Beyond Consensus: Protocols as Digital Institutions

Martin Harrahan (a teaching fellow at Southeast Technological University in Ireland) presents a protocol school workshop demonstrating an LLM-powered pipeline that transcribes and clusters the Summer of Protocols YouTube corpus into 'foundational' and 'aggregated' ideas, which can then be loaded as context to get chatbots to answer in protocol-studies terms rather than narrow computer-science definitions. He then walks participants through using an LLM persona ('Kevin the dinner host') to roleplay a chosen protocol and test it against the ten properties from Josh Stark's 'Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols' framework (e.g. defensibility, mortality, hardness), showing how conversational steering can reveal whether a protocol resists capture or can gracefully die out.

Related resources

Talk

A Protocol Fiction Protocol

Venkatesh Rao presents a theory of 'protocol fiction' as a genre distinct from both heroic fantasy (Ted Chiang's 'special people') and science fiction (Chiang's 'strange rules'), arguing it uniquely captures how humans transform alongside technological/institutional change rather than merely reacting to it or resisting it collectively (per Ursula Le Guin's 'carrier bag' model). He traces this through modernist literature, detective fiction, and Asimov/Dick/cyberpunk eras, then outlines three ways protocols appear in fiction (authorial process, central theme, background device), before Travis Van Epps and Sachin Benny discuss their own protocol-fiction writing experiments, including LLM ping-pong drafting techniques and story ideas drawn from DAO governance and care-package logistics in Venezuela.

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Apr 2025

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Talk

AI as Normal Technology

Arvind Narayanan presents his paper/book 'AI as Normal Technology,' arguing against superintelligence narratives by applying innovation-diffusion theory (invention, innovation, diffusion stages) to AI, contending that societal adoption is bottlenecked by slow organizational, business-model, and institutional adaptation rather than by the pace of capability gains. In discussion with Venkatesh Rao, they connect this to protocol theory, framing workflows, business models, and context engineering practices as new 'protocols' that must be invented, while Rao draws analogies to naval warfare tactics, printing-press literacy, and the hardness/mud distinction from Josh Stark's work to explain why protocol adoption is inherently slow but durable.

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Jul 2025

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Talk

Salon V: Autonomous Realities - 2024 Protocol Symposium

Amber Hu presents research on 'autonomous realities,' the fragmentation of shared experience as personalized mixed-reality (AR/VR) devices proliferate, and proposes a 'decentralized digital chemistry' framework using self-sovereign identity (DIDs) and object capabilities to let people merge disparate mixed-reality worlds when they physically encounter each other. The talk also introduces multi-party computation and private set intersection as a protocol for detecting mutual interest in merging realities before an encounter, illustrated by a planned art piece called 'Quantum Masquerade' for Defcon. Attendees including Dorian and others raise engineering concerns about decentralized access control and cultural parallels to etiquette-based reality negotiation.

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Oct 2024

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