Skip to content

Guest Talk with Matt Webb | Fiction, Desire, and Belief

Talk Matt Webb

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.

Related resources

Talk

A Protocol Fiction Protocol

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.

fiction protocol-fiction protocol-fiction-protocols

Benitesh Raalo

Talk

Seeing SCP as a Narrative Protocol

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.

collaborative-fiction distributed-authorship fiction

Simon Dea Rir

Paper

A Phenomenology of Protocols

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.

fiction foundations protocols

Janna Tay