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Where the Stones Hold

Fiction Kannen
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A dark fictional origin story reimagines the nursery rhyme 'London Bridge Is Falling Down' through a scene of murder and conspiracy beneath London Bridge during King John's reign. The narrative follows a young girl who witnesses a mysterious execution on the Thames bank and experiences a complex mix of terror and relief at the victim's identity.

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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.

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Paper

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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.

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Article

A Sea of Distributed Ai

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Sam Chua

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fiction protocols