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The Predation Circuit

Fiction Spencer Nitkey
researcher practitioner
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Chapter 3 of the Zoothesia Series explores a dystopian scenario where an 18-year-old with documented violent impulses wakes to find themselves isolated in an empty city, the culmination of years of algorithmic surveillance and therapeutic intervention that ultimately deemed them an 'intractable problem.' The narrative interrogates how digital protocols and predictive systems classify and manage human behavior deemed dangerous, treating the technical infrastructure of monitoring as inseparable from the social and psychological mechanisms of control.

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