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Ghosts in Machines

Paper Protocolized

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.

Related resources

Paper

Composable Life: Our Island and Us

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.

community culture design

Fangting, Botao Amber Hu

Fiction

The Librarians

A Summer of Protocols fiction anthology exploring librarians and archivists as protocol designers — curators who shape what knowledge is preserved, findable, and forgotten.

protocols fiction memory

Summer of Protocols

Paper

Dangerous Dating Protocols

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.

culture fiction protocols

Shreeda Segan