The Librarians — Protocolized

A Summer of Protocols fiction anthology exploring librarians and archivists as protocol designers — curators who shape what knowledge is preserved, findable, and forgotten.

Related resources

Paper

Composable Life: Our Island and Us

This paper explores the intersection of protocol design, community formation, and digital culture through the framework of onchain artificial life (OALife), examining how composable systems create new forms of existence and social organization. The authors investigate what it means when autonomous agents designed to be eternal on the blockchain disappear, challenging assumptions about permanence and presence in decentralized systems.

community culture design

Dec 2023

Fangting, Botao Amber Hu

Paper

Founding Memorabilia from the Order of Protocological Death

This speculative document presents founding memorabilia from a fictional 2038 organization called the Order of Protocological Death, which administers end-of-life rites for collective entities and worlds through practices like ritual deletion and memorial compression. The text establishes a taxonomy of protocological deaths (stillbirth, death by success, ossification, mismanagement) and outlines the Order's core functions including world health assessment, funeral design, and protocol archive stewardship.

culture fiction memory

Jan 2024

Summer of Protocols

Paper

Four Doors: An Architectural Memory Protocol

This paper presents 'Four Doors' as an architectural memory protocol that applies medieval monastic mnemonic techniques to a contemporary retreat space, using the building's physical architecture and inscribed doorways as mnemonic devices organized around the intercolumnia principle. The author draws on Mary Carruthers' scholarship on medieval memory practices to transform the Lodge at St. Edward Park into a 'gathering site' and 'machine for thinking' where each architectural threshold functions as a gateway to associated ideas.

culture fiction memory

Dec 2023

Summer of Protocols