Seeing SCP as a Narrative Protocol

Simon (first name only; writer and crypto technologist) presents SCP (Secure Contain Protect), a collaborative horror-fiction wiki project, as a model of a 'narrative protocol' — a collaborative fiction system defined by open IP, a clear contribution medium (the wiki page format with required fields like classification and containment procedures), thin curation, no canon, and a pervasive 'passive theme' that lets contributors stumble into ideas. He distills these traits into general principles for designing successful collaborative fiction protocols and compares SCP's structure to internet memes as another example of a working narrative protocol.

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Guest Talk with Matt Webb | Fiction, Desire, and Belief

Matt Webb builds on his earlier essay 'Who Could Write Protocol Fiction' by arguing that protocol designers must deliberately engineer belief and desire, not just reference implementations, drawing on Gabriel Tarde's sociology (imitation and imposition as the only social forces), Dave Winer's 'Rules for Standards Makers,' and design fiction's use of charismatic material artifacts as boundary objects. He illustrates this with Stripe's 'seven lines of code' onboarding and 1950s science fiction's 'consensus cosmogony' of space exploration, then leads a workshop where participants invent protocols (anti-spam payment-gated messaging, death/grief archiving rituals, hazard-alert networks, and the Bristlemouth marine hardware standard) and brainstorm artifacts to generate belief and desire for each.

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Protocols for TV Comedy with Steve Hely

Steve Hely, a TV comedy writer and novelist, maps Hollywood's unwritten protocols onto the Summer of Protocols framework, walking through the pipeline from pitching (agents/managers, the five-part pitch structure, 'burglar ways' like South Park's demo tape) to the writer's room's 'yes and' norm, table reads as laughter-audits, and call-sheet production hierarchies. He argues comedy itself often arises from characters running mismatched protocols (Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, Big Bang Theory), and closes with skepticism that AI can yet replicate the emotional story-stakes that make scripted comedy work.

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Punk, Folk, Myth, Protocols: Sketching The Socioimaginational

Sam Chua presents a framework distinguishing 'punk' (technology without technocracy) as a recurring pattern in Southeast Asian history—sea-punk trade networks, rice-punk irrigation governance like Bali's subak system, and forest-punk hill refuges—arguing these predate and parallel modern cyberpunk sensibilities. He introduces the 'social imaginational' as a distinct layer from the sociological, governed by dream-like, caricature-style logics (metaphor, myth, shadow-puppet non-seriousness) that resist reduction into protocols, and proposes a punk-prep protocol cycle (dangerous protocols breed punks, who build good protocols, which breed complacent 'prep' protocols, which decay back into dangerous ones) as a lens for protocol literacy and design.

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Sam Chua