Samuel Chua hosts a wide-ranging discussion with the Cunk Studio collective reflecting on two years of Southeast Asia-focused protocol work, tracing its origins from the 2024 Singapore workshop through the 'protocol design fiction' method, the 'Humboldtian imaginary' concept for world-building, and the reframing of 'Southeast Asia' as 'Seizure' (sea-centered geography). Participants debate how cultural DNA (bureaucratic, punk, Peranakan, PRC-influenced) shapes which protocol expressions take root locally, and outline future plans including a river-finance climate fiction project and an archipelago coordination workshop in Indonesia.
YouTube’s automatic captions, unedited, so names and technical terms are often misheard. Each timestamp opens the video at that moment.
0:00 Q&A on the first half of the presentation. Uh and then if we want to kind of like once we’re done with that, we can then transition to the more like group chat about like uh some of the stuff that Cunk has been doing and maybe the connection to the larger protocols uh journey. Thanks.
0:17 Awesome. Thanks, Sam. Um yeah, if people have questions like based on that first uh segment, go ahead and and um raise your hand, blurt it out, put it in the chat. Otherwise um yeah we can we can wait for that and the next part is the discussion so this will also be an opportunity I I assume for people to share their thoughts.
0:42 It’s um been kept pointed out that this was like Sora era videogen. Um, it’s kind of crazy to think what that would look like now and how like state-of-the-art that video was at the time. Like it was really really impressive [laughter] versus
1:01 learn how to how to split up stuff into like 5second clips and that was kind of like the before you get the hallucination limit at the time. So like that was and of course that was a very shortlived learning right like by by the like three months later you could do like almost like one minute oneshot videos uh pretty pretty like reliably.
1:23 Yeah I wanted to just flag um I’m always on the lookout for good terminology we can like appropriate and like use more broadly and I think your term um humbultian imaginary is really good. It took me a second. I was wondering whether you you were using imaginary as adjective or as a noun the way it’s used in academia. And I got that you’re using it as a noun. And it’s interesting because uh it’s related to the idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy or hyperstition, but it seems like a healthier version than those words you or those phrases usually mean. It’s like you’re not just imagining something like an exponential process or a transformation process. You’re imagining kind of like a self equilibriating um like autopoetic process which feels like a full world coming into being as opposed to just like um somebody’s idea of progress um being forced on the world. So yeah, Humbultian imagineering uh Humbultian imaginary I think is a term we should all use.
2:32 just putting in the chat imaginary humble thing is what like I think we use there but I’m sure you can find your own riffs on it. I just want to add to that that like uh part of what I think made this useful for us is the way that we actually gone around that you in doing it right a lot of people do world building by basically saying like this is what want to happen and let me imagine that it happens and then I’ll kind of like when you do that you’re kind of basically you’re going through the same path. uh we usually exercise this discipline in our world building about not going for the world you want per se but following things to be the most interesting right like I think we we try and do that so it’s kind of almost like the discipline of like this is a strange rule you follow that down and you get to that world and once you kind of have that world there you you respect that scaffolding and the protocol ethnography or the or the like imaginary humble thing is actually not to try and project onto the world what you want but actually works on that What?
3:25 Oh, ku. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Um, so basically like it’s it’s really about like working backwards from the world you’re building and respecting it. So like in the same way the ethnographer doesn’t try and project themselves on the disciplined ethnographer doesn’t project themselves onto it but tries to understand what it is kind of like we found that that process be quite useful because then if we treat as a given you have to almost imagine different kinds of protocolizations that make that thing possible and it opens up new dimensions at least for us in imagining ways uh forward. Yeah. Um, if there’s any more questions, I don’t know if someone was saying something earlier. If there was something in the chat like you can speak up as well because I wasn’t really keeping track very discipline have one small screen here that I can’t really see multi multiple things at the same time and if not I guess we can go to the next part. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, all right. So, I guess if the other seps who want to join can come join me on the sofa here. I’m going to like just uh set some context in the meantime. I hope you can see our little Cunk Studio sign uh in the background with it’s it’s like a week hole or something. Uh it’s going to be a bit crowded over here, but uh sorry. So hope to add some like comic Q to the to the to the fun. Uh okay, we’ve got
4:44 we’ve got like we’ve got like five nationalities on this so far right now. So uh
4:49 yeah, you’re all welcome. Uh it’s it’s also like 11 p.m. here. So if our energy is a bit like historical that’s probably why. So I’m just going to quickly give some background about. So the next part is going to be let me try and open this. Uh seems like a family road trip or something.
5:10 Okay. Yeah. Um so the this next section is basically kind of like more of a discussion kind of panel thing. Uh and I know we had initially wanted to do a Southeast Asia protocol session. uh bank to add something later on you can do some framing as well right I’ve just kind of termed it like uh prospects predicaments and protocols and there’ll be some reflections from the journey we’ve had but just to set some context for this uh I want to just kind of like give a bit of a peak into why I think uh this is particularly interesting for us in the context of like uh PI and its journey and stuff right so the the sep crew we have uh essentially would probably not have happened without like uh SOP and some of the the instigation that that that provided for us one way or the other intentional or otherwise. Uh we kind of blew out of the Datus and Nusas workshop in Singapore back in May 2024. Uh some of the ideas came out there. There was this post-it note with Cunk written on it that that seemed to catch some imaginations and I guess kind of instigated slash for some of us to keep doing stuff
6:12 here. like uh I I I gave a bit more of a talk um in mid there and then we kind of did the Cunk Play shop thing at the end of 2024. Uh the cost and subox workshop was really like the first chance we got to kind of like become a studio before it was just this cunk meetup whatever. Uh and like also kind of uh through that process we had kind of trying to figure out what what what a format of fiction for that workshop would be which led to this kind of us discovering this method of protocol design fiction. I think we’ve released that uh on the Southeast Asia website as a canvas you can use and we’ve kind of been experimenting with different kind of like scaffoldings for like exploring fiction. Uh since then uh the release of the Southeast Asia video and other videos that you saw earlier uh led to kind of like some ideas about artificial ghost and machines uh contest came out of that a little bit. Uh last year’s protocol school also gave us a chance to like get a bunch of different people together to learn about protocols. we had a binder over there and get together for some time. Um that in turn kind of like fed this other residency I was hosting uh in Patagonia last year uh really exploring like protocols for citizenship uh visas, borders and other things out of which we produce a fictional magazine and this month like uh the five of us here with like probably a dozen other people are all in Chiang Mai for the month uh doing a bunch of different things. We’re making some climate fiction about rivers. We’re doing some cosmological studies and a bunch of other things but also of course tuning into uh the protocol thing and I think all of this in some ways has been part of out of this journey. Uh and I I think like I was just looking up some of the the the writings and I I got this from the protocol institute website describing the original workshop right and I think this was part of the ideas that like uh the workshop maybe like surfaced for us and many other people’s consideration and I think cong in some ways has been kind of like uh tumbling fumboling along exploring these ideas uh ever since uh and like this is a slide from the consonant subs introduction last year where we kind of spoke about learning from historical non-fiction and real protocols in historical societies to then inform different kinds of like uh fictions that could then maybe become design fictions and maybe even protocol designs uh going forward. Uh last bit of context setting and then we’ll kind of go to the chat. Right. So you saw a bunch of stuff that Cunk has done. We’re now in our second year like uh we started in about September October 2024 and this year we’ve kind of doing stuff in different spaces. So ask us about some of that if you want. uh like I I let the group also share some of their reflections and it’s part of the journey we’re on and I think protocols and that stuff has been a big part of it. So I don’t know if the original workshop in Singapore achieved all the publication outputs that we were planning to have but definitely from like uh kind of like the chance to like get this adventure going uh I think we we had a lot of things come out of that for for our little group over here. So wanted to say like appreciation and hope that the adventure on all fronts continues uh in different ways. And with that, I guess we’ll zoom back to the group and uh I’ll stop there. Um I guess we’ll let some different folks share first if they want. Maybe the one in the center. It’s uh so it’s a bit of like a slow motion kind of like album cover or something, but
9:27 No. Okay. Um yeah. If you guys have question make it easier for for this this MLY crew as well. Uh it’s yeah maybe like Southeast Asia and other things. Yeah.
9:55 I hope we’re not like making your symposium look less professional. Uh guys, this is maybe whatever. Uh
10:02 definitely not. Uh I have I have kind of a question uh which is
10:07 um so like you guys are kind of the the first group um in and around the the protocol studies scene that is like a dedicated local thing going on. And I was just curious if at this point, even though it’s early, do you have any kind of dos and don’ts for people that are in other local interested in doing something similar to what you are?
10:35 Oh, uh I hope they caught they caught like uh what was that like the field building David Lang talk the other day like we were all taking notes on the floor here like in our studio or something. Uh so that was a lot of good insights there. Um, I think for us it’s just been about like I don’t know what what we we I think there was maybe an honesty in trying to follow the questions we were curious about and holding a space that was honest to that and uh in some ways even though we’ve done a lot of random things I think kind of being honest to that curiosity and following that curiosity first uh has been has been kind of like a northstar I think we’ve managed to like attract people that are driven by that first and uh not coming for the I don’t know just just for the for the aura like the or the lows or other thing. I mean we have probably a few few to many lows as well but that’s that’s a kind of like I think uh curiositydriven thing that that’s there and I think the I mean also it helps you have a lot of really interesting material right like uh like we feel like we’ve had three pe three people this week protocol built by dragging them to watch some of the stuff that’s going on these nights uh and that’s uh I think that’s we couldn’t have forced them to do it. It was just when you’re there curious about something naturally becomes infectious.
11:43 So that’s one idea. Um I guess we I don’t know what what else do we know about together? Yeah,
11:50 every sep that that that I’ve been to uh like self- selects for people who are very comfortable with ambiguity. And this is like ambiguity not just in terms of like okay come here for a week or come here for a month and we’ll talk about something that’s you know around these madeup terms and people who feel like what’s that I this is so weird I’m not going to come like unless you give me like a proper uh schedule and everything. Those people kind of go away. Uh and the only people who are left are the people who are like yeah okay let’s see where this goes. Um I I want to jam with everyone else. I want to contribute and listen and it really kind of like uh selects for people who are who are there to both give and receive and have an open mind. I think
12:41 I I’ve thought about this before and it’s like um this is a broader pattern um in this community which is like the anti-protocol protocol club. It’s like so many people just like aren’t really interested in it [laughter] like for themselves.
12:56 Yeah. But there’s a there’s also like something important there which is that um people teach best what they most need to learn and like you do have to learn to appreciate the rules and protocols around you and like limit your own behavior for like benefits in the future for the group. So it’s like I don’t know I think there’s something really valuable and like profound there. Uh yeah, I have some thoughts based on like being the um outsider observing this scene develop in the last three years. So I was part of two of the workshops and but not part of like many of the uh in between events you guys have been doing and the first workshop we did uh uh with in collaboration with CSF in Singapore. Um then the second one in Bangkok with a university and you were there in both Sam and I think you were there in both as well Jules. Uh and one of the things that struck me is that Southeast Asia like any other region has lots of different what you might call DNA in its u regional genome. Right? So there’s the very official bureaucratic statist approach. They’re all very strong kind of authoritarian states, all 10 of the countries in the region. Um so you go over there, you get very bureaucratic DNA expressed. Then you go to the more punk-like wipe that you guys have tapped into and you get like a very punk-like expression of what the region is. Um then in the Singapore workshop we talked a lot about the uh Perankan, am I saying the word right? The traditional Chinese um originally
14:31 yeah and that’s another strand of DNA that gets expressed um sometimes. And I when I last talked to Chan Lee, he was doing a lot of research on quote unquote the reening of Southeast Asia, which is, you know, the growing influence of uh um the PRC in the region. So there’s at least four major strands of DNA so to speak in the region. And I think yes, self expression and self- selection is one piece of it, but you can’t select for what’s not already in the genome. Like if you tried to do this process in South America like we tried to kick off last year, it has different sets of DNA going. It might not express this punk sensibility that Southeast Asia is expressing. I don’t know what Argentina will express, but it might it’s probably going to be somewhat different, right? So it has to be in the genes for it to get expressed. But then I think it needs like a couple of levels of opinionated filtering and curation. And here I think Sam you’ve played a big role because you individually have a particular personality of like um holding space and convening spaces where things can happen where many in the you know west for example have more a product orientation.
15:41 So this is something I had to learn working with you which is when you’re doing a program in North America you pretty much have to you you have a very product orientation right let’s write a paper let’s uh do this thing with a tangible output whereas in Southeast Asia I find that it’s like you show up you hang out it’s like let’s go to the night market and get some food together and things start to sort of like simmer on stew [laughter] right and I think this is something part of the part of the DNA is food and karaoke banquet as you know.
16:18 I think it’s kind of a tradition to always have a karaoke session [laughter] before, after, in between, you know, there’s no video evidence that that one is kept uh safely on the lock and key. But yeah.
16:32 Yeah. So to finish the line of thought, I think protocols work by encouraging sort of like the protein expression based on genes of from both like you know the theoretical affordances of the technology like we’re all using live streaming and you know uh crypto and AI and all these tools we’re using but what gets expressed through the media is a function of like local genome and also like I guess sensibilities and yeah this is something to poke God. Damn it. Sorry.
17:04 I I think that really resonates. I think the I mean so almost like at least once a month like typically like once every two weeks I get a new random person who like you know like either has heard about Cunk or like is talking to us and stuff and it’s not like we are we like really shitty at doing like you know like publicity and like we can’t even give up a substack once a month or something right but uh well we kind of we we organize better but you know they’re too busy night markets to do stuff. Um uh but what I was getting at is that uh what gets people in is not that we are particularly like you know like uh like famous or smart or whatever but when we talk about what we’re trying to find they’ve already been searching for it right so that that the authentic like I think what what way you describe it back is kind of authenticity and like uh this is like a separ that many Southeast Asians who are curious who are thinking about are looking for and there’s this kind of like weird contradiction where on one hand you have some of the most colorful, interesting, curious, I think intelligent people uh in the world, right? But and yet a lot of the futures that are on offer that are the the official futures for the region often feel so trickled down, so secondhand. So like, oh, we’ll be like California but 10 years later and we’re okay with that, right? And then here we are in the meantime with, you know, like what we’re on the frontier, we half the world’s green lungs are here, like we’re 70% water, like the like the planet, sea levels are rising, there’s all these different kinds of stuff, right? I don’t think that the region can afford to wait for those things. And I’m not the only one feeling those frustrations. And so when people connect with you and they find that you’re asking a question that they’ve been holding as well and you have other crazy people like them, right? Like that’s when they really connect into it. And I don’t need to do much, right? I just say, “Oh, like we might be in your town like maybe next month or something and people come for them. It’s not like we have crazy like 100% type things, right? But most people who come make at least like one or two really interesting kind of curiosity buddies, right? Uh and that’s that’s that’s great. So I I mean I guess follow what the authentic curiosity is maybe like the transferable domain for that.
18:58 Like I don’t think the punk thing like like saying works everywhere, right? Uh and uh I mean even Southeast Asia is not just punks, right? Like so like maybe we got the
19:07 we have a trash bag on our sign at the back just to make it visible for this. So maybe that says something about this group.
19:14 Yeah. Anyway, um I’ll put much more questions or like if you guys have reflections as well. Um maybe if some of the newer folks who are actually from like uh non-southeast Asian origins can share something without putting you on the spot. I don’t know like because I guess another thing we’re talking about while they’re thinking is that it’s not just a like a Southeast Asian thing right like we started using the term seizure actually coming out of last year’s protocol college uh and we talk about seizure where it’s not Southeast Asia is a very like geopolitical created construction like kind of like the geopolitical model of the world where you have this place that south and east of what right uh and where is that center and seizure was our way of thinking about a new kind of like way of orienting I think maybe like protocolizing geography that’s really about like what is the main shaper of the culture of this place and a lot of places in the world have been shaped by the port cities and the connections to the sea and the supply chains and those routes right so it’s a different way of seeing things based on the kinds of impacts that have happened uh and so like why were we in China earlier this year is and when we when we went there they were like are you a Southeast Asia thing we were like well that’s how it started but we start talking about the sea and the connections people really connected to there and there was a natural um affinity uh from there So one I guess way of also like the rethinking geography I guess has been part of the the the the imagination and research stuff we’ve been able to think think about and explore with that. Yeah. Is Nicholas on here today? No, I don’t know. I can see him. So many names.
20:42 Yeah, I don’t see him yet, but he’ll be here um um later today.
20:47 Yeah, right. Trying this. Yeah, if someone hasn’t spoken, you want to say something, you may. Otherwise, we’re very happy to have your faces just here like uh it’s it’s uh we’ve had a tough time getting people to stay up so late at night to come in in this studio.
21:10 Oh, hello everyone. I’m new in some of Portal and I joined the C punk like three months ago and the thing really interest me is not about protocol like stuff. I mean I work in like blockchain industry before and kind of feel sick on this like um blockchain in general. However, I feel really enlivened by like how the C punk people do things, right? They do a lot of practical things like go night club and sorry night.
21:42 Yeah, never mind. I will die for sure. So it don’t really matter.
21:46 Okay. So I I really feel like enlivened and kind of like enjoy or feel like drained by this like um team and my reflection will be okay we can set up some protocol to kind of like regulate or help people. So that’s one way let’s say we can uh form a group and another way is literally if we sing every night and let or let’s say we eat food together on the street we can also form a group like we are monkey we don’t need those fancy protocol we can just like sing and sorry I mean it’s just like I like protocol but sometimes I also feel sick of protocol [clears throat]
22:26 in the previous talk and uh Nathan was talking about more vernacular protocols versus the ones that are more formal and and uh institutionalized, right? I think uh when bank was talking about how they’re like strong strong states that are very bureaucratic uh but Jules and I was just joking at the back about how we kind of let them
22:52 continue. Oh, yeah. Uh yeah. No, I uh so just to finish off like we kind of have in Southeast Asia we’re very good at kind of like pretending like we respect uh institutions but actually we don’t give a about them. Uh we just do whatever we like. [laughter]
23:16 Uh and and yeah. And and uh so right now uh we’re in a new community space that that uh I I just started in in Mai. I I’m uh I’m originally from Myammar and um part of the Myal exiled community who moved to Thailand because of the civil war. Uh so one of the things that CP inspired me to do was to kind of like take these ideas and kind of like start prototyping them in real life. Uh so one of the things I wanted to do was have uh a space uh in my new found home in Mai where people from from uh from my country who are exiled can learn stuff and just uh share kind of stuff that they’ve learned. uh and do events like this. Uh and I think that’s one of the real concrete ways in which uh when you’re like in an exile community, it can really feel like very isolating because you’re you know you you think of home as something that you’ve like run away from because there’s a war going on. Uh and it really feels like uh you just have to keep to yourself. uh and like meeting these these uh cpunk guys have have really uh yeah like what Sam just wrote in here about how home is a home can be thought of as a set of protocols uh a set of vernacular uh way of uh experiencing and and and uh creating life for yourself I think
24:55 yeah I’ll just add on that a little bit so we’re in Changai here This month, one of the things we’re doing is part of this thing called cosmmo CNX, thinking about cosmolocism as a theory, but also like really talking about in this age of digital nomads where people work remotely and can travel the world. Uh you have these new cities where like you know now you have this kind of like in a sense two different kinds of people, right? people who are locals and people who are nomads and how those relationships grow and uh in the research that’s come this month a lot of the interviews have constantly come back to the idea of home right and uh like that the one of the themes that’s coming up is that like home is something you make right and the kinds of things that you you fall and like you know if we come back to I guess protocol language you know like uh home can be protocolized in some ways right what are the relationships you form what are the kinds of communities and the the rituals you set around you and like this there’s a kind of cunk angle to this where this is a region where a lot of the people here are displaced, right? Like there’s some indigenous peoples in some places, but most people here have been displaced from somewhere else like three, four, five, 20 generations ago. And there’s this kind of like rehoming protocol that’s there. Um, one of the most expensive cultures in Southeast Asia, the Malay culture, right, even has an official kind of like uh that’s a known thing to like they call like Masok Malayu, which is literally like how do you enter into Malenus, right? So like even ethnic identity has a deep history of being protocolizable versus being like essential. uh and that that kind of like uh that in a way makes the current era of like nation state and the the the pretending to be a like adno national civilization stage right uh especially ironic but it’s also like being not just it’s not just funny right because it’s also been very tragic in many ways and I think part of the juncture that Southeast Asia finds itself at is if we can outgrow this kind of like like ethnoism kind of like tendency and really find different ways of rediscovering cosmopolitanism maybe cosmo localism. I think you would find some like fresh frontiers to kind of like really draw on some of those deeper like activate those proteins as as WAP was saying uh in the history and the kind of societies that could emerge out of that.
27:01 Yeah. Or there’s many ways to protocolize chores. I’m sure like I’m sure people have all sorts of systems for them. We can take that for a separate session.
27:09 Yeah. I don’t know if there’s a GCC person in here. Um I know I can see that closely enough.
27:15 Yeah. Um J you want to say anything or is it a bit too sudden? No you like say hi you part of pro college last year maybe something from there or to your work if you Yeah. Okay.
27:29 Uh I guess it’s just interesting to see how just it started off as some words and then now it’s a community like often meets for the full month. So I guess that’s my recap.
27:46 Yeah. Cool. Yeah. This is Jan here who’s joining us from like Korea. She was also part of our protocol in KL last last year and has uh also a pop-up city kind of organizer. Sorry to
28:01 Uh I think we were there was we were uh I was I was at G at 4C’s the day after that that seminar. Yeah. There was there was a lot of interesting research going on there. like uh for those of you who are in Chiang Mai sometime over in the past couple years, the four C’s hub uh in Nean has become really really like uh a buzzing kind of community zone with like they have having like I think free language classes, English, Chinese and Thai. They have a board game center. They have like seminars and stuff like multiple times a week. Uh and I think it’s it’s in a way some of this homemaking right like how do you create the life that you want to have around you and it’s I think places like Chungai are showing that it’s very pro prototypable. is very maybe protocolizable and uh what what the formats for those are things that we are very interested in seeing and expanding upon. Uh I know we have 3 minutes left but we’re also happy to kind of hand the floor back if you’re done unless maybe anyone has some closing comments or thoughts or final questions for this entertaining interlude I guess.
28:59 What’s coming next year? What’s the plan next month? What’s
29:02 the plan for next year? Oh. Uh. Oo. Okay. Like start to see past the next few weeks. Uh we are doing a big climate fiction project for uh for Bangkok climate action week which uh the organizers were saying last month that it was like the largest third largest climate event in the world by attendance last year uh bigger than COP even uh in terms of number of people or something. uh we’re exploring this idea of like rivers as what if rivers own banks and like by extension like what if rivers kind of like reinstituted the world’s financial systems uh similar to how like so that money flows the way rivers flow water or something like that. Uh so that’s that’s a project and all that. Um what do you hope to achieve next year? Uh I guess we hope to keep researching and imagining maybe in different kinds of ways. Uh we’d love to like uh we love to do start doing some like seab punk kind of like uh like real like sea tech you know like uh like one of my dreams uh maybe some of the people here can can riff on it together is like start a ocean tech lab in Shenzhen right like uh solar panel powered autonomous drone boats that can do like logistics across an archipelago for example um I think all the elements of that is very prototypable I’m not a hardware expert but like uh you know like I mean what that that’s what’s I mean If we’re cunk after 5 years and we haven’t built any boats like that that feels a bit bit like glaring. Uh we’re also thinking about uh like uh one of the themes that like uh the Dusa Nusa’s workshop started with was really this idea of like uh how does coordination happen across like uh kind of like a larger set of islands. Uh and the thing about archipelago is that it’s really hard to have one hamon exerting a full span of control. So we’re thinking a lot about coordination across an archipelago. I know some of the swarm and robot staff this year really like uh had some interesting like work around there. Um we’re hoping to do an workshop in Indonesia over the coming 12 months really thinking about the history of like the islands and how what are the different customs rituals and protocols for interfacing and coordination that allowed a large span of non-hermanic control to still be very cohesive as a region and see if there’s maybe lessons for there for the peer-to-peer AI agent world or like the other kinds of governance and coordination challenges we’re having now. We’re hoping to also kind of like begin publishing and compiling some of the stuff. We have now about like three to four like fictional worlds, bunch of theories and stuff for that. Uh Jenna, we love the the book like the book publishing thing. We we’re kind of using that to train some of our stuff and we love to like follow up and see how we can take that uh further like the tooling for like book publishing. I think maybe suit some of the potential things you want to do. So very happy to riff with all of you like uh yeah it’s uh happy to chat and collab with all of you and I think I want to not eat the next person’s time. So uh come chat with us we’ll try and join as much of these as we can but protocol family happy to chat collab whatever in the future.
Patrick Atwater, innovation program manager at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, argues that protocols exist simultaneously as documented formalisms and undocumented implicit norms, using case studies from a neighborhood park, bridge/infrastructure permitting, and track-2 diplomacy to illustrate this gap. He proposes practical strategies for navigating illegible terrain—black-boxing unknowns, cultivating domain-expert practitioners as guides, and lightweight fieldwork logging (e.g., a 'protocol watching' Notion database)—and shares a real example of a water utility valve project where jurisdictional coordination revealed pseudo-official knowledge and unwritten norms.
Simone Cicero of Boundaryless presents O2A (Open Organisation Alliance), a proposed open standard for making organizations 'composable' by replacing implicit coordination mechanisms like hierarchy and meetings with an explicit, machine-readable contract graph of units, offerings, and relationships. He argues the protocol's compact grammar—three economic primitives (purchase, revenue split, investment) plus composition mechanisms—can represent bespoke institutional arrangements like Haier's Rendanheyi model or joint ventures as 'sentences' in a common organizational language, becoming essential as AI agents enter firms and transaction costs collapse.
Sean Stevenson argues that AI is undergoing a 'descent' through Stewart Brand's pace layers—moving from fast fashion/commerce layers down through governance and culture toward nature itself—becoming less dramatic and less contestable as it sinks, following a pattern he traces via Clayton Christensen's theory of attractive profits migrating to the least-optimized layer of a value chain. He proposes a four-stage model (integrate, coordinate, embed, inherit) for this descent and introduces 'appeal foreclosure' versus 'ossification' as a way to distinguish genuine new nature from captured systems, while drawing on Spinoza's natura naturans/naturata and Philippe Descola's ontological framework (naturalism, animism, totemism, analogism) to speculate how AI-plus-protocols might shift human categories of inner life and matter.