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from Protocols/Protocol Kit
  • The Protocols mavens were kind enough to send me a copy of their Protocol Kit - Summer of Protocols.
    • I feel a bit bad that I don't work anywhere except from home, because this would be a great thing to leave lying around a work common area.
from Protocols/Symposium 2025
    • I attended 2025 Protocol Symposium. My goal was to get deep exposure to the Protocol movement/field/community, which has been going for a few years and generating an enormous amount of interesting material. I can't keep up and feel like I am missing out, so this was a chance to catch up.

    • Overview

    • I was impressed by the rigor of the thinking and the academic credentials of the speakers. This wasn't amateur hour. Lots of very smart people, from a diversity of backgrounds and fields, lots of artists and policy/management people as well as the more boring technical types like myself. The conference was entirely virtual but the proceedings were deftly guided through a series of collaboration fora including Zoom, Roam, and Discord, and others.
    • I have a hard time when outsiders ask me what this community is all about. It's a self-consciously created field, scene, movement, aspirationally a new profession. These people are not studying protocols in the abstract or in the purely technical sense, they are protocol entrepreneurs, looking to design or change the protocols on which the world actually runs.
    • The field seems to echo the mid-20th-century cybernetics movement in many ways, most obviously sharing an emphasis on systems and a focus on ideas that can cut across natural, social, and technological domains. Also in its somewhat nebulous goals, which include revisioning the world by seeing patterns that already exist, understanding how they work, and ultimately learning to control and create them. The basic subject matter is overlapping if not exactly the same (processes, control, systems). The connection is acknowledged.
    • The differences from cybernetics are probably more salient. Most obviously, there's been many decades of technological experience with digital computers and communication technology. Whereas the cyberneticians designed a science-fictiony central control room for the Chilean economy (which never quite worked), today everybody with an organization to run has dashboards to keep them plugged in, and probably automated processes as well. Not only is this kind of monitoring commonplace, it is distributed, and that is a big difference, we have much better understanding and appreciation of distributed control than existing in 1950. The world has become much more decentralized. Whereas a cybernetician might have dreamed about centralized automation of the economy, a protocolist would introduce a standard that reduced transaction costs (containerization of shipping being the canonical example) and promulgates itself.
    • The project is funded by the Ethereum Foundation and there's a bit more crypto-culture in it than I like, but tolerable. If the crypto world is mostly bros and scammers, this scene is its humanistic and progressive side, the people who want to apply blockchain ideas to make the world better. No dumb ideological libertarian shit, just an appreciation for distributed systems.
    • There was surprisingly little direct connection to AI in the discourse. Even though LLMs were heavily used in teaching and for projects (see below), the obvious overlap of the topics (eg agent collaboration protocols in projects like NANDA) weren't explored directly very much.
    • Also surprising: the lack of computer simulations of protocols. Lots of formal notation, lots of paper simulation games, but nobody seems to be doing computational agent-based modeling or similar, which would be the first tool I would use for protocol design. The formal theory group was reading papers by Axelrod who does do that sort of thing, so its not like the scene is unaware, just not that interested. Just seems weird. I might try to push these ideas a bit.
    • Anyway, the symposium succeeded in getting me at least somewhat protocol-pilled, I am certainly primed to notice and talk about them more. What I will do with these ideas remains to be seen.

    • My low-effort projects

    • There were various interesting exercises and projects and homework problems along the way. I did most of them with an LLM that I had loaded up with the Protocol Reader and some other relevant texts. I thought the results were surprisingly good (albeit suffused with the usual blandness). I am not sure why I am posting them; they are not my creations except for some minor credit for prompt crafting, and anybody can generate their own AI slop these days, you don't have to read mine. But I found it an interesting exercise.
      • Digital Garden Club A site/protocol/database to support the integration of personal digital gardens
      • TIWDLL Political Simulator (LLM), based on some ongoing out-of-ban
    • Following sections are basically raw notes and probably not interpretable.

    • Day 1

      • Giovanni Merlino

        • <Missed the beginning due to early hour>
        • Specification mining (extracting temporal constraints from traces)
        • FSM equivalence (ex. iRobot) Mentions Actor model, OK I need to watch this I guess. Language equivalence vs. bisimilarity
        • This talk is way too mathy for me, can't imagine how the humanists in the crowd are taking it.
        • He's a CPS (cyber-physical systems) guy

      • Random notes

        • Feature flags - PostHog
          • From Timber...I don't quite understand what this is. Looks worth knowing about but not very connected to protocols.
          • PostHog is the open source Product OS - it's a suite of product and data tools, built on the modern data stack. We provide product analytics, session recording, feature flags, A/B testing, event pipelines and a data warehouse. PostHog can be deployed to the cloud, or self-hosted on existing infrastructure, removing the need to send user data to a 3rd party.
        • Marc-Antoine Parent chat, he is a knowledge graph / discourse representation guy.

    • Day 2

      • Eric Alston

        • Protocol Design as Governance
        • image.png
        • Links between law and standards. Imported through tort law and insurers.
        • ISO as most powerful private org.
        • Norms v institutions
        • killswitch theory
        • constitutions (bodily and organizational)
        • why do bitcoin miners mine, why do politicians politic?

      • Primavera De Filippi, Protocol Art

        • She's actually a legal scholar. And an artist around blockchain
        • Foundations of Protocol Art
          • image.png
          • Can't say that's a very interesting or illuminating definition.
          • Related (I would think) to conceptual and interactive art movements?
          • image.png
          • Protocol as tool vs medium (latter, not really "medium", more like the object itself).
          • Like these
          • image.png
          • image.png
          • image.png
          • Managed to ask a question but I don't think I got the reaction I was looking for...about flash mobs.
          • Also asked something about low art, which seems inherently more protocolized (because it tends to be the creation of distributed peer networks). Didn't get much uptake on that, but it informed my project Protocols/SubGenius Protocol Art

      • Vaugh Tan, Public Strategy

      • Strategy: making reasoned subjective arguments and decisions about accetable tradeoffs...OK
      • Decentralized hierarchies need good strategy because they are structurally hard to coordinate... OK
        • Public sector orgs in particular

    • Day 3

      • Stanley Qiufan CHEN , Deepwriting, the protocol of storytelling

        • Breakout session, god am I not in sync with these people. Should hold back.
        • The Buber Protocol – (ok, it's just the Voight-Kampf test)
        • Some prompts
          • Flip the story perspective - maybe humans are not the protagonist or the main narrator, some other source? Flip the genre - make a dystopian story funny, etc etc Return to the resonance - why does the prompt resonate? What is a core human experience that makes you want to dive deeper into the story?
        • image.png

      • Protocol Art Part 2

    • Day 4

      • Helena Rong, Trust Experience Design

        • NYU Shanghai. Taught at MIT Arch (not Media Lab)
        • Protocols of street crossing
        • image.png
        • Protocols as building blocks of trust
        • image.png
        • post-phenomenology?
        • Value- vs proof-based trust
        • social (soft) vs technical (hard)
        • AI and trust (this is too interesting I need to stop taking notes) Agentic web
        • recommneded talk on AI alignment protocols
        • image.png

      • Designing Digital Worlds, Monroy-Hernandex and Hwang

        • Andres involved in Scratch community, Hwang studies Wikimedia community
        • image.png
        • Ref to Benkler (was on his committee).
        • A pretty boring recitation of new production modes (commons-based oeer, platform, etc). Platform-based kind of stole the memes of commons-based.
        • image.png
        • OK that looks very interesting
        • Langdon Winner Artifacts have Politics

    • Unconference

      • Nathan Schneider, Bicorder?
      • Venkat, The Chivalric Turn (before 1300)

    • Day 5 (Friday)

      • Protocols in Practice, Timber

        • Project Dev, Blundercheck, safety policy, linktr.ee/timberss
        • Blundercheck is a chess term, something like the checklist manifesto, keep a library of mistakes and keep checking them (?)
        • protocoling
        • meso level
        • containers – pay attention to all the ones around you
        • practicality > conceptualizing, literacy > vocabulary
        • protocol watching as a practice (there is a channel). Chesterton's Fence? Gordian Knot? Identify actors, gfuess the packets, name the tensions. There's a field guide
        • umarelling – observing building sites (eg)
        • Running vibes vs protocols (carbs vs fat analogy)
        • image.png
        • ETTO (efficiency/thoroughness), tradeoffs --> tensions (not sure I have gotten this)
        • Amazon API mandate is a point of reference
        • image.png
        • – Hazard-oriented protocolling (HOP)
        • Human drive to eliminate anxiety (Hohman?) Protocols can do that
        • image.png
from Debugging Yourself
  • Protocols
    • Hm ok, here's a case where the computational version is a very direct metaphor from human interaction, so what does it mean to apply that metaphor backwards? It means that human interaction begins with a process of protocol negotiation, as the parties involved figure out the nature of the conversation, its rules.
from Protocols/Protocol Kit
    • The Protocols mavens were kind enough to send me a copy of their Protocol Kit - Summer of Protocols.
      • I feel a bit bad that I don't work anywhere except from home, because this would be a great thing to leave lying around a work common area.
    • What follows is some feedback on individual components, as I get to them. This probably reads as more critical than I mean to be, it's just my way of engaging. I actually think this group effort is very interesting and quite possibly of great import (at the moment it seems to be a bit self-consciously trying to be important).
    • Drew Austin, A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space
      • Applies Christopher Alexander ideas to protocols for urban spaces. Brings in a lot of ideas about agency and Stewart Brand's pace layers. I have to say I am not sure what work the concept of "protocol" does here. CA patterns are already all about interactions between people and their environment, protocols seems to be a subset of these interactions, the ones that can be legibilized and formalized.
      • The agency of an individual or group—the set of actions available to them—determines which protocols they can engage with. This, in turn, determines which protocol-mediated parts of the built environment they can interact with as mere consumers and which they can shape more fundamentally. This agency, of course, differs for everyone and even varies for a given party over the course of a day, depending on their spatial and temporal circumstances. But it is always subjective.
      • The two example patterns presented (more are forthcoming) are interesting both variations on one theme, which is the gray area between public and private spaces.
        • Gig Delivery Break Rooms
          • This is a pretty reasonable idea in response to current conditions. Cities are thronging with gig delivery people who have no home base for gathering or basic body functions, so how about providing them with one?
          • The protocol qualities of this seem to stem from the fact that gig delivery itself is an emerging urban protocol. It is already reshaping space (many restaurants now have special corners for holding deliveries, for instance). This is taking an existing protocol and reshaping it to be more humane.
          • The critique of this is that it is a shallow solution to a political problem. Gig workers are denied the very minimal rights employees have (such as access to bathrooms) because the whole sector is based on exploitation. Treating them marginally better doesn't address the real problem.
          • Also – it is definitely not in the delivery companies interests to allow gig workers to congregate, that kind of thing is the first step towards labor organizing. So not clear who is sponsoring these watering holes.
        • Privately Owned Public Space Protocols
          • Now this is actually a novel protocol idea: imagine if any space could tell you its rules in some standard way, maybe your phone pops up and tells you that this seating area requires a purchase, this hotel lobby welcomes dogs, etc.
          • I imagine making all this legible would have some downsides, and it feels too top-down and inorganic. Would work great in a shopping mall, not so great for a public square where the point is that the citizens make the rules and often are actively pushing the boundaries of the rules.
    • Many items riff on memory palaces, hermetic memory techniques, spatialization, and the like.
    • Dangerous Protocols, Nadia Asparouhova
      • A somewhat criticial take?
      • Protocols are touted as a liberating alternative to the walled technological gardens that govern our lives: an eluseive utopiza – centered around user freedoms instead of commercial interests
      • Ah OK, I get the vibe more now, these are people trying to escape the rule of platforms
      • I think this is a fantasy...their purpose has always been to simplify coordination....they do not liberate us, but rather seek to control us completely.
      • cites Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentraliztion (2004, MITP)
      • Protocol def: "procedural systems of social control that simplify communication between actors"
        • protocols reduce the number of decisions that need to be made
        • protocols gain legitimacy from participation
        • protocols resist central management
      • A section on "Subverting protocols"
      • The "Kafka Index" for evaluating bad protocols.
    • Safe New World, Timber Stinson-Schroff
      • Safety protocol evolution in coal mining and generally
    • Welcome to the Swarm, Rafael Fernández
      • On the internat, we are part of swarms: networks of people, bnots, and content, coordinated through algorithmic feedback loops. Swarms are harbingers of misinformation, heralds of mutal aid, and representatives of the public will....most importantly, they can act collectively without explicit protocols.
      • I liked this one, it was crisp and thorogu, characterizing a variety of collective phenomenon (eg "memetic tribes" as well as swarms).
    • Good Death, Sarah Friend
      • Read this while a good friend is dieing. It's more about protocol death, or death of virtual worlds, than ordinary death although it touches on both. Lots of good anthro references on death rituals.
      • Author is some kind of groovy media artist Sarah Friend
        • Sarah Friend is one of the most creative, engaged, and critical voices in the field of new digital art and its discourses. As an artist, technologist, and software developer, she works at the imbricated fringes of art, finance, and blockchain technology. We are proud to announce Friend's first solo exhibition at Nagel Draxler, Terraforming, which marks the beginning of our gallery's representation of this outstanding artist.
from Protocols/Protocol Thinking

    • Preface

    • This was written as my first response to protocols, so must be (mostly) from March 2023.

    • Main

    • Reading list

      • Phil Agre, Routines (maybe a stretch? But shows some new ways to think about the emergence of patterns of interaction)
      • All of software engineering and distributed computing is desiging protocols, basically, especially: languages, operating systems, APIs, platforms.
        • Unix
        • The whole field of distributed computation, esp Actors
        • Why these particular items? They exemplify a particular kind of design, which might as well be called "protocol design" although it is also fairly called "abstraction design". A normal design optimizes a single construct like a house (which might have a whole bunch of divergent and conflicting requirements, but its still a thing), protocol design creates a way for different parts to interact productively with each other.
        • In tech, this kind of protocol design is an everyday activity, almost. Actually, no it isn't, most work is making use of existing protocols, making a new protocol (or language or platform) is fairly rare and requires a certain skillset that not every programmer has.
        • Lambda: The Ultimate Protocol
        • A shit-ton of comedy is about protocol failures, and protocol mechanics -- Seinfeld especially was practically a textbook on this, its followup Curb Your Enthusiasm even more so. It's practically all the characters talk about.
          • Awkwardness might be relevant – as I recall, it is the social condition of not knowing the proper protocol or how to negotiate it.
        • A collection of books on social protocols

    • What is a protocol anyway?

      • technical protocols like TCP
      • social protocols like "restaurant" or "date" or "grocery checkout line", or the more heavyweight ones like "negotiation" or "campaign rally".
      • checklists
      • elaborate technical but non-automated procedures, things that require careful planning, runbooks, like that (thinking of the Apollo program because I'm watching that show)
      • Protocols, therefore, are the very embodiment of A. N. Whitehead’s observation: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”
      • Protocol as ritual minus all the spiritual / psychological aspects.
      • Standardizing various sociotechnical processes.
        • Containerization
        • The way YC made "startup" a routine thing, with very standardized steps.
        • Chain restaurants, Starbucks makes a standard protocol for getting (bad) coffee
      • Biological protocols: there are many

    • My day job

      • Building software that can encode and implement scientific protocols, especially those that require joint execution by human and automated processes. I've been doing variants of this for years; here's a screen from 24 years ago:

    • What's new here

      • My tendency is to think of all the protocol-like stuff I've read in the past (and subtly or unconsciously piss on this new movement, as not really all that new). Trying to avoid that.
      • Protocols as a class of thing
        • that can be studied in the anstract
      • Focus on protocol design, which is a rare and generally under-theorized skill
      • Blurring the distinction between technical protocols and human protocols (not that new, but in our hyperconnected age more relevant than ever)

    • Private protocols

      • Protocols of recognition. Codes of the Underworld. The general idea: most of the protocols discussed seem to be pretty open to anybody, but many real-world protocols fulfill functions of authentication, loyalty testing, and secrecy. Spy protocols and hobo codes are designed to communicate among select parties while excluding others.
      • This just seems like a pretty basic aspect of protocols, not sure it has been theorized much.
    • The Harlan Ellison story Repent Harlequin said the Ticktockman
    • That scene in The Sopranos where they try to shake down a Starbucks
    • Most of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm
    • The Wire (and really all police procedurals)
    • Alright maybe all fiction?
from Protocols/Design Environments
    • Imagine interactive software that aided humans in designing or analyzing protocols, in the largest sense. What would that look like?
    • Is it even a good idea? Real protocols are emergent, not designed. Real protocols involve tight interactions with reality, and a computer that builds an elaborate formalism is missing the point.
    • ACK: The original vision of Smalltalk, and later Playground/Vivarium
    • Workflow systems, boring protocols
    • Multiagent systems (review the lit if possible)
from Desecrating the Dead
from Protocols/SubGenius Protocol Art
    • Prompt: write something describing the church of the subgenius as protocol art, given its distributed nature. All those weirdos making pictures of Bob. Include something about how it is low art as opposed to high, and that's ok.
    • The leap to "commons-based peer production" and "egregore" was all Claude, with Protocol Reader as background material.
    • Note: this whole exercise may be too Pink. It certainly seems to lack a spark of something that you would find in actual SubGenius material – it's too humorless, too generic, too abstract, too bland, too earnest. It "gets it" to an amazing extent, yet also fails to capture the essence of "Bob". That's OK I guess, if mere humans cannot grasp something why would we expect an LLM to do so?

    • The Church of the SubGenius as Protocol Art: An Egregore of Distributed Creativity

    • The Church of the SubGenius represents one of the most successful examples of protocol art in action—a decentralized creative commons where thousands of "weirdos" have spent decades making pictures of Bob, remixing sacred texts, and building a sprawling mythos without central coordination or institutional oversight. It's art as emergent protocol, creativity as commons-based peer production.
    • DobbsHeads

    • The Bob Protocol

    • At the heart of SubGenius culture lies a simple but powerful creative protocol: the iconography of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs. That eternally smiling, pipe-smoking face functions as what the project knowledge calls a "constraint"—a shared framework that enables rather than limits creative expression. Unlike traditional religious iconography jealously guarded by institutional authorities, Bob exists in a state of permanent creative commons. Anyone can draw Bob, anyone can modify Bob, anyone can make Bob mean whatever they need him to mean.
    • This is protocol art at its purest: a distributed system where individual actors contribute unique perspectives and tools to build something of mutual interest. The Church provides the social and mythological infrastructure, but the real creative work happens at the edges, in bedrooms and basements, in xerox shops and early internet forums, wherever SubGenii feel called to manifest their personal vision of the Bob-head.

    • Low Art as Liberation

    • What makes SubGenius protocol art so powerful is precisely its commitment to being gloriously, unapologetically low art. This isn't the high modernist dream of the artist as solitary genius, laboring in isolation to create precious objects for museum walls. This is kitchen-table surrealism, photocopied manifestos, and amateur hour graphic design elevated to the level of sacred practice.
    • The "low art" designation here isn't a bug—it's a feature. By embracing the aesthetics of amateur zines, mail art, and marginal publishing, the Church of the SubGenius created a creative ecosystem that anyone could enter. You don't need formal training, expensive materials, or institutional validation to contribute to the SubGenius visual culture. You just need scissors, glue, access to a copy machine, and sufficient slack-fueled inspiration.

    • The Egregore Effect

    • The project knowledge discusses how commons-based peer production can create what's called an "egregore"—a collective entity that emerges from group ritual activities and operates autonomously according to its own internal logic. The Church of the SubGenius has become exactly this kind of entity: a self-reinforcing cultural machine that generates meaning, imagery, and mythology through the distributed creative labor of its adherents.
    • Each xeroxed collage, each hand-drawn Bob, each amateur comic strip feeds back into the larger cultural organism. The Church creates the SubGenii, and the SubGenii create the Church, in an ongoing feedback loop that has sustained itself for over four decades. No central planning committee decides what SubGenius art should look like—it emerges organically from the creative constraints of the protocol itself.

    • Anti-Rival Creativity

    • Unlike traditional art markets where scarcity creates value, SubGenius protocol art operates as what economists call an "anti-rival good." The more people who draw Bob, the stronger Bob becomes. The more widely SubGenius imagery circulates, the more powerful the overall cultural project becomes. Each new contribution to the visual culture increases the value of the whole system rather than diluting it.
    • This creates a fundamentally different creative economy—one based on abundance rather than scarcity, sharing rather than hoarding, play rather than work. It's an art world where copying isn't theft but tribute, where derivative work isn't parasitic but generative.

    • Protocol Resistance

    • The Church of the SubGenius also demonstrates what the project knowledge calls "protocol tai chi"—working within dominant systems while subtly subverting them. Rather than directly confronting the art world's hierarchies and gatekeeping mechanisms, SubGenius artists simply ignored them, creating a parallel cultural ecosystem that operated according to different rules entirely.
    • By embracing "bad" art, amateur aesthetics, and deliberately anti-commercial distribution methods, the Church created a space outside the normal circuits of cultural capital. It's art that refuses to be captured by galleries, markets, or academic institutions—not out of purity, but out of a deeper commitment to remaining weird, accessible, and alive.

    • The Persistence of Bob

    • What's remarkable about the Church of the SubGenius as protocol art is its longevity. While countless internet communities have risen and fallen, while platforms have emerged and been shuttered, Bob continues to appear in new contexts, drawn by new hands, carrying new meanings. The protocol has proven remarkably resilient, adapting to new technologies and cultural contexts while maintaining its essential character.
    • This suggests something important about the nature of successful creative protocols: they need to be simple enough to understand, flexible enough to evolve, and weird enough to maintain their distinctiveness. The Church of the SubGenius achieved all three, creating a template for distributed creativity that continues to generate new forms of low art, amateur surrealism, and protocol-based community building.
    • In an age of algorithmic curation and platform capitalism, the Church of the SubGenius offers an alternative model: art as open protocol, creativity as commons, weirdness as collective practice. It's a reminder that the most powerful creative systems are often the ones that emerge from the grassroots, that embrace the amateur, and that trust the wisdom of crowds of freaks.

    • Mapping SubGenius Protocol Art

    • Using the classification framework for protocol artworks, the Church of the SubGenius reveals its particular character across three key axes:
    • Systemic, Not Atomic: The SubGenius protocol is decidedly systemic rather than atomic. While Bob's face provides a simple visual anchor, the full creative system involves a complex set of interconnected rules and mythological primitives: the Conspiracy, Slack, X-Day prophecies, the Pink/Normal dichotomy, and an entire cosmology of alien sex goddesses and corporate overlords. Unlike Sol LeWitt's atomic wall-drawing instructions, SubGenius creativity emerges from navigating this rich symbolic ecosystem where each element can be combined, remixed, and recontextualized in infinite ways.
    • Fluid, Not Strict: The Church operates with maximum fluidity, embracing context-sensitivity and interpretation over rigid adherence to doctrine. There's no SubGenius orthodoxy police checking whether your Bob drawing meets canonical specifications. The protocol thrives on deviation, parody, and creative misunderstanding. Like Fluxus event scores, SubGenius "instructions" are deliberately open-ended: "Get Slack," "Kill Bob," "Praise Bob"—each adherent interprets these directives through their own cultural lens and creative capacity.
    • Social, Not Technical: SubGenius protocol art is fundamentally social, emerging through agreements, shared jokes, and evolving cultural norms rather than algorithmic enforcement. While the Church has adapted to various technical platforms—from xerox machines to early BBSes to contemporary social media—the protocol itself lives in the realm of human interpretation and social consensus. Unlike blockchain-based art projects or algorithmic generation systems, SubGenius creativity depends entirely on human agents choosing to participate in the shared cultural fiction.
    • This classification reveals why the Church of the SubGenius has proven so resilient: its systemic complexity provides endless creative possibilities, its fluid nature allows continuous evolution and adaptation, and its social foundation makes it anti-fragile against technical obsolescence. It's a protocol optimized not for efficiency or control, but for creative persistence and cultural transmission.
    • The Church of the SubGenius proves that protocol art doesn't need to be sophisticated to be successful. Sometimes all you need is a pipe-smoking salesman, a photocopier, and enough weird people willing to keep making pictures of Bob.
from Protocols/2025
    • This page is trying to be a top-level index to various protocol-related writings, around Sep 2025.

    • What is a protocol?

      • "Protocol" is. a deliberatly vague, evocative term. Pretty much any kind of pattern involving multiple agents can be considered a protocol.

      • Organic vs engineereed protocols

        • One popular definition in the protocol community: "a protocol is an engineered argument". Evocative but rather limiting, it would seem to exclude all organically arising protocols. The emphasis on argument (or tension or conflict) is interesting, but also maybe too limiting.
        • Handshaking (a widely used example) would not seem to be very engineered.
        • Almost everything around us, in technologically modern environments, comprises “engineered arguments” that resemble urban traffic in their phenomenology.
        • Etiquette as formalizing what presumably starts out as informal protocols. I remember reading Miss Manners back in my gnarly youth and being impressed by the logic of polite society. She's still at it!

      • Neighboring ideas

        • Rituals

          • Religious rituals like prayer have the interesting property that one of the participants is imaginary or at least, not physically present. The ritual's purpose is to conjure the presence.

        • Scripts

          • The Schankian AI model

        • Standards

      • Micro and macro protocols

        • Micro: handshaking, and other small local social rituals.
        • Macro: cargo containerization

    • Against formalization

    • (not really against, but carping with the particular approaches being used)

    • An Ethnomethodology turn

      • Sorry to sound pretentious. My oversimplified view of ethnomethodology: formal structure is not the generator of social interaction, but its product.

    • Objects, actors, and multi-agent AI as early protocol theory

    • object-oriented programming began as an attempt at a protocolized version of computer science. Casting all computation as patterns of message-passing.
    • Carl Hewitts work was both an attempt to make a more rigorous formalization of OOP (Actors) and apply it to large-scale socio-computational systems (eg in Offices are Open Systems)

    • Protocols in fiction

    • The protocol people are inventing new genres of "protocol fiction" but I'm more interested in detecting protocol themes in existing fiction (very common, esp given an expansive definition of protocols to include basically all social behavior) They are so commonplace and foundational to social interaction. Everything from comedy to police procedurals involves protocols, often explicitly (that is, characters don't just enact them, they are aware of them and talk about them). Still, this scene from The Sopranos stands out because it involves a collision of two different protocol worlds. [The Sopranos - Patsy and Burt failed extortion attempt at "Starbucks" - YouTube)

    • Protocols as practical anarchism

      • Politics and protocols. People like Charles Tilly studied protcols of conflict; what about protocols of cooperation?
      • Protocols and group formation / boundary maintainence.
      • Protocols: anarchism for autists.
        • Libertarianism is the belief that there is (or should be) only one protocol (trade). Or that you can factor social reality into TWO protocols, trade and violence.

    • Protocols and cybernetics

      • The protocol movement has some loose resemblance to cybernetics (jointly thinking about natural and artificial systems eg) but definitely from a different era (and if the underlying energy of cybernetics was from WWII, the same from this community is from crypto, the funding comes from the Ethereum Foundation).
      • (from email to a friend – I think this explains my attraction to the field)
from Protocols/2025
from anarchism
from Protocols/Formalism
    • Mostly the focus has been on "mathy" representations like Petri nets, Communicating Concurrent Processes, with occasional dips into category theory. I'm not a big fan of these, and have been lightly pushing in different directions. I've had a hard time explaining why, so this page attempts to lay out my thinking a bit. I apologize for being carping and critical, and should acknowledge that many other people in the group are grappling with the issues and trying to come up with better solutions.

    • Why not procedural modelling?

      • The FPT group has looked at a bunch of different theories and formalisms, but seems to have neglected the simplest and most obvious way to model a protocol: as a set of communicating procedural objects. That is, let's say you wanted a model of a protocol, say traffic. You could make rule-based agents for the cars, the lights, any other entities involved, and run them in a simulation. This is maybe not as elegant as more declarative mathematical formalisms, but its (a) much easier to construct and understand (b) produces cool animations to spur further thinking and experimentation.
      • I've suggested some moves in this direction (eg using the more object-oriented Actors model of computation, or one of the existing agent-based modelling frameworks like SugarScape or NetLogo. SugarScape is mentioned as a "lodestar" Woodenman Group 1 but in general there doesn't seem to be a ton of interest in this approach.
      • The nice thing about agent-based modelling is that a child can understand it (this is the basis for Logo). It's a powerful thinking tool, and much more accessible than more mathy formalisms like CCS or category theory. I've built systems like this in the past, such as Behave! (an animal-behvior modelling environment designed for maximum non-technical accessibility). And see Vivarium Project for a more expansive version of the idea of a learning/simulation environment.
      • Of course it depends on the goals of formalism. If it is to make iron-clad proofs about tightly-defined technical protocols, then you might want something more mathy. That stuff has its uses, to be sure, eg in cryptocurrency or networking. But most of the interesting stuff in protocol theory deals with vaguer, more human-centric protocols, and those seem less amenable to this kind of thing.
      • The strongest mark against these formalisms is that they are rather forbidding to people without a math background. The protocol field is trying hard to be inclusive of non-technical people (artists, policy people, activists) and a tool that is too mathy won't be of much use to them.

    • The interesting parts of protocols aren't formalizable

      • This is kind of a separate argument and has the problem that it is really against any kind of formalism, not just the mathy ones.
      • One of the canonical examples used in the SIGFPT is handshaking. I haven't actually seen a formal model for this but you can imagine what it looks like: one party sees another, approaches, extends hands, grip, release, while the other party acts accordingly. You can make a state diagram for this, but it will probably fail to capture what is interesting about handshaking, all the subtle social cues involved in it. Here eg is a paper that tries to get at that with a Erving Goffman -microsociology lens: The handshake as interaction by Hall & Hall.
        • A 'good' handshake, according to Vanderbilt, is 'elbow level, firm, and brief' (1972:241). Post says, The proper handshake 'is made briefly, but there should be a feeling of strength and warmth in the clasp' (1940:23). Bad handshakes include the bone crusher — the grip that makes the other person, especially a woman wearing rings, wince. Or a limp, damp handshake that seems to say, 'I am not really happy to meet you at all!' Or it may be the kind of straightarm shake that seems to hold the other person off or the octopus grip that draws you inexorably toward the shaker, who never seems to want to let go.
      • It might be theoretically possible to formalize all this, but quite difficult.
      • Another key aspect of protocols that tends to be left out of formalizations is enforcement and violations. Protocols are not mere patterns of action, but social objects that people orient to, make use of in structuring their behavior, and violate when they can get away with it. This is the point of Ethnomethodology, roughly that the formal structures of protocols are not constitutive but are the product of people's improvised social activity. This is also their most interesting aspect.
      • None of this is really an argument against formalism, just that I find the interesting bits of protocols lie in the areas where formalisms are weak.

    • So what do I suggest?

      • Instead of mathy formalisms (or in addition), focus on agent-based modelling. Build an environment and modelling language that looks like rule-based Actors or something, where protocols can be expressed in simple condition-action rules. Make it easy for people to run simulations involving a lot of interacting agents, and vary parameters, do experiments. NetLogo is an existing platform that could be used for this. Run workshops where people are trained to build models, put them up in public.
      • Perhaps this is just a different effort than formal theory. Call it protocol modelling or simulation or somesuch.
from Protocols/Ideas

    • Agent-based protocol modeling

      • Eg with NetLogo, SugarScape or something new. Note "agent-based" has different connotations nowadays (LLM-BS), so maybe need a different term.

    • Real world alternative protocol domains

      • Wikipedia, open source, Burning Man (these must be in SOP stuff already)
      • So I went to Burning Man for the first time, and it was quite as amazing and overwhelming as I had hoped. I don՚t think I՚m going to go into details here. But I have to note that the fundamental thing about this event, which everybody knows but is not often made explicit, is that the whole thing is conceived, designed, built, and populated by people who are tripping balls most of the time (with exceptions). **Black Rock City thus mirrors one of the more interesting phenomena of drug use: that a mind (or city) can be completely fucked up and yet still manage to perform most of the necessary operations to sustain daily life. I can՚t quite explain how this works, but in both cases it seems to say something about the robustness of the system architecture, for lack of a better term.** A normal computer, by contrast, can՚t tolerate even a single component going wrong.
      • Software and other standardization projects. Surely this has been studied to death.
      • Scientific Data Sharing protocols (Science Commons, )

    • Microsocial protocols

      • Claude (interestingly bullshitty, usually Claude sounds better)
      • Note that this approach has some tension with classical formal methods; I think that could maybe be interesting.
      • Also, serious sociological study of this stuff is great, but isn't comedy actually a better reflection on social protocols? Seinfeld/Larry David especially, but a lot of humor is based on noticing and/or violating protocols.

    • Protocols and motivation

      • eg, why do people adhere to protocols, or not? If they are rules, how are they enforced, if they are better than rules (eg because self-enforcing), how does that work?

    • More!

      • These are getting very random

      • Protocol and Narrative.

        • I'm sure there is tons of work on this but I am interested iin how people undeerstand and implement protocols with narrative intelligence.

      • Protocols and programming

        • These are blending and maybe have always been blended.

      • Protocols against Fascism

        • no idea, but how about seeing if this can apply to the actual big problem?

      • The Soul of Man Under Protocols

        • OK I don't know what I mean, phrase popped up...really wodnering, what do I personally do in a protocol world?
        • Smalltalk. Do you chat with your Uber driver or treat them like machine parts? Do you modulate your voice to create just the right level of intimacy?

    • Cancer as a Protocol Problem

      • Q: how useful is this? (That is, how useful is protocl language, above and beyond the existing framework of evolutionary theory).
        • Which allows you to apply agentic language to cells and genes. Everyone understands what it means. Or thinks they do. Selfish genes are not really selfish except they kinda are.
        • I guess the question is whether the further metaphor of agreements and cheating (protocolic language) is useful
        • or interesting.
from Protocols/Protocol Fiction (Classic)
    • The Harlan Ellison story Repent Harlequin said the Ticktockman
    • That scene in The Sopranos where they try to shake down a Starbucks
    • Most of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm
    • The Wire (and really all police procedurals)
    • Bruce Sterling’s 1998 novel Distraction has a number of different aspects involving protocols:
      • the opening scene is a flash mob swarming attack on a bank
      • the main character is a political operative who is trying to resucitate failing social institutions by protocol-hacking them
      • one of his clients is an architect/designer who developed a distributed, protocolized construction technology which figures in the plot
    • The Bruce Sterling story Maneki Neko has a network-mediated gift economy that exists as a kind of subversive subculture within capitalism. This story also involves a conflict between protocol systems. I officially declare this the most protocol story ever.
from Protocols/Study
    • (56) Intro to Protocol Studies - YouTube
      • what is a protocol? Better not to define, but: "an engineered argument"???
        • I guess that reflects that people have conflicting motives and only agree tentatively?
      • "a stratum of codified behavior that allows for...complex coordinated behavior"...
      • technical side and social/human side
      • "protocolization debt" the pope will help...
      • Protocol Studies 101: terms
        • engineered argument
        • agents
        • strata and loci
        • tensions
          • a trade-off (engineering) plus a conflict (social)
          • every loci has a set of trade-offs (eg productivity vs safety)
        • whitehead advance
          • "civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them"
          • eg abstraction, but they don't use that word for some reason
        • kafka protocol (index)
          • measure of protocol badness (eg TSA, no feedback loop, more decision burden)
        • hardened commons
          • a system that produces or stewards shared resources with resiliency
          • Wikipedia(? my example)
          • vulnerabilities: commons abuse, goodharts law, etc.
      • VGR: managing tensions at an ecosystem level
      • Robert Peake
    • Protocol Reader
      • Where the cyberpunk hero was a lowlife maverick outsider who typically had to hack their way to technological agency from an external locus, what we might call the protocol punk hero operates from within a protocolized environment where boundaries separating insides and outsides are increasingly meaningless...The protocol punk hero is an archetype that merges the 1950s style insider bureaucrat hero5 and the 1980–90s style outsider maverick hacker hero.
      • When everything is inside the belly of the technological beast, there is no “outside” or “underbelly.” There is only a range of postures of greater or lesser agency that one can adopt while on the inside. The greater the attunement to the protocolized environment, the greater the agency. The greater the attunement to mere technocracy, the lower the agency.
      • >Where the bureaucratic hero has mastered a specific set of institutional realities (and is typically helpless outside those realities), the hero of a protocolized world has mastered a general set of technological patterns that undergird not just the internal realities of organizations across the entire planet but even the interstitial spaces between them.
      • Whitehead advance a bit of jargon, which basically means "institutional abstraction"
      • Observability with Charity Majors who does database monitoring and stuff like that. Cool person it looks like.
      • Ben Zucker, protocol engineering and music (intersting!)
      • from monitoring to observability. Architecture has exploded, no longer possibnle to have simple models.
      • vemlat ref IBM Autonomic Computing, feedback and control theory.
      • auto instrumentation. "add little notes to your future self" to record intent. Need fast feedback loops.
      • The kids today don't know about cycling power supplies
      • Devops movement is ending?
      • How does Honeycomb interview? Takehome, but judged on review process. Makes sense. They try to lower the stakes, but its hopeless. everybody hates interviews.
      • Venkat brings up AI, ok, that is more interesting. MLOps. Charity: little has changed. LLMs are just another trace. OK. "the only companies making money from AI are those who laready have reliabiliyt/observabilty in place". MCP is mentioned. Charity is somehwat AI-skeptic.
      • API gives the same answer, MCP doesn't.
      • Some companies require using AI coding assistance (bleah). Charity doesn't because not authoritarian, but most people are doing it anyway
      • disposable vs durable code. both have their uses.
      • Venkat brings up protocol observability at 45:00 or so.
      • "high cardinality" has some special buzzword (eg ssns vs gender).
      • Venkat: scattering small microphones to detect illegal logging.
      • Protocol town hall Nathan Schneider, academic at U Col and looks interesting
      • Alexander Galloway, Protocol. 2004 (important book that I have not heard of) (but there are critques)
      • Protocols as hgistorically foundational: "Understadniugn Early Large-Scale Collectives" (book by archeologiests) – sounds really interesting
      • His lab is working on dispute protocols for online communities (sounds useful).
        • "Dispute Protocol Builder"
      • Protocol capture
      • "Protocological Governance" Between Sovereignity and Entanglement (with Johannes Bennke)
      • "Vernacular Protocols" with Avery Edenfield Pattern Design from Below (some stuff with trans community)
        • as opposed to Galloweay's top-down concept
      • Broad definition: protocol as pattern of interaction
      • image.png
      • image.png
      • book: Governaable Spaces, implicit feudalism
      • VGR comes on, says Nathan has been doing work in paralleil with SoP community, interesting.
      • Some notes about diaspora jews, network protocols vs dominator protocols (see The Jewish Century )
from Protocols/Personal Health Agent
    • This was another Protocols/Symposium 2025 exercise, I forget which session. It's a whole business plan! Too bad I'm too lazy to start a company. Not going to bother pasting the whole thing this time; you can read it here Some highlights:

    • Elevator Pitch

    • Asclepios is a personal health agent that acts as both an AI health coach monitoring your biometrics and lifestyle patterns and a smart broker that negotiates medical services by matching you with optimal providers through a decentralized health protocol network based on verified outcomes data and peer experiences.

    • Scenario

    • Maya, a 34-year-old freelance designer, interacts with her personal health agent Asclepios through her spatial computer interface as she navigates a minor but persistent digestive issue. Asclepios, drawing from both Maya's continuous biometric data and the decentralized Global Health Protocol Network, first coaches her through elimination diet protocols and stress management techniques while simultaneously scanning the network for specialists in her bioregion who have successfully treated similar cases. The agent negotiates directly with providers using Maya's health tokens, comparing not just costs but treatment success rates, patient satisfaction scores, and protocol compliance—all verified through the blockchain health commons. When Maya's symptoms persist, Asclepios brokers a consultation with Dr. Chen, a gastroenterologist whose treatment protocols have shown 87% efficacy for Maya's symptom cluster, while also connecting her with a peer support group of three other network members who've successfully resolved similar issues. Throughout the process, Asclepios maintains Maya's health sovereignty by ensuring all data remains in her personal health vault, while contributing anonymized insights back to the protocol network to help future patients—creating a regenerative health commons where personal health agency and community knowledge amplify each other.

    • Dealing with trust issues

    • Here are trust-building rituals and signals that could strengthen this health system: Provider Trust Rituals
    • Proof of Care Ceremonies: Monthly community gatherings where providers present anonymized case studies and receive peer feedback, creating accountability through public practice review
    • Skin in the Game Staking: Providers lock health tokens as collateral for outcomes - poor results forfeit stakes to a patient compensation fund
    • Open Practice Protocols: Providers live-stream consultations (with consent) or maintain public decision logs, creating radical transparency
    • Continuing Education Rituals: Mandatory participation in protocol network learning sessions, with community-witnessed skill updates Patient Community Rituals
    • Health Journey Sharing: Structured storytelling sessions where recovered patients guide newcomers through treatment paths, building experiential trust
    • Peer Verification Circles: Small groups that validate each other's health improvements and provider experiences before they enter the broader network
    • Collective Care Protocols: Community members commit to checking on each other during treatment, creating mutual accountability
from Protocols/of Protest
    • The day after Protocols/Symposium 2025 ended, I went to the local TeslaTakedown protests, in Colma CA, where my wife and I have been going irregularly for the last six months or so. Naturally I couldn't help seeing it through newly protocol-pilled eyes.
    • I was going to write something about that but turns out, better to let an LLM do it)). This was a multi-step conversation; my prompts are indicated as blockquotes. The full dialog is here; including the "reasoning" steps which were kind of interesting in this case.
    • This might be the first case where I felt that an LLM was not just aiding me, but actually thinking better than I could on my own. Well, better in some dimensions. Certainly making more connections amongst protocolish ideas than I would.
    • Protocols of street protest. Write something about that. Also maybe include something from Erica Chenoweth research, apparently she did a quantitative study of what scale of protest you need to be effective

    • Protocols of Street Protest: Emergence, Scale, and Adaptive Resistance

    • Street protest operates as a swarm protocol - a decentralized coordination mechanism that emerges from shared grievance and scales through network effects. Unlike traditional organizational hierarchies, protest protocols create order from apparent chaos through distributed participation governed by simple, transmissible rules.

    • The Chenoweth Threshold: Protocol Activation at Scale

    • Erica Chenoweth's quantitative research reveals a critical protocol parameter: **campaigns mobilizing at least 3.5% of the population in sustained action have never failed to achieve their goals**. This isn't merely a statistical observation but a protocol design principle - the threshold where distributed resistance creates sufficient systemic disruption to force accommodation or regime collapse.
    • The 3.5% rule demonstrates how protest protocols achieve phase transitions. Below this threshold, resistance remains containable within existing system parameters. Above it, the protocol generates emergent properties that fundamentally alter the operational environment for power structures.

    • Protocol Components in Practice

    • Drawing from both VGR's framework and resistance research, effective street protest protocols contain:
    • **1\. Promise/Grievance Broadcasting**
    • Simple, transmissible core message (like China's "white paper" symbol)
    • Viral amplification through decentralized broadcasting nodes
    • Protection mechanisms for individual participants
    • **2\. Participation Lowering Barriers**
    • Nonviolent methods reduce "moral, physical, informational and commitment barriers"
    • Multiple participation modes accommodate diverse capacities
    • Open-source participation (anyone can join without credential checks)
    • **3\. Tactical Diversity and Innovation**
    • Creative disruption that maintains initiative (Morocco's patriotic-colored cats)
    • Economic pressure through strikes, boycotts, infrastructure occupation
    • Cultural/symbolic actions that "break down the regime's invincibility"
    • **4\. Anti-Fragile Organization**
    • Rhizomatic growth that survives repression
    • Distributed leadership preventing decapitation attacks
    • Discipline protocols that prevent violent escalation

    • Protocol Aliveness vs. Effectiveness

    • A protest protocol becomes alive (in Alexander's sense) when it creates conditions for human flourishing rather than merely achieving tactical objectives. This means:
    • Generating new forms of solidarity and democratic participation
    • Creating prefigurative spaces that model desired futures
    • Building resilient networks that persist beyond immediate campaigns
    • Fostering collective intelligence through inclusive decision-making
    • The most successful protest protocols don't just topple regimes - they establish new patterns of coordination that can be forked, modified, and redeployed across contexts. Like software commons, they create ongoing infrastructure for collective action.

    • Implementation Considerations

    • For protest protocols to remain "alive" and adaptive:
    • Local Forking: Core tactics must be locally adaptable while maintaining network compatibility
    • Learning Loops: Systematic capture and sharing of tactical innovations across movements
    • Counter-Protocol Resistance: Anticipation of state counter-measures and adaptive responses
    • Post-Victory Governance: Protocols for transitioning from resistance to reconstruction
    • The protocol paradigm suggests that street protest isn't just about expressing dissent, but about prototyping new forms of collective coordination that can scale and evolve. The most powerful protest movements become laboratories for democratic innovation, creating reusable templates for bottom-up organization. This framing positions street protest as both a means of resistance and a form of infrastructure building - each successful campaign contributes to a commons of organizational knowledge that strengthens future movements.
    • Here is one of my personal observations, please expand on them: The location (in this case, Tesla dealerships, so very distributed) is a schelling point or nucleation site

    • Tesla Dealerships as Distributed Schelling Points: Protocol Architecture for Coordinated Action

    • Your observation about Tesla dealerships as schelling points reveals a sophisticated distributed coordination protocol that deserves deeper analysis. This represents a evolution in protest infrastructure that leverages corporate spatial distribution as a protest coordination layer.

    • Schelling Points as Protocol Infrastructure

    • Tesla dealerships function as pre-established coordination nodes that solve the fundamental collective action problem: where do we meet? Unlike traditional protest sites (capitol buildings, city centers), corporate retail locations create a standardized, distributed protest infrastructure with several key properties:
    • Geographic Distribution: Tesla's retail strategy places dealerships in affluent suburbs and urban centers across vast geographic areas, creating simultaneous local accessibility and national coherence. Protesters don't need to travel to a single central location - they can participate locally while being part of a coordinated national action.
    • Symbolic Convergence: The dealership serves as both a physical meeting point and a symbolic target - each location embodies the entire corporate entity being protested. This creates what we might call "fractal targeting" where local action directly engages the global issue.
    • Cognitive Load Reduction: Participants don't need complex coordination to find each other. The dealership location is unambiguous and discoverable - it's literally designed to be found by consumers, making it perfect for protesters.

    • Nucleation Sites and Phase Transitions

    • The nucleation metaphor is particularly apt. In physical systems, nucleation sites are where phase changes begin - where order emerges from disorder, or where new structures crystallize. Tesla dealerships function similarly as crystallization points for collective action.
    • Activation Threshold: Each dealership becomes a site where the **Chenoweth 3.5% threshold can be tested locally. A successful protest at one location provides proof-of-concept and model for others, creating cascading activation** across the network.
    • Local-Global Feedback: Actions at individual dealerships create emergent network effects. Success at one location provides templates, tactics, and momentum that propagate through the network, while the distributed nature makes total suppression impossible.
    • Standardized Disruption: Because Tesla dealerships follow standardized design and operational protocols, protest tactics developed at one location are immediately portable to others. The corporate standardization becomes protest infrastructure.

    • Protocol Design Implications

    • This distributed schelling point model suggests new principles for protest protocol design:
    • **1\. Corporate Infrastructure Hijacking Rather than building protest infrastructure from scratch, movements can parasitically utilize** existing corporate distribution networks. Any sufficiently distributed corporate presence becomes potential protest infrastructure - Starbucks, McDonald's, Apple Stores, etc.
    • **2\. Fractal Coordination Each location becomes a scale-invariant representation of the larger target. This allows movements to achieve simultaneous local presence and global impact** without requiring massive central coordination.
    • **3\. Accessibility Without Dilution Traditional mass protests often require choosing between accessibility** (everyone can participate) and impact (concentrated force). Distributed schelling points solve this tension by enabling locally accessible, globally coordinated action.
    • **4\. Immune System Evasion Distributed actions are harder for authorities to suppress because they require simultaneous response across multiple jurisdictions**. The protest protocol becomes more resilient by distributing load across the system.

    • Strategic Considerations

    • Network Density: The effectiveness depends on sufficient node density - if dealerships are too sparse, the coordination benefits diminish. Tesla's aggressive expansion actually creates better protest infrastructure over time.
    • Symbolic Coherence: The target must have sufficient symbolic weight to justify the distributed action. Tesla works because it represents broader issues (tech power, environmental policy, labor practices), making each dealership a meaningful proxy.
    • Timing Synchronization: Distributed actions require temporal coordination even when spatially distributed. Social media and digital communication become critical for achieving simultaneity without centralization.

    • Beyond Tesla: Scaling the Model

    • This pattern suggests a broader corporate-parasitic protest protocol:
    • Amazon fulfillment centers for labor/monopoly protests
    • Bank branches for financial system resistance
    • Fast food chains for wage/labor actions
    • Tech company offices for surveillance/AI governance issues
    • Each represents a case where corporate distribution infrastructure can be repurposed as protest coordination infrastructure, turning capitalism's spatial logic against itself.
    • The Tesla dealership model demonstrates how effective protest protocols can leverage existing systems rather than building parallel infrastructure, creating maximum coordination with minimal overhead - a truly elegant protocol design that scales naturally with corporate expansion.
    • Another personal thought, please expand: there are impromptu signalling protocols, like people who drive by honking to show either approval or disapproval. The problem is that there is no way to tell which it is! How could protocol thinking be applied here? It's mostly approval I think, the hostile ones gun their engine or yell obscenities.
    • This is a fascinating observation about impromptu signaling protocols in protest settings. The user is pointing out an ambiguity problem in decentralized signaling - honking can mean approval or disapproval, creating interpretation challenges. They note that hostile responses tend to use different signals (engine gunning, obscenities).
    • This is a great example of protocol design problems in the wild - where emergent signaling systems have ambiguity issues that could be solved with better protocol design. Let me think about this through the lens of protocol thinking and how it could be improved.
    • Key issues: 1. Signal ambiguity - same signal (honking) can mean opposite things 2. Context dependency - interpretation requires additional context 3. Asymmetric clarity - negative responses are clearer than positive ones 4. Spontaneous participation - people want to signal support but lack clear protocol Protocol solutions could involve:
    • Signal differentiation (different honk patterns)
    • Visual accompaniments
    • Timing protocols
    • Standardized gestures
    • Technology assistance
    • This connects to broader themes about communication protocols, signaling theory, and collective action coordination.

    • Honking Protocols: Designing Clear Signal Differentiation for Distributed Support

    • Your observation reveals a critical signal disambiguation problem in spontaneous protest communication. The honking ambiguity represents a classic protocol design failure: insufficient signal specification that creates coordination breakdown precisely when community expression is most needed.

    • The Signal Ambiguity Problem

    • Current "honking protocol" suffers from semantic overloading - a single signal (horn honk) carries multiple contradictory meanings without disambiguation mechanisms. This creates: Interpretation Uncertainty: Protesters can't gauge actual support levels because each honk requires contextual interpretation Feedback Loop Breakdown: Ambiguous signals prevent effective community mood sensing Participation Deterrence: Potential supporters may avoid signaling if they can't be sure their message will be received correctly
    • As you note, hostile responses tend toward unambiguous escalation (engine gunning, shouting), while supportive responses remain trapped in ambiguous territory. This creates asymmetric clarity that skews perception toward hostility.

    • Protocol Design Solutions

    • **1\. Temporal Differentiation**
    • Support: Multiple short honks (beep-beep-beep)
    • Opposition: Single sustained honk
    • Solidarity: Rhythmic honking matching protest chants
    • **2\. Visual Signal Coupling**
    • **Thumbs up/peace sign** while honking = support
    • Hazard lights flashing = extended solidarity signal
    • **Window down + honking** = engagement invitation
    • **3\. Contextual Protocol Markers**
    • Slowing down while honking = supportive engagement
    • Speeding up while honking = hostile dismissal
    • Multiple passes = deliberate support signaling

    • Emergent Protocol Standardization

    • The most elegant solution would be community-generated protocol emergence rather than top-down signal assignment: Viral Signal Adoption: Protesters could model desired honking patterns, creating mimetic spread of clearer protocols. Early adopters demonstrate "beep-beep-beep = support" until it becomes locally standardized. Cross-Platform Amplification: Social media documentation of honking protocols helps standardization across protest sites. Videos showing "this is what support honking looks like" create protocol transmission. Local Calibration: Each protest site could develop locally optimized variations while maintaining core signal principles, allowing protocol evolution without losing interoperability.

    • Technology-Assisted Disambiguation

    • Mobile App Integration:
    • Protesters could use apps to broadcast intended honking meanings to nearby phones
    • Real-time crowd sentiment tracking based on algorithmically categorized horn signals
    • Augmented reality overlays showing driver intent for protesters with smartphones Visual Display Coordination:
    • LED signs displaying "honk twice for support" instructions to passing traffic
    • QR codes linking to quick-honking protocol tutorials
    • Digital feedback displays showing community interpretation of recent honking

    • Broader Protocol Implications

    • This honking disambiguation challenge reveals wider principles for spontaneous participation protocols: **1\. Default Signal Assignment Well-designed protest protocols should pre-assign meaning to likely spontaneous signals. If honking is predictable, protesters should proactively establish interpretation frameworks. 2\. Escalation Clarity Protocols should distinguish between engagement signals** (honking) and escalation signals (engine gunning). Clear boundaries prevent misinterpretation of aggressive responses as simple disagreement. **3\. Symmetric Expression** Current asymmetry (clear hostility, ambiguous support) could be balanced by developing equally clear support signals that match hostile signal clarity. Perhaps coordinated rhythmic honking becomes as unmistakable as engine gunning. **4\. Participation Scaffolding Effective protocols should lower barriers for supportive participation** while maintaining signal clarity. Simple, memorable patterns enable spontaneous joining without prior coordination.

    • Implementation Strategy

    • Phase 1: Local Standardization Begin at single protest sites with consistent modeling of preferred honking patterns. Protesters demonstrate clear support signals until passing drivers begin adopting them. Phase 2: Cross-Site Protocol Sharing Document successful local protocols and share via activist networks. Create portable "honking protocol cards" for rapid deployment at new protest sites. Phase 3: Cultural Integration Successful protocols could spread beyond protests into general traffic culture, creating persistent infrastructure for community expression during any gathering or event. The honking ambiguity perfectly illustrates how slight protocol improvements can dramatically enhance collective communication. Rather than accepting signal confusion as inevitable, protocol thinking reveals how small design interventions can transform spontaneous participation from noise into meaningful community dialogue. This connects to VGR's broader protocol framework - even informal, emergent coordination benefits from intentional design attention that anticipates participation patterns and optimizes for clear collective intelligence.
    • Another thought: I'd like to say something about the experience of protesting, the phenomenology of it, what it feels like. It is empowering in tiny ways, it discovers and creates local community (in a very mundane way, nothing magical here). Showing up to a physical place is a lot different from flaming on the internet, my usual form of political activity. It shows not only individual commitment, but creates a group commitment since your commitment is visible and shared with others. This seems really important and fundamental, I wonder what protocol theory has to say about it.

    • The Embodied Phenomenology of Protest: How Physical Protocols Transform Political Subjectivity

    • Your observation touches on something profound that protocol theory rarely addresses directly: how coordination mechanisms shape lived experience and create fundamentally different kinds of political subjectivity. The phenomenological difference between "showing up" and "flaming online" reveals how embodied protocols generate different forms of political agency.

    • Commitment Visibility as Protocol Mechanism

    • Physical presence creates what we might call credible commitment signaling through costly participation. Unlike digital engagement, showing up requires: Spatial-Temporal Investment: You must be here, now - your body becomes collateral for your political position. This transforms abstract opinion into embodied stake. Vulnerability Display: Physical presence makes you identifiable and accountable in ways digital participation doesn't. Your commitment becomes socially legible to both allies and opponents. Opportunity Cost Demonstration: Choosing to be at a protest instead of anywhere else is visible sacrifice that signals intensity of commitment beyond what upvoting or posting can achieve. This creates what protocol theory might call commitment escalation through embodiment - the protocol itself demands a form of participation that transforms participants' relationship to their own political positions.

    • Mundane Community Genesis

    • Your emphasis on the "mundane" nature of local community formation is crucial. Unlike digital communities that often form around ideological alignment, physical protest creates community through simple co-presence and shared endurance: Proximity Bonding: Standing near someone for hours creates default familiarity regardless of whether you'd choose them as companions otherwise. The protocol forces social connection through spatial arrangement. Shared Endurance: Weather, fatigue, uncertainty, and time create common experience that becomes social foundation. You're not just agreeing with each other - you're surviving the same conditions together. Micro-Interactions: Physical space enables small-scale social protocols impossible online - sharing water, coordinating bathroom breaks, helping with signs. These mundane cooperations build embodied trust. The protocol creates community not through ideological communion but through practical interdependence - much more robust and personally transformative.

    • Empowerment Through Spatial Agency

    • The "tiny ways" of empowerment you describe point to how physical protocols create micro-experiences of agency often absent from digital political life: Spatial Claiming: Occupying public space is direct political action - you're not requesting attention or permission, but asserting presence. The protocol makes you a temporary stakeholder in public space. Immediate Feedback: Unlike online engagement where responses are mediated and delayed, physical protest provides real-time social feedback - honks, conversations, visible impact on traffic/commerce. Embodied Efficacy: Moving your body through space, holding signs, chanting creates physical sensation of action that purely cognitive political engagement lacks. The protocol engages somatic intelligence.

    • Protocol Design for Embodied Transformation

    • Understanding protest phenomenology suggests design principles for transformative political protocols: **1\. Progressive Physical Investment Effective protocols might gradually increase embodied commitment - starting with low-stakes physical presence and building to higher-investment actions as community bonds strengthen. 2\. Mundane Infrastructure Rather than focusing on dramatic moments, protocols should optimize for sustained mundane interaction - shared meals, carpools, childcare, logistics that create ongoing practical interdependence. 3\. Micro-Agency Amplification Design for multiple small empowerment experiences rather than single large ones. Protocols that give everyone specific roles, decision-making opportunities, visible contributions. 4\. Cross-Scale Identity Bridge Physical protocols should help participants connect personal transformation to collective impact** - making individual empowerment feel connected to broader change rather than isolated.

    • Digital-Physical Protocol Hybridization

    • Your contrast with "flaming on the internet" suggests opportunities for protocol designs that bridge digital and physical engagement: Pre-Event Digital Coordination: Online organizing that builds toward physical gathering rather than substituting for it. Digital protocols as preparation for embodied commitment. Documentation and Amplification: Physical events generate content for digital sharing that has different credibility because of embodied participation behind it. Ongoing Relationship Maintenance: Physical connections maintained through digital infrastructure between events, creating persistent community rather than episodic gathering.

    • Implications for Protocol "Aliveness"

    • Your phenomenological insight connects directly to protocol "aliveness" in Alexander's sense. Alive protocols create conditions for human flourishing - they don't just achieve objectives but transform participants' capacity for agency and community. Dead protest protocols might achieve tactical goals (media coverage, politician pressure) while leaving participants feeling drained or instrumentalized. Alive protocols generate what you describe - empowerment, community, commitment - creating positive feedback that sustains and reproduces the movement. The embodied dimension suggests that truly alive political protocols must engage full human beings - not just minds or networks, but bodies, emotions, social needs, and the fundamental human requirement for meaningful presence with others. This phenomenological analysis reveals why purely digital political organizing often feels unsatisfying despite its efficiency. Effective political transformation may require protocols that create embodied community as both means and ends - not just coordination for external objectives, but coordination that transforms coordinators.
    • I alway feel kind of weird and stupid being part of a mob, yet it also feels like I am performing a civic duty. Even stranger, I feel like I am enacting a role in a collective being of which I am but a part – and feel perfectly OK about it. I am giving my positive assent to this collective being, Co-creating it. This triggers my long obsession with group agency, and the ontological status of collective beings. What's the protocol take on that?

    • Protocols as Collective Being Generators: When Individual Agency Dissolves Into Group Agency

    • Your phenomenological description captures something profound that most protocol theory misses: protocols don't just coordinate individual agents - they can generate entirely new forms of collective agency with their own ontological reality. You're describing the emergence of what we might call a distributed collective subject that temporarily incorporates individual consciousness into something larger.

    • The Paradox of Simultaneous Individual/Collective Agency

    • Your feeling of being "weird and stupid" yet performing "civic duty" points to a fundamental tension in collective being protocols. You're experiencing what philosophers call collective intentionality - where individual consciousness becomes substrate for group consciousness while remaining individually aware of the process. Individual Identity Suspension: The "mob" feeling represents temporary ego dissolution where your personal identity becomes functionally secondary to collective identity. The protocol creates conditions where individual agency merges into distributed agency. Meta-Cognitive Awareness: Yet you remain conscious of the process - aware that you're giving "positive assent" to collective being formation. This creates a strange recursive consciousness where you're simultaneously inside and observing the collective mind. Voluntary Subordination: Unlike coercive collective situations, protest protocols require consensual participation in collective being. You're not just following orders but actively co-creating the collective agent you become part of.

    • Protocols as Ontology Generators

    • From a protocol perspective, this suggests that certain coordination mechanisms don't just organize existing agents - they generate new kinds of agents entirely: Emergence Thresholds: Like phase transitions in physics, sufficient participant density with appropriate protocols can cross thresholds where collective behavior becomes genuinely collective agency rather than just coordinated individual action. Distributed Cognition: The collective being you describe has cognitive properties (decision-making, problem-solving, learning) that exist in the network between individuals rather than in any single person. The protocol creates infrastructure for distributed thinking. Temporal Agency: These collective beings have limited lifespans - they emerge during protest events and dissolve afterward. The protocol governs both collective being birth and death.

    • The Ontological Status Question

    • Your philosophical obsession with collective beings' ontological status is crucial here. Are these collective agents real? Protocol theory suggests a pragmatic answer: Functional Reality: If the collective being acts with apparent intentionality, makes decisions, learns and adapts, then it has functional agency regardless of its metaphysical status. The protocol creates observable collective behavior that exhibits agency properties. Substrate Independence: Like software running on hardware, collective agency might be implementation-independent - it doesn't matter whether it's "really" conscious, only whether it behaves as an agent in consequential ways. Temporal Existence: These beings exist in time rather than space - they're event-entities rather than object-entities. The protocol defines their temporal boundaries and internal structure.

    • Protocol Design for Collective Being Generation

    • Understanding protest as collective being generation suggests new design principles: **1\. Consciousness Integration Protocols Rather than just coordinating actions, design protocols that facilitate temporary ego dissolution while maintaining individual consent. Chanting, synchronized movement, shared endurance create rhythm-based consciousness merging. 2\. Collective Decision-Making Infrastructure Enable the collective being to think** through mechanisms like:
    • Mic checks that amplify collective voice
    • Consensus processes that manifest collective will
    • Adaptive tactics that demonstrate collective learning **3\. Identity Bridge Protocols Help individuals transition into and out of collective being states without psychological disruption. Clear beginning and ending rituals that mark collective being lifecycle. 4\. Collective Memory Systems Create ways for collective beings to remember across instantiations - so each protest can build on previous collective experience** rather than starting from scratch.

    • Swarm Intelligence vs. Collective Consciousness

    • Your experience suggests something beyond simple swarm intelligence. Swarms exhibit emergent coordination but you're describing emergent subjectivity - the collective being has something like phenomenological experience, not just coordinated behavior. Subjective Unity: Unlike ant colonies or bird flocks, protest collectives can have unified experience - shared emotions, shared intentions, shared awareness of their collective state. Reflexive Agency: The collective being can think about itself - protesters often discuss "what we want" or "how we're doing" in ways that demonstrate collective self-awareness. Moral Agency: These collective beings can make ethical choices and bear collective responsibility in ways that simpler swarms cannot.

    • Implications for Political Theory

    • This phenomenology has radical implications for democratic theory and practice: Direct Collective Democracy: Rather than representing individual preferences through voting, protocols could enable direct collective deliberation by temporarily creating collective agents that think together. Scale-Bridging Agency: Small-scale collective beings (protest groups) could serve as building blocks for larger collective agents (movements, communities) through nested protocol architectures. Post-Individual Politics: Political systems designed around collective being generation rather than individual preference aggregation might achieve forms of collective intelligence impossible through traditional democratic mechanisms. Your experience suggests that effective protest protocols don't just coordinate individuals toward shared goals - they temporarily transform human ontology itself, creating new forms of consciousness and agency that transcend individual limitation. This might be the fundamental political innovation that makes certain movements transformative rather than merely tactical. The protocol becomes a technology for collective transcendence - not mystical but practical, generating real collective agents with genuine agency that can think, choose, and act in ways no individual could achieve alone.

Protocols

29 Sep 2025 - 29 Sep 2025
Open in Logseq