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Missing Not at Random

Fiction Spencer Nitkey

In Chapter 5 of the Zoothesia Series, a narrator investigates their older brother Io through the lens of a research project, exploring what makes him unique in a world governed by the Zoothesia Protocols—systems designed to protect people by visualizing and managing information about them. The chapter interrogates how protocols that claim to protect everyone paradoxically render certain individuals invisible or anomalous, setting up a penultimate narrative convergence where overloaded information systems begin to break down.

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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.

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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.

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A Sea of Distributed Ai

This issue features worldbuilding analysis of the AI-generated film South Beast Asia, examining ten core traits designed to explore distributed AI systems through a Southeast Asian-inspired lens developed at the Khlongs & Subaks workshop. The piece unpacks how fictional 'strange rules' address questions of AI distribution while the issue also hosts a guest talk with AI Snake Oil author Arvind Sarayanan.

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Sam Chua