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 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.
Venkatesh Rao
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.
Timber Stinson-Schroff
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.
Venkatesh Rao, Tim Beiko, Timber Stinson-Schroff
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