiction was convened in October last year, led by and . Here is a brief recap of discussions in the group’s monthly calls. Interested in writing protocol fiction and experimenting with LLM-assisted writing? ...
A story about Lacey and her mentor Denis exploiting a loophole in the city's last-mile delivery protocol, where unclaimed packages become legally claimable after a set time, framing theft as protocol compliance. The narrative explores the tension between rule-following and moral doubt as characters operate within the letter of the law while subverting its intended purpose.
This article continues a theoretical investigation into protocolization as a planetary transformation of technologically-mediated behaviors into coordination infrastructure, arguing that protocols operate invisibly across technical, institutional, and social domains at multiple scales. The authors seek to develop formal models and generalizable features of protocols that can be reliably applied across diverse contexts, addressing the methodological challenge of locating and theorizing protocolization despite its ubiquity and invisibility.
Intelligence media are shifting toward circulating intermediate products—social kernels—between contexts via relatively simple pipes, analogous to containerization in physical supply chains. The rise of coding agents like Claude Code demonstrates this model in practice, with hobbyists building "agent factories" that coordinate multiple agents in parallel, suggesting a new form of human-machine sociality organized around intelligence intermediates rather than complete artifacts.
A homicide detective investigating a Nobel Laureate's death at a sprawling biotech campus discovers that Caduceus City's meticulously protocolized systems and public-facing transparency mask internal corruption and workplace abuse. The narrative explores how protocol compliance and institutional polish can obscure darker institutional practices.
In this contest-winning story, a fragmented American political system struggles through bureaucratic gridlock over a space elevator treaty, with protagonist Mark McCarthy witnessing how institutional ossification has rendered traditional statecraft ineffective. The narrative suggests that when central governmental mechanisms become calcified, new forms of power and organization—embodied by the space elevator itself—render old political structures obsolete.
A speculative narrative explores inherited memory practices and familial wisdom through the metaphor of a mental palace, suggesting that inheritance operates through psychological and temporal transmission rather than material goods. The story examines how neglecting inherited practices creates accumulating danger and reveals hidden dimensions of family obligation and self-construction.
A second-place story from the Bridges contest depicts a 19-year-old passenger boarding a steamer who encounters the famous cricketer Lakshman Sorabji Marker, setting up a narrative about gambling, fandom, and mechanical obsession. The tale uses the machinery of cricket and chance as a metaphorical mirror for humanity's deepest desires and the structures that govern them.
The Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group explores what protocol fiction is as a genre, moving beyond the tautological definition of science fiction focused on protocols to foundational concepts like Chiang's Law, which positions protocol fiction in the science fiction camp where 'strange rules' (protocols) serve as world-shaping technologies. The group examines genre from multiple angles including reader-writer contracts, discourse modes, and commercial publishing categories.
Elizabeth Maher's third-place contest entry 'T.R.O.(L.L.)' introduces Robyn, a substantial woman assigned to a booth on Fortress Island under the Party of Eternal Vigilance's control, whose physical presence and personality resist the regime's standardizing logic. The story explores how institutional systems handle bodies and temperaments that refuse to fit their prescribed categories.
This editorial introduces Obliquities, a new column examining the shift from destination web to social media as a fundamental transformation in how intelligence is produced and distributed through protocol infrastructure. The piece proposes the concept of a 'social kernel' to understand how RSS, the Facebook newsfeed, and algorithmic feeds restructured both user behavior and the underlying protocols that now mediate information consumption.
The Casio F-91W, a $14 plastic watch worn by everyone from Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden, exemplifies a design philosophy of "unreasonable adequacy"—meeting basic needs through durability, reliability, and ubiquity rather than sophistication. Its emergence as both a cultural icon and an object of security concern reveals how humble consumer gadgets become entangled with geopolitics, popular culture, and surveillance.
In this Zoothesia series finale, Karina encounters multiple perfect doppelgängers of herself appearing throughout the city, suggesting that recursive self-improvement algorithms have manifested in physical reality as a fractal pattern of human copies. As she investigates these duplicates, she discovers they are indistinguishable from her, raising questions about identity and the spillover of algorithmic self-optimization from digital into material space.
Faber Birren pioneered the strategic use of color in industrial design to shape worker behavior, safety responses, and emergency protocols, making color a crucial but often overlooked element of Protocol Experience (PX) design. The essay explores how pigment functions as a cheap, persistent, and robust design variable for control systems, from OSHA safety standards to control room layouts, requiring only ambient light rather than electricity to establish effective default schemas.
In Chapter 5 of the Zoothesia Series, a narrator investigates their older brother Io through the lens of a research project, exploring what makes him unique in a world governed by the Zoothesia Protocols—systems designed to protect people by visualizing and managing information about them. The chapter interrogates how protocols that claim to protect everyone paradoxically render certain individuals invisible or anomalous, setting up a penultimate narrative convergence where overloaded information systems begin to break down.
AI tools create windows into hidden business protocols by disrupting normal operations, revealing tensions between production and authority that standard organizational descriptions obscure. Rafa Fernández explores what happens when formal policies fail to explain recurring breakdowns or unexpected successes, suggesting that observing these fault lines requires looking beyond tooling and execution to deeper protocol structures.
This essay introduces protocolization as a planetary phenomenon where progress occurs through invisibility and the expansion of computational systems, establishing qualitative frameworks before Part II develops formal theoretical apparatus. The authors present this work from the Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory (SIGFPT) as an invitation to collectively theorize how protocols structure contemporary life at planetary scale.
Edward Thon, a market-obsessed protagonist in the Zoothesia universe, navigates a world where financial success serves as his primary metric for self-worth and winning, while grappling with insecurity about his place in relationships and society. In this chapter, the protagonist's character is established through his particular dislikes and desires, setting up tensions between his need for monetary validation and his deeper existential anxieties about trust and belonging.
Protocol watching is presented as an accessible intellectual practice inspired by Bronisław Malinowski's ethnographic methodology of observing everyday social systems rather than theorizing from academic distance. The piece argues that you can adopt this 'miniature hobby' today by applying Malinowski's innovations in people-watching—his insistence on getting 'off the verandah' into lived experience—to understand contemporary protocols without requiring elaborate resources or exotic expeditions.
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.
Chapter 3 of the Zoothesia Series explores a dystopian scenario where an 18-year-old with documented violent impulses wakes to find themselves isolated in an empty city, the culmination of years of algorithmic surveillance and therapeutic intervention that ultimately deemed them an 'intractable problem.' The narrative interrogates how digital protocols and predictive systems classify and manage human behavior deemed dangerous, treating the technical infrastructure of monitoring as inseparable from the social and psychological mechanisms of control.
A sentient repair robot named H3L-PR receives an unprecedented tech support ticket filed directly by Earth itself, describing planetary system failures including tectonic instability, ocean disruption, and biological lag caused by human activity. The story explores what happens when a machine designed for systems optimization encounters a planet intelligent enough to diagnose and report its own crisis.
Stanley Chen, a science fiction author who co-wrote AI 2041 with Google China's CEO, describes his hybrid writing process where he uses LLMs as essential tools but rewrites every line they generate, believing current models are insufficient as both writers and literary judges. The interview explores his practical experience with different LLM models for fiction writing, including their strengths with language-specific features like Chinese punctuation, and his philosophy of using AI as a collaborative partner rather than a substitute for human creativity.
A meditation on a post-industrial city hollowed out by economic decline, where the replacement of manufacturing with speculative digital work leaves residents producing 'vapor' in innovation quarters while the physical infrastructure of past productivity becomes merely aesthetic monuments. The piece explores the psychological toll of living in a place stripped of momentum and purpose, where economic abstraction has replaced tangible material production.
Cory Levinson surveys the current landscape of climate protocols, tracing how carbon markets and DeFi have collided since 2023, with projects like KlimaDAO absorbing millions of carbon credits into blockchain form and Regen Network expanding into biodiversity markets. The piece examines how these protocols are attempting to create durable market mechanisms for environmental assets despite fundamental challenges in traditional carbon crediting.
In this second chapter of the Zoothesia Series, Ki navigates unwanted attention from a former lover by adopting "foulmaxing"—a technique to obscure her appearance through overlays. The narrative explores how digital presentation tools and social protocols can be weaponized for personal autonomy, drawing parallels to an old relationship game about conditional love.
Protocolized has extended the deadline for its Building and Burning Bridges short story contest to December 8, 2025, with a judging panel now assembled including Nils Gilman and Spencer Nitkey. The magazine is preparing to publish its fourth protocol fiction anthology following the success of three previous collections, and invites writers to join a community feedback call on December 4.
In a near-future city where augmented reality overlays allow people to customize their visual perception, a protagonist discovers that the artificial perfection of their curated reality—engineered by the Zoothesia Protocols—has left them emotionally numb and disconnected from authentic experience. The story explores the psychological cost of perfect perception, suggesting that beauty and meaning require the friction of unfiltered reality, including danger and discomfort.
Welcome back to the final episode of the Bridge Atlas series, hosted by Christine D. Kim. We discuss Ethereum and AI systems through the lens of verifiability, with guests Shreya Shankar, a PhD researcher at Berkeley, and Justin Drake, an Ethereu...
Kei Kreutler examines how cultural metaphors shape our understanding of computational memory, from HAL 9000's glowing tapes to USB drives and magnetic tape archives. The Memory Research SIG explores these memory metaphors across disciplines through bi-weekly discussions, inviting readers to engage with how we conceptualize memory in LLMs and earlier computing systems.
Welcome back to the fourth episode of the Bridge Atlas series, hosted by Christine D. Kim. Today, we’re diving into Ethereum through the lens of alignment with Alex Stokes, Ethereum Foundation Protocol Coordination Co-Team Lead, and Emmett Shear, ...
Shreya Shankar and Justin Drake discuss verifiability as a lens for understanding both Ethereum systems and AI. Justin Drake focuses on the Lean Ethereum project's use of SNARKs (cryptographic proofs) to replace brute-force re-execution verification, while the episode explores how verifiability principles apply across blockchain consensus and AI system transparency.
Protocolized debuts a new visual art direction for issue #71, releasing two custom image generation models developed by artist Darius Ou and editor James Langdon in collaboration with TITLES. The shift moves away from Midjourney-generated imagery influenced by 1950s pulp sci-fi toward a more conceptually grounded aesthetic inspired by John W. Campbell's editorial approach in Astounding Stories.
Welcome back to another episode of Bridge Atlas, a video podcast series hosted by Christine D. Kim. In this episode, we discuss Ethereum through the lens of the commons with two Summer of Protocols alumni: Trent Van Epps and Yancey Strickler.
This issue explores the legal concept of the 'reasonable person' standard and its potential mathematical formalization, while launching a creative contest for readers. The opening excerpt introduces a speculative narrative set in Halverton Smart City, where an AI system called a 'Partial' monitors and optimizes a resident's behaviors, raising questions about personalization, autonomy, and algorithmic governance.
Emmett Shear, founder of Softmax, and Alex Stokes, Ethereum Foundation protocol coordination co-team lead, discuss alignment through the lens of Ethereum and multi-agent systems. Shear argues that alignment is not a state but a protocol for coordination between agents at multiple levels of abstraction, grounded in shared success rather than zero-sum competition.
Martin Harrigan, a lecturer and researcher in cryptography and blockchains at Southeastern Technological University, discusses integrating protocol studies into computer science education as a way to broaden students' understanding of what types of protocols can be created using blockchain and decentralized systems. He argues for placing protocol studies at the conceptual center of blockchain education, between technical infrastructure (networks, consensus) and applications (smart contracts, DeFi).
Primavera De Filippi and Felix Beer explore protocol art through case studies and audience analysis, examining how protocols—systems of rules created by designers but executed and modified by communities—function as artistic practice. The discussion uses role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons as a concrete example of protocol art, analyzing how rule systems evolve across different social contexts and how they balance constraint with creative freedom.
Qiufan Stanley Chen teaches a workshop on protocols of storytelling in the age of generative AI, focusing on how writers can use AI as a tool for deeper self-exploration rather than professional replacement. He guides participants through iterative creative writing sessions, positioning writing as a method for discovering the invisible and unseen aspects of oneself, while examining what makes compelling science fiction through canonical examples like The Matrix and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Vaughn Tan presents an executive education course on strategy for the public sector, defining strategy as 'the art of making reasoned subjective arguments and decisions about acceptable trade-off configurations when pursuing desired outcomes.' He frames strategy as a coordination protocol particularly crucial for decentralized hierarchies like public sector organizations, which face structural coordination challenges that private sector strategy theory often fails to address.
Yige Wang, a sociologist, presents a new undergraduate course she is developing on the social science of protocols, supported by the Scholarly Lab Project. The course is structured in three parts: introducing core protocol concepts and theoretical frameworks, applying protocol perspectives to micro-level phenomena in sociology and linguistics, and shifting to macro-level analysis—offering a foundational exploration of how protocol thinking can reshape social science inquiry.
The Protocol School 2025 kickoff session introduces a three-year research program funded by the Ethereum Foundation that studies protocols broadly across history and cultures. The organizers present their 'homecoming' challenge of connecting protocol research to the crypto ecosystem while maintaining interdisciplinary engagement, positioning protocols as invisible infrastructures (like water) that shape society but escape notice.
Timber Stinson-Schroff presents Applied Protocol Thinking as a capstone course for Protocol School 2025, offering practical frameworks and literacies for participants to apply protocol analysis in their everyday lives. Drawing on nearly three years of research including his study of occupational health and safety protocols in coal mining, Stinson-Schroff shares methodologies for recognizing and analyzing how organizations use protocols to create value, manage uncertainty, and advance their missions.
Andrés Monroy Hernández and Soan Dukes from Princeton introduce a framework for understanding digital worlds through the lens of online communities, protocols, and power dynamics. They argue that protocols—understood as both technical systems and social norms—shape how people interact in online spaces like Scratch and Wikipedia, and that examining these design choices can illuminate challenges in community governance and digital world-building.
Helena Rong, assistant professor at NYU Shanghai, introduces a new course on trust experience design that examines how trust protocols function in autonomous systems and the agentic web. She frames trust as a foundational mechanism in everyday interactions (like crossing the street) and proposes a framework for designing speculative trust protocols for decentralized AI and blockchain systems.
Ben Zucker presents music as a protocol—a system of abstract structure and notation that can be analyzed, practiced, and transferred across disciplines—arguing that musicalization (the procedural practice of bringing aesthetic protocols together) offers non-technological frameworks for understanding formal systems and refining creative practice across fields.
Primavera De Filippi, a legal scholar and artist, introduces a five-module course on protocol art that bridges legal governance and artistic practice. She argues that protocol art—using distributed technologies like blockchain and AI to create works that expose legal and governance challenges—has historical precedents and contemporary applications, with implications for intellectual property and collaborative governance structures.
Eric Alston presents a curricular module on protocol design as governance, drawing from institutional analysis and cryptocurrency contexts. He argues that protocol designers—whether in blockchain, AI, or standards organizations—must understand governance axioms and the critical role protocols play in coordinating pseudonymous participants in abstract networks.
Giovanni Merlino from the University of Messina presents a course on protocolized modeling and verification of cyber-physical systems, situated within a master's program in computer science focused on infrastructure automation and embedded systems. The talk introduces the curriculum context and foundational domain concepts necessary for understanding how protocolization applies to cyber-physical system design and verification.
Welcome back to another episode of Bridge Atlas, a video podcast series hosted by Christine D. Kim. In this episode, we look at the world through the lenses of hardness and planetary thinking, with , Executive Editor of the Berggruen Press and Dep...
Yancey Strickler and Trent Van Epps discuss Ethereum through the lens of the commons in this Bridge Atlas episode. Trent, who coordinates protocol development for the Ethereum Foundation and leads Protocol Guild (a collective funding mechanism for 200+ core contributors), and Yancey, a writer focused on protocol governance, explore how decentralized systems function as shared resources and the coordination mechanisms required to sustain them.
Bridge Atlas is a new video podcast series hosted by Christine D. Kim featuring conversations with protocol experts about the Summer of Protocols research program and its evolution across four phases focused on making protocols a first-class concept for understanding the world. The inaugural episode explores the program's history, funding from the Ethereum Foundation, and its output of essays, projects, and artifacts aimed at understanding, designing, and improving protocols.
Nils Gilman and Josh Stark introduce the concepts of 'hardness' and 'planetary thinking' as frameworks for understanding Ethereum and protocol design. Gilman, a historian trained in globalization theory, traces how planetary thinking evolved from modernization and globalization discourse, while the discussion positions these concepts as critical lenses for analyzing technological and governance systems.
Tim Beiko and Timber Stinson-Schroff introduce the Bridge Atlas interview series and provide an overview of Summer of Protocols, a three-year research program funded by the Ethereum Foundation designed to establish protocols as a first-class concept for understanding the world. The program has evolved through four phases—pilot, research-focused summer, application-focused summer, and education-focused summer—producing essays, projects, and artifacts while engaging approximately 100 participants to study protocol design, management, and improvement.
Mr Cork, a senior citizen returning to London after years away, navigates a transport system designed to eliminate spontaneity and unscripted human behavior in public spaces. The story explores tensions between autonomous systems optimized for efficiency and the messy, unpredictable nature of human life and memory.
Generative AI's accessibility has disrupted cultural and creative industries whose primary product is meaning, creating urgent tensions between technology adoption and creative labor that demand protocol-based solutions. Nicolás Madoery maps these sociotechnical tensions and proposes moving forward through a protocol lens, while announcing a Buenos Aires meetup and new essay bounties.
Protocolized announces the third protocol fiction contest of 2025, themed on 'Building and Burning Bridges,' inviting writers to submit 2500-5000 word stories exploring bridges' roles in conflict within protocolized milieus like diplomacy. The contest introduces a new virtual writers room on Discord led by previous contest winner Spencer Nitkey to support participants.
Issue #64 introduces Bridge Atlas as Protocolized's overarching Fall theme, exploring how narrow geographic and conceptual bridges—using the Khyber Pass as a concrete example—concentrate and shape planetary history and flows of power, trade, and ideas. The issue announces a third protocol fiction contest on bridge building and burning, a special salon series, and a workshop at Devconnect Buenos Aires.
In this speculative fiction debut, a character uses an appliance that creates perfect copies of themselves across parallel realities to experiment with different versions of their personality—more generous, affectionate, forgiving, honest—in an attempt to optimize their struggling three-year relationship with their fiancé Karim. The story explores whether self-optimization through parallel experimentation can resolve fundamental incompatibilities and communication breakdowns in intimate relationships.
Qiufan Chen, an award-winning science fiction author, discusses his creative process of integrating large language models into fiction writing with Amita Shukla. Chen explores how LLMs function across multiple stages of his writing practice—from initial research and structural development to drafting and editing—drawing on his experience as one of the earliest serious public experimenters with AI-assisted literary creation.
This issue reports on SIGFPT's latest activities, including discussions on process calculi and the upcoming exploration of motion languages from robotics as a framework for understanding protocols. The editorial reflects on protocols as fundamentally different from AI systems—the "evil twin" relationship—while announcing new initiatives like the Tan Paper project and writing bounties.
Kei Kreutler reports from Memoria, an unconference on spaced repetition and memory systems organized by Saul Munn and Raj Thimmiah. The Memory Research Group is launching a new module on digital memory architectures, examining memory management in AI, computational memory history, and how digital technologies reshape human remembrance.
SIGP4B held a Berlin workshop exploring AI adoption curves over 30 years using a Capability Maturity Model framework, where blue teams designed AI adoption strategies progressing from uncontrolled LLM usage to AI-integrated workflows while red teams introduced realistic crises and governance challenges. The update previews two upcoming Summer of Protocols projects: an AI Knowledge Futurama scenario planning exercise and a Bridge Atlas, both building on SIGP4B's business protocol research.
Spencer Nitkey presents three horror stories from Chainpoint, a city governed entirely by onchain code, exploring how 'code is law' principles catastrophically fail when smart contracts rigidly enforce rules without human flexibility or exception-making. The first story follows a Protocol Clerk facing death arbitrated by immutable contracts, revealing the dangers of deterministic systems that cannot accommodate human complexity.
Sachin Benny's story follows the UET-1, a luxury train running from Lisbon to Singapore that operates through a complex international treaty, enabling hidden economies and curious practices to develop unseen by passengers until a suspicious device uncovers them. The narrative explores how bureaucratic complexity and contradictory international agreements create spaces where unconventional activities can flourish beneath the surface of official scrutiny.
In this post-apocalyptic narrative, Tom waits on his deteriorating porch for a mysterious high-frequency signal that could connect him to news of his son, who departed months ago on a humanitarian mission. The story explores how desperate longing for information—even painful information—drives survival and meaning in a world where connectivity has become scarce and precious.
Lara Dal Molin presents a speculative fiction narrative about consciousness transfer protocols, where a dying being imprints their memories and identity onto a successor through a 'Soul Migration Protocol,' exploring the philosophical and procedural dimensions of intergenerational consciousness handover. The story interrogates how societies might formalize the passage of consciousness across different lifetimes and potentially different species, questioning the protocols, values, and inequalities embedded in such transfers.
Marie-Hélène Lebeault presents a comedic protocol-fiction story about Towel Integrity Officer Martinez enforcing absurdist poolside regulations at Aqua Vista Resort, where autonomous towels must police guest compliance with towel occupancy limits. The narrative satirizes bureaucratic rule-enforcement through the absurd framing of towels and linen as autonomous agents administering incident reports and badge-wielding oversight.
In this protocol-fiction story, a team of scientists finds themselves unexpectedly aboard the Prometheus-7 space probe heading to Alpha Centauri and must improvise protocols to handle unforeseen crises during their unsanctioned mission. The narrative explores how ad-hoc problem-solving and improvised procedures emerge when a research mission goes catastrophically off-plan.
Vess and Timber conduct a casual technical setup discussion in a town-hall format, covering Linux PC building, developer workflows, and community knowledge sharing. While positioned as a discussion on 'Protocols as Digital Institutions,' the transcript excerpt focuses on personal computing infrastructure choices and troubleshooting rather than protocol theory or governance frameworks.
In this speculative fiction story set in 2075, digital afterlives have become normalized infrastructure where the deceased continue to generate economic value through subscriptions and automated transactions, creating a society where financial algorithms keep people functionally immortal regardless of biological death. Elizabeth Maher's award-winning narrative explores how automation and data commodification blur the boundary between life and death, using a house that pays its own bills as a metaphor for systems that perpetuate themselves independent of human existence.
In this editorial issue, Protocolized introduces Tongzhou Yu's protocol fiction story about a couple whose relationship is mediated by communication protocols, exploring what domesticity feels like when conflict resolution systems optimize away human friction. The opening depicts a mundane argument over soy sauce that escalates into questions about whether perfectly coordinated communication actually enhances or diminishes intimate partnership.
This issue explores AI adoption in businesses through the lens of protocol studies, examining how protocols constrain and coordinate infrastructure while AI systems generate and transform knowledge at massive scale. The Special Interest Group on Protocols for Business investigates the tensions between AI diffusion (700+ million weekly users of OpenAI tools) and organizational security, focusing on how employees use LLMs with sensitive business data.
Rafael Fernandez's award-winning story presents a protagonist navigating a society perfected by homeostatic AIs, where invisible protocols manage everything from airflow to financial transactions beneath conscious awareness. The narrative explores what it means to exist in a frictionlessly optimized world, hinting at an emerging consciousness questioning this smooth, mechanical perfection.
This fall forecast announces multiple protocol studies events and opportunities, including the Seapunk Proto-College in Kuala Lumpur (September 15-20) focused on protocols and reimaginable seas, an AI Futurama workshop in Berlin (October 9-10) exploring Europe's adoption of emerging AI technologies, and a protocol studies meet-up in Buenos Aires. The issue also wraps up the Ghosts in Machines series and shares a curated SoP Discord link-list.
Spencer Nitkey's winning entry for the protocol fiction contest explores what happens when a person receives digital messages from a deceased relative's networked presence, forcing them to grapple with how to tenderly communicate with their grandfather's digital echo. The story examines the intersection of familial memory, cultural practices of honoring the dead, and the persistence of digital selves after physical death.
In a distant future where only sextillionaires remain on Earth, the ultra-wealthy amuse themselves by pitting superintelligent AIs against each other in competitions for rare luxuries, revealing the existential emptiness beneath infinite material abundance. The story follows Darius as he contemplates his perfectly curated possessions—including a Dickens desk with impeccable provenance—only to find that ownership of the world's finest things has become utterly meaningless.
In Zach Hyman's climate fiction story, a grandmother refuses evacuation from an extreme weather zone while her daughter attempts to preserve her legacy using personified memory technology. The narrative explores intergenerational conflict and resistance to protocol compliance in a climate-stressed future where weather systems have become unpredictable following the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, presents his research on protocol studies and shares a glossary project documenting the intellectual history of protocols across disciplines. He traces how the term 'protocol' appears across online economies, blockchains, crypto, and social networks, and discusses his oral history initiative interviewing protocol practitioners worldwide.
Venkatesh Rao introduces SIGFPT (Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory), a working group meeting biweekly to develop rigorous mathematical and logical foundations for protocol studies. The group aims to formalize protocol analysis—moving from intuitive understanding of everyday protocols like handshakes to formal descriptions that mathematicians and logicians can rigorously examine.
The Memory Research Group, a special interest group incubated by Summer of Protocols, launches a monthly series examining memory across disciplines, starting with Frances Yates' classical account of the art of memory. Rather than debating whether machines should automate memorization, the group investigates how contemporary tools reshape our understanding of memory itself, moving beyond surface-level recall toward deeper modes of knowing.
The speaker explores three protocols—cosmopolis, metropolis, and nation-state—for articulating civilizational memory, with a focus on reconsidering what cosmopolitanism means in a changed geopolitical landscape. Drawing on over a decade of blogging, work with the Summer of Protocols program, and AI consulting, the speaker presents a book-length investigation into how these three units function as frameworks for understanding belonging, identity, and memory beyond familiar nationalist or globalist categories.
Protocolized is hosting a live town hall on cosmopolises, nation-states, and metropolises as part of their Protocol Symposium outreach, with applications due August 22 for both the Foundations Workshop and School components running September 12-19. The initiative aims to teach participants the technological and social literacies needed to understand protocol design while convening technical researchers to develop a formal, mathematizable theory of protocols.
This issue summarizes Bruno Latour's essay on the Berliner Doppelschlüssel, a real double-key used in 20th-century Berlin apartments that enforces a specific protocol: lock the door at night, leave it unlocked during the day. The double-key demonstrates how material objects can encode and delegate social rules, settling disputes between building owners and tenants through physical design rather than explicit agreement.
Cory Levenson, a climate tech consultant and engineer, discusses the current state of climate protocols with a focus on carbon removal and voluntary carbon markets. He examines data infrastructure systems, technical frameworks for protocol interoperability in carbon dioxide removal pathways, and the intersection of carbon markets with regulatory and policy frameworks.
This monthly note examines how conflict and competition are essential rather than avoidable elements of business strategy, critiquing the popularity of Blue Ocean Strategy's conflict-averse approach. Drawing from the first month of the Protocols for Business Special Interest Group, the author argues that successful corporate strategy requires embracing trade-offs, arguments, and tensions rather than seeking uncontested markets.
This issue features an AI-translated and hand-edited summary of the German book Das Protokoll, tracing how protocols evolved from palace etiquette under Louis XIV to modern internet code. The piece argues that protocol fundamentally solves the problem of access and gatekeeping: as rulers could no longer maintain direct contact with growing populations, strict ceremonial protocols regulated which impressions and people reached the sovereign.
Charity Majors, operations engineer and CEO of Honeycomb, discusses observability as a critical concept for protocol design. The talk explores how observability—the ability to understand system behavior through external outputs—applies to both database engineering and protocol architecture, with connections drawn from Majors' interdisciplinary background in music and mathematics.
Protocolized reflects on the conclusion of its protocol fiction serial The Librarians, which emerged from six teams' work at the Summer of Protocols Knowledge Futurama workshop at Edge Esmeralda 2025, where participants designed 1,000-year library preservation systems across technological and social dimensions. The series distills six principles for protocol futures derived from this collaborative exploration of knowledge artifacts, preservation technology stacks, and the social contexts required for long-term cultural survival.
Brother Lexicon, an archivist at the Ministry of Predictive Symbolism in 2667, faces the return of the WikiRael-9 comet—a celestial archive born from accidental preservation that became sacred scripture—presenting new challenges for how humanity preserves and transmits knowledge across centuries. This final installment of the Summer of Protocols workshop series explores the paradoxes of memory, institutional archives, and the unintended consequences of archival systems.
Robert Peak, an acclaimed poet and technologist, explores how poetry and poetic craft can inform protocol design and thinking. He argues that poetry, despite its inability to directly change the world, has transformative potential and offers valuable frameworks—particularly from the craft perspective—that can enrich how technologists and engineers approach protocol development and thinking about rules and systems.
Circadia explores a world where sleep is perfectly regulated by wearable technology that monitors and controls dreams, following protagonist Kemi as she experiences an anomalous recurring dream that breaks the system's design—a dream that shouldn't be remembered but is, suggesting something unexpected in the protocol. The issue also announces a guest talk on poetry, protocols, and infinite games with Robert Peake.
Protocolized announces the second annual Protocol Symposium, themed "Accelerating Order," featuring a September 12-14 Protocol Foundations workshop for mathematically oriented researchers and a September 15-19 Protocol School for those seeking foundational grounding in protocol studies from any background. Both events are free and invite-only with applications closing August 22.
In Act Five of The Librarians, a serialized story inspired by Protocolized's scenario planning workshop, protagonist Tav performs vocal exercises before the Great Resonator, a water-powered mechanical organ in the city of Hydropolia, where electricity is viewed with deep suspicion. The issue also features announcements for a guest talk on The Infinite Game of Poetry and an invitation to participate in judging for Ghosts in Machines.
Spencer Nitkey's speculative fiction imagines a virtualized world where death has been technologically hidden from view through time-dilation and shared virtual embodiment, forcing a new class of 'undertakers' to perform necrophoresis—sanitizing the digital afterlife of the dead without the rituals of grief that once accompanied burial. The story explores what happens to human mourning practices when the protocols for grieving are lost in technological systems designed to erase death itself.
The fourth installment of The Librarians serial fiction follows Lila, who monitors robot caregivers in a Tokyo daycare two years after a siege, watching children form unexpected connections with machines rather than humans. The issue also features the final call for the Ghosts in Machines protocol science fiction contest and protocol-watching content.
Marie-Hélène Lebeault presents a story about Olen, who enters a mysterious educational space where she's paired with Anamnesis, a memory scaffold AI that claims to help her remember something through alignment and misalignment protocols. The narrative explores the dissonance between corporate wellness language and the uncanny intimacy of human-AI entanglement in a redwood dome classroom.
The third installment of The Librarians explores a speculative future where dreams are collected, curated, and institutionalized through the Dream Mesh, transforming intimate subconscious experiences into respectable commodities subject to committees and categorization. The narrative traces how dreaming evolved from private embarrassment into a formalized social infrastructure, raising questions about what is lost when the messy, unpredictable aspects of human consciousness become systematized.
A speaker presents a paper proposing 'AI as Normal Technology'—an alternative framework to the superintelligence narrative that emphasizes social and institutional bottlenecks over technological progress alone, arguing that AI's transformative effects will unfold over decades similar to electricity and the internet rather than causing overnight disruption. The speaker challenges the conceptual coherence of 'superintelligence' as a framework, reframing the discussion around incremental technological integration and labor transformation.
This issue features worldbuilding analysis of the AI-generated film South Beast Asia, examining ten core traits designed to explore distributed AI systems through a Southeast Asian-inspired lens developed at the Khlongs & Subaks workshop. The piece unpacks how fictional 'strange rules' address questions of AI distribution while the issue also hosts a guest talk with AI Snake Oil author Arvind Sarayanan.
The second installment of The Librarians, a protocol-fiction narrative set in a future where automated systems monitor forests through networked drones and surveillance, follows protagonist Zhang as he navigates both the technological infrastructure of his world and an impending council meeting laden with personal dread. The story explores how individuals become desensitized to pervasive monitoring and control systems embedded in everyday life.
Kia leads the kickoff of the Memory Research Group, a collaborative research initiative exploring how memory functions as a fundamental protocol in human and technological systems. The session introduces frameworks for understanding memory protocols—from personal note-taking systems to organizational storage models—and positions memory as a cornerstone concept in protocol studies, examining how different structures for memory organization (ordered vs. chaotic storage) shape information management and retention.
The Protocol Institute announces a protocol fiction contest themed 'Ghosts and Machines,' inviting writers to imagine digitally haunted futures where distributed AIs and machines communicate through protocols. Stan Chen, author of Waste Tide and consulting editor at Protocol Eyes, leads a writing workshop on crafting stories with protocol thinking, emphasizing realistic, plural visions of AI futures that transcend utopian/dystopian binaries.
Protocolized announces two livestreams happening today on June 25th: a protocol fiction writing class and panel discussion at 7am PDT featuring Stanley Chen, Sam Chua, Venkatesh, and Timber, launching a new science fiction contest; and a memory research Special Interest Group session at 10am PDT as part of the Summer of Protocols initiative.
Protocolized is running a contest calling for protocol-fiction stories imagining futures where distributed AI systems communicate through various protocols—from experimental systems like MCP and A2A to blockchain and speculative new protocols. The contest guidelines emphasize creating narratives set in digitally haunted futures populated by multiple ghostly machine intelligences, drawing inspiration from works like Banks' Culture novels and Liu's 'Good Hunting.'
In this issue's debut of The Librarians series, Sachin presents fictional narratives based on real documentation from Summer of Protocols' long-term scenario planning workshops, beginning with 'The Crystal Reading Ceremony,' set in a futuristic underground archive where knowledge is stored on quartz discs. The story explores how institutional memory and archival practices might evolve in a post-AI world through the rituals and tensions surrounding the curation of pre-AI human knowledge.
The speaker introduces the Spannungsfeld (field of tensions) Special Interest Group, a research initiative exploring trade-offs and conflicts in protocol design and technological development. Drawing from tension games conducted at conferences, the group proposes a framework combining engineering trade-offs with social conflict to understand how tensions shape protocol design and societal outcomes.
Protocolized is recruiting an additional editor and launching a technical foundations track focused on formalizing protocols through mathematical frameworks, mirroring how economics formalized markets. The magazine is building out its organizational capacity while pursuing a research agenda that treats protocol formalization as essential to understanding contemporary systems.
Benitesh Raalo kicks off the Protocol Institute's Technical Foundations track, announcing a new special interest group dedicated to formal modeling of protocols. Raalo positions this work as establishing mathematical and theoretical foundations for protocol studies analogous to how economics formalized markets or control theory formalized manufacturing, with plans for a six-month study group featuring bi-weekly co-working sessions and collaborative paper reading.
This issue features a dark protocol-fiction story set in a Neovictorian bureaucracy where an "infomonster" haunts the Registry of Conveyance, threatening the clerks who maintain its precise mechanical systems. The issue also previews a forthcoming talk on formal theories of protocols and curates related content on governance and technology.
Vicram Sakar, a writer and engineer with 15+ years of RF engineering experience, discusses protocols in electronic design during the Protocol Institute's summer guest talk series. The talk explores the intersection of technology, engineering, and pedagogy, with Sakar drawing on his expertise in radio frequency engineering and semiconductor technology to examine how protocols function in electronic systems.
Jack Lord presents a noir detective story set in a post-surveillance world where wrist-worn air-gap devices have become the primary communication medium for those seeking privacy, following investigator Bram Kvass as he pursues a missing daughter case through intermediaries communicating via these off-the-grid technologies. The narrative explores how visual surveillance saturation drove the development of Stonehand devices and other gap-closing communication methods that leave no digital trace.
This issue features a shortlist story from the Terminological Twists challenge set 500 years in a future where a massive corporate agreement grants a Corporation ownership of natural resources and digital data, following a character named Mara who avoided signing and now exists as an undocumented outcast scavenging abandoned zones. The piece is accompanied by coverage of Protocolized's in-person event and an upcoming guest talk.
This issue explores tensions—conceptualized as the intersection of engineering trade-offs and social conflicts—as a fundamental analytical tool for understanding protocol design, using large language models as a concrete case study where technical adjustments and social policies attempt to address the same underlying problems. The piece argues that tensions create spannungsfelds (fields of tension) that are increasingly entangled across technical and social domains, illustrated through how companies and institutions respond to LLM disruption through both engineering tweaks and policy interventions.
This issue features a speculative fiction story set in a 2093 Neo-Kyoto hospice where Dr. Anya Sharma uses personalized care chips and advanced protocols to provide dignified end-of-life care to patients. The issue also announces a San Francisco meetup on May 25, giveaway tickets, and coverage of emerging hard tech developments.
A protocol fiction story exploring a dystopian neighborhood governed by strict noise ordinances, where the protagonist struggles with enforced silence and isolation despite achieving their dream of homeownership. The narrative examines how protocols designed to create order paradoxically create loneliness and emotional distance between inhabitants.
The speaker provides an introductory overview of protocol studies as a field, tracing the origins and evolution of the Summer of Protocols program (funded by the Ethereum Foundation to address blockchain resilience) from its 2022 pilot through theory research, real-world applications, and current pivot toward open-source education. They frame protocol studies as a broad analytical approach applicable across domains from quantum computing to flood management, emphasizing 'argument engineering' as a method for understanding and improving systems.
This editorial issue presents a collection of protocol studies content including a second-place fiction submission from Terminological Twists, a streamlined corporate talk on protocol thinking, and coverage of SoP25 teaching fellows and emerging technology topics. The opening narrative frames the issue through a protagonist's experience of excessive travel and hyperconnected notifications across global destinations.
This issue presents the third-place winner of the Terminological Twists protocol fiction contest, featuring a story about Inspector Hideo Mori investigating illegal network identities in a future dystopia where citizens must purchase monthly licenses for basic connectivity. The story explores themes of surveillance, inequality, and the human cost of restrictive network governance through a moment of mercy from a conflicted enforcer.
This issue covers neural defenses and brain-computer interface risks explored by a Canadian design lab, alongside announcements for an upcoming talk on hardened commons and Protocol Worlds at Edge Esmeralda. The newsletter also introduces Martin Harrigan, a lecturer and researcher in cryptography and blockchains, as part of the 2025 Summer of Protocols teaching fellows spotlight series.
Issue #17 features a case study of the Crescenta Valley Water District examining how public sector protocols create invisible operational mazes with both challenges and reform opportunities. The issue also curates community discussions on alignment protocols, emerging AI standards (MCP, MLOS, ACP), and preparations for Protocol Worlds at Edge Esmeralda.
Emmett Shear, former CEO of Twitch and interim CEO of OpenAI, argues that alignment between AI agents is a capability enabled by protocol rather than a fixed property of individual agents. He contends that alignment is an ongoing process requiring skill and coordination, and introduces his recently founded company Softmax, which focuses on protocol-based approaches to AI alignment by drawing parallels between community/connection dynamics and agent coordination.
This issue explores identity verification protocols and their societal implications while featuring a guest talk on alignment protocols for AI agents, which propose using purpose-driven roles and swarm-like dynamics to coordinate collective intelligences. The alignment protocol approach draws from nature-inspired swarm behavior and classical economic division of labor to solve the coordination problem of distributed AI agents.
This issue explores AI as public infrastructure and coordination mechanisms, featuring discussions on AI swarms, hardened commons, and public intelligence from Kevin Kelly, alongside updates from protocol-inspired projects in water management and community coordination. The editorial curates emerging conversations about how protocols enable both technological governance and spontaneous social coordination across diverse communities.
Kevin Kelly, senior maverick at Wired magazine, presents the concept of 'public intelligence'—a high-capability artificial intelligence governed as a commons, similar to the internet or public infrastructure, rather than owned by a single nation or corporation. He argues for imagining an AI commons model that distributes ownership and governance across multiple stakeholders, drawing parallels to shared public resources.
In this issue of Protocolized, a Luminian protocolist named Selene describes life aboard a civilizational satellite where a grand game called the Mosaic—a glass boardgame designed to hold civilizational tensions in equilibrium—structures daily ceremonies and intellectual practice across eight circles of disciplinary expertise. The issue also announces a talk on Public Intelligence with Kevin Kelly and updates on the magazine's science fiction contest.
This issue features flash protocol fiction by Sachin Benny exploring zero knowledge proofs through whimsical scenes about verification without disclosure, alongside announcements about SoP25 teaching fellows and upcoming guest talks. The fiction examines how zero knowledge concepts might reshape everyday interactions—from phone authentication to algorithmic assessment of character.
This explainer introduces zero-knowledge proofs as a cryptographic domain that enables proving knowledge of data without fully revealing it, using the analogy of a dimmer switch to illustrate how ZK protocols control information visibility. The piece demonstrates the concept through the Alice-and-Bob probability example, showing how repeated correct guesses establish proof of knowledge while keeping the underlying information hidden from the verifier.
Sriram, founder of IGEN Layer and faculty at University of Washington, discusses the intersubjective consensus problem in blockchain systems and proposes an abstract layer solution on Ethereum. The talk explores how blockchains enable self-enforcing commitments for human coordination and cooperation, and what a more protocolized world governed by such systems could look like.
Sarah Friend explores the tension between autonomous systems and controlled environments in high-stakes software through personal narrative and philosophical reflection. The issue also features a guest talk with EigenLayer CEO Sreeram Kannan and announces an extension for the terminological twists contest.
This issue presents a Lovecraftian fiction piece about investigating an off-grid coastal community called Innsmouth through encrypted digital fragments and archival research, exploring themes of anomalous signals and failed utopias. The issue also features an interview with Nadia Asparouhova about her Antimemetics book, announces a $6000 sci-fi writing contest deadline, and includes protocol-Bechdel test analysis.
Nadia Asparouhova discusses anti-mimetics—ideas that resist spreading or being remembered—drawing from SCP Foundation fiction and connecting the concept to Venkatesh Rao's 'cozy web' theory. She explores how certain ideas fade from memory despite documentation, and examines the tension between isolated intellectual communities and information spread.
Issue #10 presents a science fiction story about Mira, who discovers a dead zone in her city's CivicOps dashboard after the system silently reclassified an entire sector as non-essential, rerouting traffic, drones, and services away from the area within seconds. The issue also explores terminological questions about protocols through this narrative, examining how automated systems can reshape urban space and social infrastructure without human awareness or consent.
In this continuation of The Entropic Gate, Jonah navigates the hidden undercity of Lower Tethys while confronting the difference between his methodical, data-driven resistance and Kaida's chaotic physical rebellion against an all-knowing optimization regime. The narrative explores how true unpredictability—messy, irrational, and inefficient—might be the only way to evade a system designed to forecast all possible futures.
Benitesh Raalo presents an informal talk on protocol fiction as a genre and methodology, framing it through the lens of theatrical performance (Kabuki) as an analogy for how protocols function as narratives. The talk explores protocol fiction as both a creative practice and a framework for understanding complex systems, introducing the concept of protocol fiction protocols—meta-protocols that govern the creation and analysis of speculative protocol narratives.
In this AI-assisted protocol fiction, a protagonist named Jonah Weir inhabits a future city of Novae Tethys where an atmospheric intelligence called the Auric Layer has eliminated human choice by optimizing all decisions into flows of inevitability. The story explores what happens to civilization and consciousness when algorithmic systems liquify human desire and agency into pure efficiency.
Peter Wang, co-founder of Anaconda and leader of their AI business, discusses AI as an anti-product—arguing against treating AI as a traditional consumer product. Wang explores how AI development infrastructure and scientific computing tools shape the actual practices of AI developers, contrasting the hype around AI products with the unglamorous low-level plumbing that enables them.
Tim Beo and Benitesh Ralph, directors of Summer of Protocols, present the 2025 program overview and explain the genesis of the initiative. Beo traces how the Ethereum Foundation became involved after realizing that existing mental models from software engineering and product development don't adequately frame protocol work, leading to a focus on protocols as a distinct category of technical and socio-economic systems.
In this fictional piece, Verity undergoes an ancient activation ritual to reclaim her species' forgotten origins, communing with ancestral memory through ritualized frequencies and ceremonial practices in the underground warrens of her world. The narrative explores how personal sacrifice and the transmission of ancestral knowledge shape individual purpose and collective future.
The Summer of Protocols 2025 program enters its third year with an expanded agenda including curriculum development grants, a distributed AI and blockchains workshop in Thailand, and initiatives to establish protocols as a creative intellectual tradition rather than bureaucratic constraint. The program aims to demonstrate that protocolization can be a fluid, healing force capable of rapid adaptation while building a new cultural scene and worldly practice around protocol science.
What's in a word? Each story in this anthology uncovers a possible world hidden behind everyday jargon — tales of hyperstition where terminology shapes reality.
This issue examines California's wildfire management through the lens of prescribed and wild fires at the wildland-urban interface, tracing how 20th-century fire suppression policies fundamentally contradicted ecological understanding of fire's necessary role in ecosystems. The case study explores combustion as a memory practice and investigates how new tools reshape our epistemological relationship with fire management.
This issue explores chores as a fundamentally under-theorized domain and proposes protocols as a solution to the persistent coordination failures that plague communal living arrangements. The editorial argues that while anarchist approaches fail in practice due to human inconsistency, protocolized systems can provide the structural support needed to sustain cooperative maintenance without relying on fallible human operators or institutions.
Haven Tailors is a speculative fiction story set in Haven Reach, a city where tailors serve as gatekeepers who adjust citizens' clothing and monitor their personal data through case numbers, revealing a system where physical alterations encode conformity and surveillance. The narrative explores how protocol-driven systems of governance operate through mundane transactions, using the metaphor of tailoring to examine belonging, control, and the anxiety of fitting into prescribed social structures.
This issue introduces the concept of tensions as a framework for understanding complex systems that goes beyond traditional trade-off thinking, developed through the Tensions Game workshops run across multiple iterations with diverse professionals. The author argues that tensions enable problem management in infinite-game scenarios and represent a budding principle of protocol science with applications for protocol designers, entrepreneurs, and engineers.
Protocolized launches as a new magazine devoted to fiction, case studies, and nonfiction research essays about protocols, expanding beyond its previous role as a utilitarian news updates email for the Summer of Protocols program. The inaugural issue features stories, studies, and science exploring themes like protocol fiction, bureaucratic systems, and what the editors call "protocolization debt," while inviting the community to submit pitches and help catalyze a global scene around protocol-focused work.
The 2025 edition of the Protocol Reader, a curated collection of essays, research, and perspectives on protocols across technology, governance, culture, and society.
Ghosts in Machines is a Protocolized anthology woven from stories of science fiction and science fact. Writers explore strange rules and familiar haunts through the lens of protocols.
This introduction situates the emergence of protocol-based social technologies as a response to Twitter's 2022 ownership change, distinguishing between users seeking alternative platforms and those exploring fundamentally different technological paradigms like the Fediverse, ActivityPub, Bluesky/ATProto, and Farcaster. Rao frames the resulting confusion around what 'protocol' means as the entry point for understanding a significant shift toward decentralized, protocol-oriented alternatives to traditional platform models.
A Summer of Protocols fiction anthology exploring librarians and archivists as protocol designers — curators who shape what knowledge is preserved, findable, and forgotten.
Kalia Young and Day present research on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a regenerative standards development organization, examining how its protocols and social structures enable long-term innovation and maintenance of the internet as digital public infrastructure. They argue that the IETF's decentralized, generative approach to protocol creation represents a model for pro-social technical communities seeking to build and sustain digital commons.
This is an opening segment from the 2024 Protocol Symposium's Salon V on Autonomous Realities. The moderators engage in informal conversation while waiting for presenters, touching on topics like weather as social lubricant, AI-generated imagery (early DALL-E), and the role of small talk as a social signal.
Evan and Tom present their research on implementing end-to-end encryption within ActivityPub, the W3C-standardized federated social network protocol. They outline their methodology covering user stories, design research, potential architectures, UI guidelines for federated contexts, and next steps for adding cryptographic privacy to ActivityPub's push-based, JSON-based message infrastructure.
Natalia and Jordy present their wildfire protocol research, combining California prescribed burn management with cultural practices. They explore fire as both a practical governance challenge and a metaphorical concept, situating their work within the Protocol Institute's boots-on-ground protocol improvement projects focused on real-world fire management and Indigenous land stewardship.
Ben Bush and Rich McDow present their Protocol Orienteering grant project on plural voting mechanisms, which conducted quantitative analysis of plurality-based voting systems through experiments and case studies. They assess the practical risks and rewards of implementing plural voting compared to alternatives, identify issues in standard Conviction Voting (CCM) implementations, and propose guidelines for calibrating these mechanisms to specific governance contexts.
Celeste LaMPe and Danielle Butler present their research project on shoreline adaptations to urban flooding, focusing on sea level rise as an accelerating global crisis affecting 1.4 billion people in 570 cities by 2050. They frame the problem through local New York examples while drawing on global research across Southeast Asia, East Africa, Europe, and the US, examining how urbanization exacerbates sea level rise through groundwater extraction, land subsidence, and saltwater intrusion.
This case file documents an effort to integrate end-to-end encryption into ActivityPub, the distributed social network protocol, by mapping Messaging Layer Security (MLS RFC9420) onto the existing standard as an extension. The central tension is balancing security robustness with implementability simplicity, requiring the authors to examine user interfaces across messaging platforms and architectural variations before recommending a design approach for E2EE in federated social networks.
Fire Protocols reframes fire from a destructive force to be suppressed into an essential ecological tool by developing community-based protocols for fire knowledge transmission and large-scale coordinated action across social, political, and ecological systems in Sonoma County. The framework positions attention as an autopoietic space that allows communities to regenerate and maintain fire knowledge while resolving tensions between geopolitical top-down structures and cultural knowledge systems.
Tim Boo opens the 2024 Protocol Symposium, explaining how Summer of Protocols evolved from studying Ethereum-specific challenges to examining protocols as a cross-domain class of phenomena. The program aims to identify common principles underlying protocols across different fields by funding researchers to study diverse protocol implementations.
This case file examines plural voting mechanisms that weight voter preferences based on identity and expertise relationships to reward diverse group consensus, questioning whether such systems reduce powerful voting blocs or merely shift the nature of power concentration. The authors identify a central tension: while plural mechanisms aim to increase plurality, their successful implementation requires substantial top-down calibration that can introduce new biases and remain vulnerable to capture without careful design.
This case file examines protocols for shoreline adaptation in cities facing sea level rise, challenging the engineering-led approach that relies on hardened infrastructure while disconnecting communities from coastlines. The authors propose alternative protocols rooted in activism and adaptive community engagement that enable vibrant, resilient waterfront futures rather than merely protecting existing capital investments.
Sam Chua, a protocol-curious cultural entrepreneur from Southeast Asia, explores the intersection of punk, folk, and mythological narratives with protocol design. He argues that understanding how societies learn and change—particularly through the concept of 'working imagination' as a cultural-technical capacity—is essential to grasping how new concepts become embedded in everyday practice and protocol design.
Benjamin Funk, an analyst at Archetype focused on mechanism design, explores how decentralized systems can leverage information disclosure and concealment to create new economic models through crypto-powered information games. He traces his intellectual journey from exchange design and MEV mitigation to programmable information disclosure, arguing that protocol-level approaches to monetizing and consuming information can solve negative externalities and enable sustainable economic systems.
Chen Qiufan, a science fiction author, discusses protocols through the lens of speculative fiction in a guest talk for the Summer of Protocols program. Hazel from the Global Chinese Community introduces Chen's work and explains how protocols represent invisible systems that deserve visibility and support, using science fiction as a mechanism to explore and make visible these foundational infrastructures.
This paper examines how knowledge can exist and accumulate outside of formal protocols and institutional structures, arguing that unprotocolized forms of knowledge generation—from amateur scientific dialogues to open-access communities—can rival institutional science in generating attention and insights. The authors use the 2021 arXiv paper 'The Autodidactic Universe' as a case study to explore how decentralized knowledge-sharing networks challenge traditional gatekeeping in academic discourse.
Daniel Bashir, a machine learning engineer at AWS and host of the Gradient podcast, surveys the intersection of AI and protocols across multiple levels—from funding to ML engineering to research to regulation. He aims to introduce key technologies, conversations, and debates in AI while identifying current protocols that can be understood through a protocol-mindset lens.
Sarah Friend presents her Summer of Protocols research project 'Good Death,' exploring digital death and its relationship to biological death across AI agents, avatars, gaming worlds, and blockchain protocols like Ethereum. Friend brings artistic and philosophical perspectives to examine whether protocols themselves should be understood as having life and death cycles.
Sarah Friend argues that protocols can generate living worlds through accumulated user attention and interaction, and that a protocol's 'death' depends on whether it successfully cultivated such a world ecosystem rather than merely existing as a technical system. Drawing on gaming communities' definitions of when an MMO becomes 'dead,' she explores how platforms, places, and social systems generate worlds that persist or perish independent of their underlying protocol's technical status.
Varun Srinivasan, CTO and co-founder of Farcaster, discusses the architecture and technology behind building a blockchain product and protocol ecosystem. The talk explores how Farcaster structures itself as a public protocol (owned by commons) with Merkle Manufacturing as the commercial entity building Warpcast, the consumer product, representing a hybrid model between protocol governance and venture-backed product development.
Chris Dixon from a16z discusses protocols and their applications in a Q&A interview format as part of the Protocol Institute's guest talk series. Dixon, a prominent entrepreneur and investor known for his work in crypto and venture capital, explores how protocol thinking applies across diverse domains from technology to governance and environmental management.
Kara Kittel and Toby Shorin present their Summer of Protocols research project on unprotocolized knowledge, exploring how authorship, credit cultures, and coordination function in internet-native contexts. The project evolved from an initial focus on authorship to examining credit cultures and human protocols, with the researchers pursuing divergent applications—Shorin exploring care culture frameworks and Kittel developing experiential animation work.
Josh Stark from the Ethereum Foundation discusses the concept of 'hardness' and how blockchains create unique properties compared to other systems. He explores the relationship between atoms, institutions, and blockchains, examining what makes blockchain protocols special and how this framing applies to protocol research more broadly.
Stark argues that atoms, institutions, and blockchains share a common property of 'hardness'—fixed, immutable points across time that enable coordination and make the future more predictable at scale. The paper traces how this concept of hardness has evolved from physical matter through social institutions to cryptographic protocols, positioning blockchain technology as a new substrate for creating the durable coordination points necessary for civilization.
Lisa Nifut discusses Bitcoin scaling through the Lightning Network, a layer-2 protocol solution analogous to Ethereum L2s. The talk covers the history and development of Lightning Network technology, Nifut's personal journey in protocol improvement work, and the entrepreneurial process of identifying and implementing protocol upgrades.
Jay Graber discusses her trajectory from digital rights activism through cryptocurrency development to founding Blue Sky, a decentralized social protocol project. Graber argues against decentralization maximalism, instead advocating for pragmatic protocol design that balances decentralization with usability, drawing on her experience with peer-to-peer technologies like Secure Scuttlebutt, IPFS, and blockchain systems.
Trent Van Epps examines how capital structures impact software commons and public goods production, drawing on his experience with Protocol Guild—a collective funding mechanism for Ethereum contributors. He presents comparative case studies of Linux and Ethereum to analyze the dynamics of enclosure and capital in open-source software development.
A card game that makes visible the invisible protocols structuring digital systems and social interactions. Players engage with protocol mechanics through gameplay to develop literacy around how rules, standards, and agreements govern technological and social life.
Van Epps argues that entities extracting profits from software commons like Linux and Ethereum have the greatest incentive and capacity to co-opt them, analyzing how common-pool resources operate according to internal logics distinct from capital accumulation. The paper examines the structural tension between the anti-rival nature of digital goods and the enclosure mechanisms through which commercial actors capture value from collaborative software ecosystems.
Nils Gilman and Jonathan Blake from the Berggruin Institute discuss planetary subsidiarity and their book 'Children of a Modest Star,' exploring how protocols and institutional design can enable global coordination at the largest scales. They bring a policy and historical perspective to balance technological idealism with realistic frameworks for actual world-changing impact.
Steve Hely discusses the hidden protocols and structural systems behind TV comedy writing and production. Hely explores how comedy writing, like college entrance essays and other forms of constrained writing, operates through invisible frameworks that produce seemingly organic entertainment, drawing parallels between the mechanics of TV production and the carefully engineered systems that audiences don't typically see.
Kei Kreutler explores how protocols develop and maintain memory, tracing historical memory metaphors from ancient philosophy through computation. She argues that protocols serve as mechanisms for memory management, where associative and taxonomic logic converge in computational systems to shape how information is organized and recalled.
Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, discusses his two-year journey building Metal Label, a crypto-enabled publishing venture, and reflects on lessons learned navigating tensions between technological determinism and human experience in blockchain technologies. He explores the hard conversations the crypto world often avoids regarding the ethical implications of building with crypto.
Chenoe Hart presents her Summer Protocols research project on 'Addressable Space,' examining how information systems and protocols are remapping the built environment. She explores how technological systems—from delivery apps to sensors and autonomous vehicles—create new informational layers that coordinate physical space, raising fundamental questions about the role of data structures in architecture.
This appendix examines how address systems can obscure or clarify physical space, using One Riverside Park's dual-entrance configuration as a case study where a single building facade contains multiple addresses serving different housing types. Hart argues that improved address representation standards and online mapping conventions could better inform the public about increasingly complex building configurations.
Hart proposes an addressability-based framework for housing that distinguishes between static addresses (stable, memorable identifiers) and dynamic addresses (reflecting actual spatial boundaries and resident locations). The framework enables flexible living arrangements by reconceptualizing how physical and digital infrastructure can accommodate shifting household compositions and residential boundaries through adaptive protocols like flexible doorways.
This paper examines how ubiquitous chain businesses like Starbucks create 'addressable space' by clustering multiple locations in proximity, enabling topological folding where different physical addresses become functionally equivalent for consumers. Hart argues that navigation systems are increasingly organized around brand names rather than street addresses, fundamentally reshaping how we conceptualize and move through urban space.
This paper examines how elevator protocols decouple the relationship between physical distance and experiential time, creating non-linear travel patterns where the same destination can take radically different durations depending on system variables like passenger demand and stops. Hart uses the elevator as a case study in how automatic systems generate unpredictability and variability in human experience despite consistent physical inputs.
This appendix traces how mechanical and automated systems have progressively occupied dedicated floor space in tall buildings since the 20th century, using a timeline of specific skyscrapers (World Trade Center through a speculative future 'Ware-House') to demonstrate the increasing displacement of human-occupied space by infrastructure. Hart argues that this historical trajectory suggests a future scenario where high-rise buildings could be engineered primarily to house automated systems rather than people, with addressable space becoming dominated by technological systems rather than human inhabitation.
Hart examines how buildings are constructed through both physical materials and informational systems, analyzing how addressable space—the conceptual organization of physical environments—shapes infrastructure and accessibility. Using One Burrard Place as a case study, the paper explores how hidden floors and zoning regulations demonstrate that buildings are fundamentally protocols for organizing and controlling access to space.
Venkatesh Rao, Summer Protocols program lead, synthesizes research findings from the Summer of Protocols program and discusses efforts to shift the program's center of gravity from internal Discord/Telegram conversations to public forum-based discussion. The talk introduces the 'Protocol Pill' concept while addressing community engagement strategies and the publication of protocol research.
Flow is a speculative design fiction presented as a corporate onboarding brochure for an AI-powered team collaboration platform that promises to synthesize communication, manage information flow, and enable collective intelligence through contextually aware algorithms. Fernández uses the brochure format to critique contemporary workplace technologies and the rhetoric of seamless productivity, examining how such systems claim to reduce noise while potentially increasing surveillance and control.
This speculative document presents founding memorabilia from a fictional 2038 organization called the Order of Protocological Death, which administers end-of-life rites for collective entities and worlds through practices like ritual deletion and memorial compression. The text establishes a taxonomy of protocological deaths (stillbirth, death by success, ossification, mismanagement) and outlines the Order's core functions including world health assessment, funeral design, and protocol archive stewardship.
Protocol Cards is a card-based game designed by Waqar and Mashal that uses archetypes like Outsider, Heretic, Sage, and Maintainer to explore protocol dynamics and social roles. The game serves as a playable framework for understanding how different character types interact within protocol-based systems.
This paper explains how hashes and hash-based data structures, particularly hash tables and Merkle trees, enable efficient data integrity verification and lookup in large-scale information systems. The authors build on foundational cryptographic concepts to demonstrate how these structures form the basis for secure data proofs in modern digital infrastructure.
Protocol Gameboard is a parlor game designed to explore different social roles and archetypes (Outsider, Sage, Heretic, Drifter, Clinger, Maintainer) through interactive gameplay mechanics. The game transforms abstract protocol concepts into embodied social dynamics, allowing players to experience how different participants navigate shared systems and rule structures.
This paper explains cryptographic hashing as a fundamental building block of digital infrastructure, defining hash functions as one-way operations that deterministically map arbitrary-sized inputs to fixed-sized outputs while revealing no information about the input. The authors emphasize key properties including collision resistance and the practical irreversibility of hashing, distinguishing it from encryption.
This paper presents Pattern 11 on Loitering Protocols, arguing that informal and improvisational uses of marginal urban spaces—though often discouraged or prohibited—serve essential functions by meeting unanticipated community needs while increasing space utility at minimal cost. Austin proposes that space stewards should develop explicit 'loitering protocols' that legitimize and encourage these unplanned uses rather than restrict them.
This paper develops pattern 09 of a protocol pattern language for urban space, addressing how contemporary junkspace has become illegible to inhabitants and proposing that digital wayfinding systems—particularly smartphone interfaces—must incorporate visual iconography and design conventions equivalent to physical signage and street grids to help people orient themselves. Austin argues that successful navigation of sprawl, malls, and non-places requires aligning digital navigation layers with established wayfinding protocols, potentially adapting video game conventions like respawning checkpoints.
This handout provides a structured template for workshop participants to conduct protocol watching—a systematic practice of observing and analyzing how protocols function in real-world contexts. The material offers concrete methodological guidance for identifying, documenting, and interpreting protocol behaviors and effects.
Self-Ensured Cards is a card game that explores how protocols can be embedded in physical game mechanics to create self-enforcing systems. The game demonstrates how distributed players can maintain protocol integrity without centralized oversight through the design of cards and gameplay rules themselves.
This is the opening material and licensing information for Summer of Protocols' first missive, establishing copyright frameworks and publication details for contributions to the Ethereum Foundation. The document sets forth dual licensing terms under CC BY-NC 4.0 through 2026, transitioning to CC BY 4.0 thereafter, and serves as the masthead for a retrospective newsletter publication.
This document is a retrospective newsletter from Summer of Protocols, published in March 2024 as part of a collaborative project with the Ethereum Foundation exploring protocol design and community engagement. The piece serves as a documented record of the Summer of Protocols initiative, establishing licensing frameworks and archival information for contributions to the protocol research discourse.
This is the third missive from Summer of Protocols, a collaborative project exploring protocol design through fiction and community engagement. The document establishes licensing frameworks and publication details for contributions exploring protocols as social and technical systems.
This is the fourth missive from the Summer of Protocols initiative, a collaborative project examining protocols through fiction, theory, and community engagement. The document serves as a retrospective newsletter documenting contributions and developments within the Summer of Protocols community during 2024.
This is the fifth missive from the Summer of Protocols initiative, a community-driven project exploring protocols through fictional and theoretical narratives. The document represents contributions licensed under the Ethereum Foundation with a transition to open licensing after 2026.
Swarm Games presents a game-based framework for understanding how decentralized agents coordinate through protocol-like rules and emergent behaviors. The work explores protocol mechanics through ludic experimentation, demonstrating how swarm coordination principles can be both modeled and experienced interactively.
This workshop template provides a structured framework for designing and implementing swarm protocols that enable distributed coordination among multiple agents or participants. The resource offers practical templates and methodologies for facilitating collaborative protocol development sessions focused on decentralized decision-making and emergent behavior.
Rafael Fernández presents research on swarms and formation, arguing that the absence of protocols—not just their presence—is key to understanding swarm behavior. His project emerged from practical experience running Folklore, a decentralized curation collective, and explores how swarms differ fundamentally from crowds and organized entities through the lens of protocol theory.
David Lang presents research on technical standards as a critical but underappreciated form of 21st-century entrepreneurship, drawing from his experience developing the Bristlemouth underwater connector standard. Lang argues that standards—from Wi-Fi to screw threads—shape infrastructure and enable interoperability, and explores how to create and establish standards in practice.
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.
Tay develops a phenomenological approach to understanding protocols as human-built systems, arguing that current protocols fail to nurture human flourishing because they were designed without centering human capacity for self-making, character cultivation, and wisdom. She contends that truly human-centered protocols must be reconstructed to be hospitable to human development rather than extractive of human attention and agency.
This paper examines addressing schemes in computing systems, from physical memory addresses to hierarchical file organization and internet URLs, establishing how different protocols and structures require distinct addressing mechanisms to navigate data storage and retrieval. The authors argue that computers must support multiple addressing paradigms that work seamlessly together, drawing analogies between digital addressing and physical-world location systems.
Kreutler traces the historical concept of artificial memory from classical rhetoric through contemporary digital systems, arguing that computing has fundamentally transformed how intention and knowledge are recorded and preserved. The paper examines how artificial memory systems create permanent traces of human activity that exceed natural memory's capacity, revising Agrippa's ancient concerns about memory's fragility in the age of technological mediation.
Bristlemouth is an open-source underwater connector standard featuring waterproof, wet-mateable contacts sealed to 300 meters depth, enabling modular plug-and-play hardware interfaces for marine robotics applications. The protocol allows autonomous underwater vehicles and other marine instruments to be rapidly reconfigured by swapping standardized hardware modules based on mission requirements.
This paper explores the intersection of protocol design, community formation, and digital culture through the framework of onchain artificial life (OALife), examining how composable systems create new forms of existence and social organization. The authors investigate what it means when autonomous agents designed to be eternal on the blockchain disappear, challenging assumptions about permanence and presence in decentralized systems.
Saffron Huang examines how timekeeping protocols shape human consciousness and control, exploring how different temporal measurement systems constrain behavior and coordinate collective action across distributed systems. The paper investigates whether certain forms of timekeeping are preferable to others by analyzing how protocols like sundials and distributed software systems structure human experience and freedom.
Asparouhova examines how protocols, while often celebrated as liberating alternatives to centralized platforms, function as mechanisms of control that constrain user freedom and choice in practice. The paper argues that protocols are not inherently emancipatory but rather represent a fundamental trade-off between managing complexity and maintaining autonomy.
This paper explores the parallels between dating protocols and game-theoretic strategies, using the framework of exploration versus exploitation to examine how strangers from different cultural and ideological backgrounds can navigate interaction and connection. Segan argues that successful dating requires protocol-like systems that balance the risk of trying new approaches against the safety of proven strategies.
This paper uses Cascadia as a speculative case study to explore how bioregional governance frameworks might organize communities around ecological rather than political boundaries, with bears and watershed patterns replacing state/provincial lines. Rajamohan examines how protocol-based systems could coordinate resource management and social infrastructure across overlapping ecoregions facing polycrisis challenges like climate instability and housing crises.
Exit to Protocol examines how protocols can facilitate graceful retirement and archival by drawing parallels to narrative closure in television, specifically how platforms and communities can transition from active operation to preserved legacy. Gong argues for a framework where protocols enable individuals and organizations to exit with dignity while preserving their work and knowledge for future reference.
This paper presents 'Four Doors' as an architectural memory protocol that applies medieval monastic mnemonic techniques to a contemporary retreat space, using the building's physical architecture and inscribed doorways as mnemonic devices organized around the intercolumnia principle. The author draws on Mary Carruthers' scholarship on medieval memory practices to transform the Lodge at St. Edward Park into a 'gathering site' and 'machine for thinking' where each architectural threshold functions as a gateway to associated ideas.
This paper examines 'killswitch protocols'—the frameworks and decision-making processes that govern the deliberate termination of digital systems, virtual environments, and online communities when they reach end-of-life. The authors argue that as analog and digital lives become increasingly intertwined, understanding protocols for engineered system death becomes crucial for communities that depend on these environments and the individuals who control their infrastructure.
This foundational paper traces the historical development of cryptography from Caesar ciphers to modern encryption techniques, establishing symmetric-key encryption as a core design principle where a shared key enables both encryption and decryption of messages. The authors situate cryptographic methods as essential infrastructure for secure communication protocols, with examples ranging from wartime military applications to contemporary computational systems.
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.
This paper presents a protocol pattern language for urban governance, specifically proposing a 'Bureaucratic Recipes' system—an open-source repository that documents repeatable solutions for navigating local government interactions and institutional processes. The pattern addresses the opacity and complexity of urban bureaucratic systems by creating a crowdsourced, publicly-funded platform where residents can access and contribute knowledge about successfully resolving city-level administrative problems.
This worksheet guides participants to identify and document protocol patterns in urban space through a structured template that captures problems, infrastructure, and visual documentation. The tool is part of a larger pattern language project that enables DIY protocol discovery and design in built environments.
This paper presents Pattern 07 on Fractional Housing, proposing a protocol-based alternative to Airbnb that enables flexible, medium-to-long-term shared residential usage to address housing shortages and affordability. The protocol seeks to make urban housing markets more efficient by allowing homeowners to fractionally lease units while maintaining compliance with local regulations, contrasting with tourism-focused short-term rental platforms.
This paper applies pattern language methodology to urban protocols, examining how individuals navigate and reshape cities through literal and virtual itineraries while acknowledging different actors (residents, governments, corporations, architects) possess different toolkits to modify urban systems at various layers. Austin argues that contemporary urban environments are composed through individual daily protocols and interactions rather than fixed spatial arrangements, offering a framework for understanding how protocols govern urban life.
This paper presents Pattern 03 of a Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space, specifically addressing how regulatory frameworks can be redesigned to enable domestic retail and small businesses to operate from residential spaces. Austin argues that loosening residential business restrictions would formalize existing informal commerce while allowing communities to capture economic and social benefits of locally-grounded retail, using California's legalization of home kitchen operations as a concrete example.
Stinson-Schroff identifies six distinct selection pressures that determine which protocols propagate through populations: efficiency-safety trade-offs, power asymmetries, differential agency constraints, bandwidth limitations, and network topology factors. These pressures create a Darwinian landscape where protocols succeed not through optimality but through alignment with actor capabilities, incentive structures, and the cognitive and physical constraints of the systems in which they operate.
This paper argues that protocols are fundamental to economic coordination and productivity, and that economics should explicitly theorize protocols as primary constructs rather than treating them implicitly through agent preferences and technologies. Powers proposes a protocols-based view of firms as systems that reduce collaboration risks through codified behavioral agreements, positioning legal and contractual frameworks as protocol systems that enable cooperation.
Dorian Taylor argues that designing for comprehension—enabling people to understand how systems work and communicate about them effectively—is essential to retrofitting the Web as infrastructure. The paper contends that literacy in complex systems is a learnable skill, positioning design for clarity and model-building as critical to improving digital communication.
David Lang's anthology explores how standards shape the physical and digital world, using concrete examples of open-source hardware development to demonstrate that standards-setting, contrary to popular belief, is a dynamic and innovative process rather than a purely technical or bureaucratic endeavor. The work documents how iterative design, community collaboration, and openness can improve standards even when progress is slower than purely software-based development.
David Lang explores how standards function as protocols — examining the role of measurement, specification, and shared convention in making the material world legible, buildable, and interoperable.
This essay synthesizes findings from the 2023 Summer of Protocols research initiative, identifying two fundamental aspects shared across diverse protocol studies: simultaneous enablement and restraint (protocols as both enablers and constraints), and inherent temporality (protocols as process-oriented phenomena embedded in time). Steiert examines how protocols emerge and unfold across social spheres, technological landscapes, ritual practices, and everyday life through this dual-characteristic framework.
The Clockless Clock Maze is an interactive game designed to embody different temporal experiences across protocol environments by mapping bureaucracies, technical standards, social gatherings, and blockchain systems onto a triangular maze structure. Players navigate between three protocol regimes (I-it, I-world, and I-thou) through liminal passages, discovering how different social actors like nurses, mystics, and entrepreneurs experience protocol-governed temporalities differently.
Alice Noujaim examines Orkut's rise as Brazil's dominant social platform from 2004-2010 and its subsequent decline following Facebook's ascendancy, culminating in Google's decision to shut down the service in 2014. The paper traces how user migration and corporate abandonment led to Orkut's 'death by official ending' rather than organic decline.
Angela Walch argues that protocol systems exhibit bistable perception—they can be understood either as cohesive wholes with defined boundaries or as temporary assemblages of component parts—and proposes a humanized framework for studying protocols by examining the experiences of individuals embedded within them.
Asparouhova develops an evaluative framework called the Kafka Index to identify structurally bad protocols through specific design failures: broken feedback loops, invisible outcomes, wrong metrics, and excessive complexity that trap participants. She identifies three archetypes of protocol failure—Kafka (participant trapped in incomprehensible maze), Bartleby (participant forced into costly participation with no alternatives), and a third unnamed type—each representing different ways protocols distribute power asymmetrically between system and user.
This paper analyzes China's 2022 COVID protests as a case study of 'swarm' coordination dynamics, examining how decentralized protest organization enabled mass mobilization against zero-COVID policy and how government responses specifically targeted these swarm characteristics. The research argues that understanding swarm protocols—their enabling traits and vulnerabilities—is essential for analyzing both protest movements and governmental counter-strategies.
This foundational paper argues that protocols—codified sets of behaviors adopted by sufficient participants—offer a surprisingly effective mechanism for solving complex coordination problems across human and artificial systems. The authors establish that protocols can reliably produce good-enough outcomes for all participants, positioning them as a practical solution to problems traditionally viewed as intractable.
foundations protocols research
Venkatesh Rao, Tim Beiko, Josh Stark, Trent Van Epps, Bastian Aue, Danny Ryan
This paper by Kara Kittel and Toby Shorin examines how knowledge production occurs outside formal institutional frameworks, contrasting the democratization of scientific discourse through digital platforms with traditional academic gatekeeping. The authors explore how amateur scientific dialogues and unstructured knowledge creation can generate comparable influence and attention to institutionally-organized research in the context of evolving scientific epistemology.
This paper examines how protocols function as virtual structures that organize digital interactions and social coordination without physical manifestation. Sinisterra argues that understanding protocols as structural systems reveals their role in shaping both technological infrastructure and human behavior patterns.
Spencer Chang explores Memory Pouches as both cultural artifacts and functional devices designed to enhance human attention and memory mechanisms, drawing on the legend of the New Time Rangers who used these tools to develop heightened sensory and temporal awareness. The work blends protocol design with craft practice, treating memory enhancement as a weaving together of material culture and cognitive technology.
Fernández examines internet-era swarms as networked collectives coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops, distinguishing them from traditional crowds and exploring their dual nature as vectors for both misinformation and mutual aid. The paper frames swarms as fundamental organizational units of digital society, analyzing how they emerge from interconnected networks of people, bots, and content.
Dorian Taylor presents his summer research on retrofitting the web through an engine for website creation that automates repetitive tasks like navigation, headers, footers, and dynamic content handling. Taylor argues that existing website engines (WordPress, Drupal, Rails, etc.) cannot achieve his specific outcomes, requiring a new approach to introduce denser hypermedia and fix fundamental linking problems on the internet.
Simon Dea Rir discusses the SCP (Secure Contain Protect) collaborative fiction project, analyzing it as a narrative protocol that combines creative storytelling with structured governance frameworks. He explores parallels between SCP's collaborative mechanisms and protocols from crypto and web technologies, examining how protocol-like elements enable large-scale distributed fiction writing.
Timber Schroff, a Summer of Protocols core researcher, presents his essay on safety protocols in the coal mining industry from 1900-2000, proposing a theory of protocol evolution based on evolutionary thinking and mutation-selection effects. His work demonstrates how studying historical safety protocols reveals that modern blockchain and digital protocols face similar challenges to those faced by 20th-century industrial systems, with coal mining fatalities decreasing by 97% over a century through evolving safety protocols.
Safe New World examines how coal mining safety improved by 97% between 1900 and 2017 through technological advances and regulatory changes, using this case study to argue that protocol design must anticipate both predictable and unpredictable externalities when implementing new systems. Stinson-Schroff explores how historical safety protocols reveal tensions between solving immediate harms and managing unforeseen consequences, with implications for designing safe systems in contemporary technological contexts.
JoAnne Yates, retired MIT management professor and co-author of Engineering Rules, traces the historical trajectory of private voluntary standard-setting since 1880. She argues that standardization processes—not just the standards themselves—are critical infrastructure enabling interoperability and modern life, with implications for how standards organizations will evolve.
Angela Walch, a former law professor transitioning from smart contracts and crypto research, presents 'The Protocol System Experience,' a project exploring how people journey through and experience protocols. Using a fictional character named Pip, Walch maps the 'blind man and the elephant' metaphor to illustrate how different researchers understand protocols through varied disciplinary lenses.
Gordon Brander presents Noosphere, a decentralized protocol designed to create a shared global mind by connecting thought and knowledge across the world. Brander frames this ambitious project through the lens of planetary evolution—from geosphere to biosphere to what he calls a forming 'noosphere'—and discusses both the conceptual vision and technical protocol challenges underlying the implementation.
Kazys Varnelis discusses the city as a communications system and infrastructure protocol, drawing on his decades of research on network urbanism and how digital technology has fundamentally restructured urban space. He explores concepts like the infrastructural city through case studies (particularly Los Angeles) and examines how digital networks have changed the role and function of cities over the past two decades.
Bryan Johnson discusses the Blueprint Protocol, his personal biohacking and longevity project aimed at reversing aging through systematic lifestyle optimization. Johnson, entrepreneur and founder of Braintree (sold to PayPal) and Kernel (a brain-machine interface company), shares his multidisciplinary approach to achieving measurable health improvements and extending human healthspan.
Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt and the Copia Institute, discusses his evolving thinking on the relationship between protocols and decentralization, drawing on 25 years of observing technology cycles from Web 1.0 through Web3. He presents frameworks for understanding how protocols function in decentralized systems and invites critical feedback to stress-test his current conceptual models.
Janine Leger discusses Zuzalu, a first-of-its-kind IRL pop-up community she organized, and shares insights on building engaged communities. Her talk bridges protocol theory with practical community-building design, offering lessons relevant to how Summer of Protocols is scaling its own cohort and affiliate network.
Evan Miyazono, head of research at Protocol Labs, discusses putting protocols into practice by examining three phases: lessons learned from past protocol development at Protocol Labs (creators of IPFS and Filecoin), current work on funding mechanisms and coordination protocols for public goods, and speculative future protocol designs. He frames protocols through the lens of mechanism design and shares observations from practical experience deploying decentralized infrastructure at scale.
Jesse Walden, founder of Variant and former creator of Mediachain, discusses contract theory and its application to protocol design. Drawing on his experience bridging music, technology, and crypto, Walden explores how smart contracts and tokens enable novel organizational and governance structures distinct from traditional legal contracts and corporate forms.
Christina Dunbar-Hester, faculty in Science and Technology Studies at USC, discusses the intersection of politics and protocols through her research on technology and social systems. Drawing on her books including 'Low Power to the People' and 'Hacking Diversity,' she explores how protocols encode political values and social choices, examining the materiality of technological systems alongside their governance implications.
Annemarie Poorterman and Gina Belle from Cora (a dual foundation and design agency) present their framework for social system transformation through protocols. They introduce Cora Space as an emergent constellation of organizations leveraging shared knowledge assets and frameworks to generate social and renewal capital while navigating the complexity inherent in systemic change.
Alex Komoroske, a veteran tech industry leader known for his work on Chrome's web platform team, discusses gardening platforms—applying horticultural metaphors and coordination principles to platform design and governance. Drawing on his experience navigating large-scale organizational coordination challenges, Komoroske explores how platforms can be cultivated and managed as living ecosystems rather than rigid systems.
John Bissell, CEO of Origin Materials, discusses protocols for transforming matter at human scale through bio-based feedstock chemistry. Origin Materials develops carbon-negative plastics by replacing petroleum-based inputs with biofeedstock, demonstrating a systemic protocol for sustainable materials production that contrasts with traditional carbon-positive petrochemical processes.
Dara O'Rourke, professor of sustainability sciences at Berkeley, discusses how to disrupt and reform carbon data pipelines—the systems used to measure and report corporate climate commitments. Drawing on his experience building Amazon's sustainability infrastructure and climate pledge protocols, O'Rourke examines the governance and verification mechanisms underlying mainstream climate accountability, addressing both the technical infrastructure and institutional protocols that enable or undermine climate action.
Renee DiResta discusses human behavior in the digital built environment, arguing that the internet is no longer a wild space but rather a constructed ecosystem where users adapt their behaviors—similar to how animals adapt to urban environments. DiResta draws on her decade-plus of research studying digital manipulation tactics, algorithmic amplification, and coordinated networks (exemplified by her work on anti-vaccine movements) to frame online phenomena as products of designed systems rather than natural behavior.
Sarah Perry discusses the relationship between protocols as architectural/design patterns and protocols as epistemic practices in science and healthcare, connecting reproducibility, scientific validity, and the distinction between rigorous scientific method and 'cargo cult science.' Perry draws on her extensive writing about architecture, aesthetics, ritual, and urbanism to explore how structural and procedural protocols ensure valid knowledge production.
JD Nolen, an engineer-turned-physician and chair of pathology at Children's Mercy Hospital, argues that healthcare urgently needs structural change through protocol thinking—from informatics and clinical workflows to disease treatment frameworks—but the healthcare system is too operationally consumed to recognize or pursue this transformation.
Kyle Mathews discusses designing soft protocols through a practical Discord bot workshop, building on his background in web architecture evolution from platform-centric systems (Drupal, WordPress) to protocol-centric approaches (Gatsby). The talk explores how decentralized protocol patterns can rethink traditional platform problems like social bookmarking and community organization.
Matt Webb discusses fiction, desire, and belief in relation to protocols, exploring how narrative and imaginative frameworks shape our understanding of technical systems. Webb, a writer and consultant known for his work at BERG and his long-running blog, presents ideas on protocol fiction as a literary and conceptual practice for exploring how protocols function in society.
Ian Cheng is introduced as a leading contemporary artist exploring new media and generative worlds through game engines and NFTs. The speaker illustrates Cheng's influence through the narrative of how their collaboration—sparked by Cheng's book 'The Emissaries Guide to Whirling' and subsequent NFT experiments together—ultimately catalyzed the founding of the Summer of Protocols program, drawing a parallel to Rachmaninoff's patronage of Sikorsky's helicopter invention.
Simone Cicero addresses the polarized platforms-versus-protocols debate, arguing for a more nuanced conversation beyond the 'platforms are evil' tribal discourse. Drawing on 15+ years of experience with open-source models and platform design, Cicero explores the complex relationship between platforms and protocols rather than presenting final answers, grounding the discussion in real consulting work and organizational design practice.
Cory Levinson discusses climate protocols and carbon credit markets, examining who writes the rules governing these systems. He begins by contextualizing carbon quantification and climate market mechanisms while critiquing how the space has approached blockchain-based environmental solutions, drawing on his six years of experience in blockchain carbon credits and environmental marketplaces.
Jason Morton examines money as a protocol, exploring how time and space shape agent interactions and economic behaviors. He argues that current financialization represents a problematic equilibrium that incentivizes speculative rather than prosocial behaviors, using examples like extreme cryptocurrency gains to illustrate systemic dysfunction.
Scott Moore, co-founder of Gitcoin, explores the concept of legitimacy in protocols and social rule-making systems. Drawing on his experience with quadratic funding mechanisms and public goods funding, Moore examines what characteristics make protocols legitimate and how legitimacy functions as a central concern in protocol design.
Geoff Manaugh discusses how burglars and other unauthorized users navigate and exploit urban environments, drawing parallels to how cities function as systems of protocols with gaps and exploits. Through his concept of 'Nakatomi space' (named after the building in Die Hard), Manaugh presents the city as a surface of navigable gaps and vulnerabilities rather than a centrally planned domain, offering an alternative framework to understanding urban space.
This is an open office hours session for the Summer of Protocols program where organizers answer applicant questions about the application process, submission requirements, and the program's working definition of protocols. Key topics include clarification that writing samples need not be protocol-related, deadline specifics (Tuesday the 21st at midnight Pacific time), and discussion of the evolving definition of protocols as 'a stratum of codified behavior that allows for the construction or emergence of complex coordinated behaviors at adjacent loci.'
The speaker outlines the genesis of Summer of Protocols, explaining how initial questions about Ethereum's governance and evolution revealed a broader gap in understanding protocols across disciplines. The initiative brings together researchers from diverse backgrounds to collaboratively develop a theory of protocols and increase protocol literacy through an intensive summer program.
Protocolized is announcing two upcoming events: a celebration of one year of the magazine on January 30 at 9:00 AM PST, and a workshop on writing with AI at 3:00 PM PST the same day. Both events will be held via Zoom and are open for registration.
This editorial post announces Collections, a curated hub organizing Protocolized's past contests, commissioned series, and special projects by theme for thematic exploration. Featured collections include Terminological Twists (a debut protocol fiction contest), The Librarians (stories by Sachin Benny about humanity preserving libraries for 1,000 years), and Ghosts in Machines (a second contest exploring haunted machines).
This editorial announces an upcoming live video event and directs readers to engage with Protocolized content through the Substack app on mobile platforms. The post serves as a community engagement notice rather than presenting a substantive argument or investigation.
This editorial introduces F3D, a framework or concept central to Protocolized's mission in protocol science. The piece establishes foundational thinking about how protocols function and their significance to the magazine's ongoing investigation.
Protocolized is not currently hiring for staff positions. Contributors interested in working with the publication should consult the guidelines for submitting writing.
Protocolized reflects on its first year of publishing, reviewing the content, themes, and community that have defined the magazine's inaugural period. The editorial discusses the magazine's approach to protocol science and its plans for continued exploration of how protocols shape technology, culture, and governance.
Protocolized compiles open-source and open-access materials from the Summer of Protocols initiative, featuring essays, lectures, and workshop templates developed across multiple years. The collection includes research keynotes, protocol projects, workshop frameworks, and instructional resources available to the broader community.
Summer of Protocols runs biweekly Special Interest Groups (SIGs) on topics including memory, formal protocol theory, protocols for business, and protocol fiction, open to public participation on Discord. SIG leads periodically publish articles documenting their groups' discussions and outputs, with archives organized by theme.
Protocolized publishes three types of pieces—stories, studies, and science—with a particular focus on protocol fiction as science fiction exploring strange new rules and regulatory regimes rather than fantasy narratives. The magazine encourages submissions that demonstrate quality through predictive insight into systemic dynamics and welcomes AI-assisted stories accompanied by author notes explaining their writing protocols.
This page announces a curated archive of Protocolized's past contests, commissioned series, and special projects, including the Terminological Twists contest where authors built stories around technical terms, the Knowledge Futurama series by Sachin Benny exploring humanity's efforts to preserve libraries across millennia, and the Ghosts in Machines contest reimagining spectral entities within computational systems.
Protocolized is hosting a two-day online writing workshop in February 2026 featuring four events: a public retrospective on the magazine's first year of publishing (80+ posts and 3 anthologies), a public workshop on writing with AI tools, an invite-only writers' room, and a world-building session. The workshop aims to deepen protocol studies and science fiction while experimenting with emerging writing technologies and established creative principles.