About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Page Contents
Full
Page Tree
Incoming links

Protocols/of Protest

25 Sep 2025 - 28 Sep 2025
Open in Logseq
    • 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.