In this talk, we'll explore how protocol fiction authors can use an array of techniques from both foresight and game design practices to build rich and nuanced worlds. The foresight field has powerful tools for investigating possible futures of complex systems and for generating evocative scenarios. Indie storytelling games have developed a wide breadth of approaches to evolving coherent and compelling worlds. By the end of this talk, you'll be ready to leverage these approaches to shape compelling settings for your own protocol fictions.
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.
Most teams 'adopt AI' by buying new, and mostly untested software, then wait for a productivity jump that never shows up in the numbers. That missing productivity is the signature of the stage we are actually in: the Kit phase. Every general-purpose technology — the steam engine, the Model T, the PC — passes through it: loose components people tinker with, repurpose, and master by doing, long before anyone builds the firm-scale machinery that turns tinkering into measured output. Farmers ran corn shellers and water pumps off jacked-up Model Ts for years before Ford watched them and built the…
Sachin Benny argues that AI modernity is reorganizing our relationship to the past the way industrial capitalism reorganized our relationship to the future, coining 'Archival Time' as a condition where traces of prior events become retrievable without recreating the event. He contrasts this with Bakhtin's 'Carnival Time,' bounded periods where accumulated traces lose authority and things get unmade and remade, drawing on William Sewell's eventfulness framework (path dependency, temporal heterogeneity, contingency) to argue eventful history requires a mix of both archival inheritance and carnivalesque rupture.