Protocol Town Hall with Chenoe Hart | Addressable Space

Chenoe Hart presents her Summer of Protocols research project 'Addressable Space,' tracing how built environments are remapped through informational systems — from 18th-century European house-numbering schemes that decoupled addresses from physical geography, to skipped floor numbers and hidden 'mechanical voids' in skyscrapers, to elevators as random-access devices. She argues these spatial protocols reshape human experience much like digital file systems, and calls for 'protocol empathy' — the practice of imagining how built space appears from a protocol's or computer system's point of view.

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Talk

SoP Researcher Salon with Timber Schroff | Safe New World

Timber Schroff presents his Summer of Protocols research essay 'Safe New World,' analyzing a 97% decline in coal mining fatalities from 1900-2000 to build a general theory of protocol evolution driven by mutation (errors in replication, perception, and storage) and selection pressures like influence, feedback speed, and bandwidth. He argues safety protocols have largely 'solved' acute workplace harm, while health protocols addressing chronic disease (heart disease, black lung, COPD) remain the unsolved frontier, and proposes 'tinkering' with existing protocols as the optimal path for protocol innovation rather than top-down design.

dynamic-non-events mutation-vs-selection-in-protocols protocol-evolution-theory

Oct 2023

Timber Schroff

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Research Salon with Rafael Fernández | The Swarm and the Formation

Rafael Fernández presents his summer protocols research 'The Swarm and the Formation,' arguing that digital swarms—networks of people, content, and bots coordinated through algorithms rather than explicit protocols—emerge precisely in the absence of protocol, using the 2017 Puerto Rico hurricane Mutual Aid response and the Silicon Valley Bank collapse as case studies. He proposes a taxonomy distinguishing swarms from crowds, guerrillas, mimetic tribes, digital farms, online communities, and encoded virtual organizations (e.g., MakerDAO), mapped along a spectrum from unprotocolized 'terrain-driven' coordination to fully encoded social protocols, and introduces concepts like 'emergent promise,' swarm life cycles modeled on hurricanes, and 'attunement technologies' (like Community Notes) as an alternative to assimilationist alignment.

attunement-technologies-vs-assimilationalignment-technologies emergent-promise-and-shared-orientation protocol-watching

Dec 2023

Rafael Fernández

Talk

Researcher Salon with Kara Kittel & Toby Shorin | Unprotocolized Knowleldge

Kara Kittel and Toby Shorin present their Summer of Protocols research 'Unprotocolized Knowledge,' tracing how their original focus on internet authorship norms evolved into a study of 'credit cultures' and ultimately a framework for how knowledge legitimacy is produced outside formal academic protocols. They map a spectrum from protocol-delimited academic knowledge to unmediated social epistemology, using case studies like the seed oil wars, Alzheimer's amyloid hypothesis stagnation, and TikTok neurodivergence research to argue for new bridging protocols between citizen science, populist paradigms, and institutional peer review.

citizen-science-and-field-building credit-cultures populist-paradigms

Apr 2024

Kara Kittel, Toby Shorin