Trust by Protocol — Protocolized

Estonia's internet voting system represents a deliberate engineering of trust through protocol design, where digital procedures replace the legibility and visibility of traditional polling stations. By making the voting process itself a sophisticated yet understandable protocol, Estonia demonstrated that legitimacy in elections can be transferred from physical ritual to cryptographic procedure.

Related resources

Talk

Guest Talk w/ Christina Dunbar-Hester | Directing Signals: Of Politics and Protocols

Christina Dunbar-Hester (USC, Science and Technology Studies) draws on her three books—Low Power to the People, Hacking Diversity, and Oil Beach—to examine protocols as 'terms of relating' that both open up new associations and enforce control, using Langdon Winner's framework that technologies encode order and politics. She traces this through 1990s-2000s pirate/low-power FM radio activism and community Wi-Fi ('cantennas'), gender exclusion and feminist server/code-of-conduct interventions in FLOSS communities, and the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach as a site where standardized shipping protocols produce 'envirotechnical' dependencies and violence (pollution, whale strikes) hidden behind frictionless-flow imagery. She closes by distinguishing protocols (which create hard material/standardized handoff points) from merely 'culturally disciplining' practices like crypto-dancing or feminist server principles, and argues analysts must attend to both material and ideational levels of protocols, their recurring maintenance needs, and how local changes do or don't scale to systemic ones.

cultural-discipline-vs-hard-coded-protocol envirotechnical-infrastructure-and-maintenance feminist-servers-and-codes-of-conduct-in-floss-communities

Jun 2023

Christina Dunbar-Hester

Article

Disentangling the State of Climate

Cory Levinson surveys the current landscape of climate protocols, tracing how carbon markets and DeFi have collided since 2023, with projects like KlimaDAO absorbing millions of carbon credits into blockchain form and Regen Network expanding into biodiversity markets. The piece examines how these protocols are attempting to create durable market mechanisms for environmental assets despite fundamental challenges in traditional carbon crediting.

article climate governance

Dec 2025

Cory Levinson

Paper

Good Death

Sarah Friend argues that protocols can generate living worlds through accumulated user attention and interaction, and that a protocol's 'death' depends on whether it successfully cultivated such a world ecosystem rather than merely existing as a technical system. Drawing on gaming communities' definitions of when an MMO becomes 'dead,' she explores how platforms, places, and social systems generate worlds that persist or perish independent of their underlying protocol's technical status.

community governance protocol-watching

May 2024

Sarah Friend