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Missing Not at Random

Fiction Spencer Nitkey
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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.

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