The speaker introduces the Spannungsfeld (field of tensions) Special Interest Group, a research initiative exploring trade-offs and conflicts in protocol design and technological development. Drawing from tension games conducted at conferences, the group proposes a framework combining engineering trade-offs with social conflict to understand how tensions shape protocol design and societal outcomes.
Nadia Asparouhova discusses anti-mimetics—ideas that resist spreading or being remembered—drawing from SCP Foundation fiction and connecting the concept to Venkatesh Rao's 'cozy web' theory. She explores how certain ideas fade from memory despite documentation, and examines the tension between isolated intellectual communities and information spread.
Nadia Asparouhova
Tim Beiko and Timber Stinson-Schroff introduce the Bridge Atlas interview series and provide an overview of Summer of Protocols, a three-year research program funded by the Ethereum Foundation designed to establish protocols as a first-class concept for understanding the world. The program has evolved through four phases—pilot, research-focused summer, application-focused summer, and education-focused summer—producing essays, projects, and artifacts while engaging approximately 100 participants to study protocol design, management, and improvement.
Tim Beiko, Timber Stinson-Schroff, Christine DKim
The speaker explores three protocols—cosmopolis, metropolis, and nation-state—for articulating civilizational memory, with a focus on reconsidering what cosmopolitanism means in a changed geopolitical landscape. Drawing on over a decade of blogging, work with the Summer of Protocols program, and AI consulting, the speaker presents a book-length investigation into how these three units function as frameworks for understanding belonging, identity, and memory beyond familiar nationalist or globalist categories.
Venkatesh Rao