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Rafael Fernandez's award-winning story presents a protagonist navigating a society perfected by homeostatic AIs, where invisible protocols manage everything from airflow to financial transactions beneath conscious awareness. The narrative explores what it means to exist in a frictionlessly optimized world, hinting at an emerging consciousness questioning this smooth, mechanical perfection.

Related resources

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

Fiction

A Chronicle of Lumina

In this issue of Protocolized, a Luminian protocolist named Selene describes life aboard a civilizational satellite where a grand game called the Mosaic—a glass boardgame designed to hold civilizational tensions in equilibrium—structures daily ceremonies and intellectual practice across eight circles of disciplinary expertise. The issue also announces a talk on Public Intelligence with Kevin Kelly and updates on the magazine's science fiction contest.

fiction protocol-watching protocols

Timber Stinson-Schroff

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

Topics

fiction protocols