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PR//the modern burglar often understands the protocols of urbanism better than the insiders who are their nominal stewards. In a world that increasingly comprises protocols, power follows knowledge, not ascriptive authority.
PR//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.
PR//what we might call the protocol punk hero operates from within a protocolized environment where boundaries separating insides and outsides are increasingly meaningless.
PR//the protocol punk hero, unlike the bureaucratic hero or the outsider maverick, is master of both smooth and striated spaces, and able to navigate both arborescent and rhizomatic epistemic environments.
PR//It is easy to miss the myriad invisible ways in which clock time structures our lives, from train schedules and norms of scheduling meetings to begin at half-hour boundaries, to the structuring of work and leisure hours by calendars with roots in ancient religions.
PR//Every successful protocol, arguably, is the result of successfully anticipating some sort of traffic jam, and presciently engineering mechanisms to manage the underlying tensions.
PR//Unlike the epic heroes of antiquity, or even cyberpunk heroes, protocol punk heroes are rarely lone wolves. Instead, they often exhibit remarkable social skills. Their uncanny protocol-whispering abilities often rest as much on social engineering skills as on technical engineering or architecture skills.
PR//major component of the work of protocol whisperers is to manage constantly shifting tensions at an ecosystem level, rather than within a single organization
PR//trusted relationships with allies on many sides of many active arguments
PR//a strong sense of the collective memory of an evolving commons.
PR//protocol design and architecture conversations, a truly remarkable amount of conscious and active attention is devoted to things like selection pressures, incentives, red-teaming, and modeling of emergent equilibria. Unlike the engineer in a private corporation, or the bureaucrat in a hospital or a government agency, the protocol whisperer must simultaneously think like an Organization Man, a central banker, a hacker, a market maker, and a military strategist
PR//Efforts to create the right engineered arguments are the exceptions. Playing to win is the norm. Playing to continue the game is rare.
PR//The pluralist infinite-game idea of a protocol as an engineered argument can be contrasted with a complementary “playing to win” definition of an API
PR//There are also non-human single points of failure (SPOFs). In a thoughtful critique, Moxie Marlinspike, co-creator of the Signal messaging protocol, pointed out the many SPOF vulnerabilities in the Ethereum ecosystem.14 In the worst cases, they can lurk unseen until they cause the unexpected fatal collapse of a valued protocol.
In well-managed protocols, SPOFs are broadly recognized, consciously managed, gradually mitigated, progressively moved to less and less critical loci, and in the best cases, eliminated altogether.
PR//When it comes to protocols, sticking to any kind of ideological hardline position cedes agency to those willing to participate in the engineered arguments. There is no winning move, and the only way to continue to play is to recognize that you’re not in traffic, you are traffic.
PR//Part 4, Living With Protocols
PR//is easier to reorganize the furniture in one’s house than to change the building’s structure or expand the site on which it’s built. Longer-term interventions in the built environment that adapt the base layers to new conditions are still worthwhile—they are as critical as ever—but, for individuals working at smaller spatial and temporal scales, the “software” (and the protocols that mediate it) may be a more fruitful domain of intervention than the hardware
PR//Today we build fulfillment centers, freeways, container ships, and supertall skyscrapers, all accidental monuments to the various protocols that utilize them, and equally impressive (but usually more esoteric, largely appreciated by the “protocol literate”). Unlike cathedrals and pyramids, the charismatic qualities of protocol monuments are likely to be incidental, a side effect of their primary purpose.
PR//As our world becomes increasingly automated, networked, and sensor-filled, our levels of awareness regarding the invisible interfaces, processes, and protocols through which computers comprehend our world will translate into a new awareness of physical space. Our digital literacy will enable us to retain a sense of effective agency as we design and navigate what is a new category of virtual worlds operating (through the assistance of automation) within the medium of physical space.
PR//To deal with limited memory and processing powers, we get used to things going well. The result: our brains only notice when things go wrong—when there is an event. We do not notice the non-events (i.e., the status quo, the day-to-day). But events and non-events are both consequences of human actions. No actions, no events. Action performance varies, putting the dynamic in dynamic non-event.90 Safety is a dynamic non-event. Talking about safety (and health) is difficult because it is a sustained absence of events, not an event itself.
PR//health protocols don’t have fast feedback loops, so adoption is challenging. From my experience, we operate more proactively when the risk is obvious, probable, and has the possibility of immediate harm. Safety issues trigger acute stress responses that encourage action. Anything beyond obvious risk requires empathy for a “future version of oneself” that is difficult to nurture. This can change via instrumentation, such as calorie, nutrient, movement trackers, and continuous glucose, heart rate, and sleep monitors.
PR//Following protocol involves several actions: perceive another person following protocol or receive instructions on how to follow the protocol; store the protocol in memory; and replicate the protocol. Errors can occur during any one of these actions. The primary way that protocols mutate is via such unintentional errors. A protocol is a type of meme: like genes, protocols reproduce using humans as hosts.
PR//The other two ways that protocols mutate is through tinkering and design.
PR//The three sources of protocol mutation, characterized by their pace and strength, are design, tinkering, and memetic error. They fall on a spectrum of pace and strength of mutation
PR//Protocol systems are always two things at once—individuals and a group. A bistable perception—individual versus system—is actually important in examining them. If we only think about the aggregated whole, we may overlook harms suffered by individuals within the system or problematic power dynamics masked by the continued functioning of the system. On the other hand, if we only focus on individuals within the system, we may miss emergent risks and benefits coming from the system as a whole.
PR//If there is a bad fit between your internal self and your role, you can suffer from a sense of compelled inauthenticity, or dysphoria, while if there is a good fit, and you authentically align with your role, you can thrive.
PR//If Pip has awareness of a protocol system, they are “seeing the water” that they swim in—the culture and world (protocol system) that surrounds them, shapes them, and constrains them. When aware, Pip sees the ocean they swim in, knows that other oceans and non-oceans exist, knows how they got into their ocean, and understands that the ocean currents affect their movements.
PR//Pip has awareness with regard to a particular protocol system if they know:
that they are entering, participating in, or exiting it;
that they play a certain role within it;
that there are alternatives to joining or participating in this particular protocol system;
whether they entered the system by choice or under the influence or control of others; and
that the protocol is influencing their thoughts and actions.
PR//Insight is about the depth of knowledge and understanding Pip has about a protocol system.156 Insight allows a person to make a meaningful choice about their participation and role within a protocol system.
PR//As we become more networked, opportunities for alignment and attunement technologies will become increasingly apparent. They present a possible path to support the success of swarms and other online formations while addressing platform business needs.
PR//A nascent sensibility defined here, orientation can be understood as a form of situational awareness that arranges knowledge in a selective and associative manner aligned with a particular purpose. Orientation enables navigation based on partial cues, feelings, and hints within an environment, without presuming complete situational awareness.
PR//Fixed, hard points across time that let us make the world more predictable.
We need these hard points because it is impossible to coordinate at scale without them. Money doesn’t work unless there is a degree of certainty it will still be valuable in the future. Trade is very risky if there isn’t confidence that parties will follow their commitments.
PR//Good rituals can liberate the individual—in the case of the artist—by helping them coordinate their actions towards their creative goals. Protocols are not just about constraints that are necessarily enforced at the cost of creativity and liberty; they can generate creativity and liberty, if well-designed and implemented.
PR//the art of protocol subversion looks more commonly like tai chi, where participants follow protocol, but in a way that better suits their needs. As Galloway proposed, “it is through protocol that one must guide one’s efforts, not against it.”
PR//Instead of resisting protocols, we ought to bring a greater awareness to their overall influence, so that we can make better decisions about which protocols we wish to be a part of and how we might live peaceably under their reign.
PR//Any sufficiently healthy world will spawn activity in peripheral forums where the protocol is discussed. It will spread and animate spaces outside itself. The life of the world is not only in the world. Looking for these spaces is an important and often overlooked world-assessment criteria.
PR//Protocol makers, know this: your protocol will die. It may become so inflexible that it must be discarded —“if the constitution is too rigid, it becomes necessary to kill the king”412—or the conditions around it may change so much as to become unrecognizable.
PR//to your protocol and whether they would withstand an existential question
PR//In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander argues that patterns in architecture and the urban organization have a “quality without a name” that makes a house, a street, a town more or less “alive.” We perceive a place as alive when it is structured or organized to allow congruence within us—this congruence is the capacity to align us with our biological reality and natural desires, allowing those forces to move freely.
PR//Flourishing requires the cultivation of character, which almost always requires that we examine the systems to which we are beholden and that we break with our narratives and frames. This requires us to take responsibility for our own development—a mindset at odds with mindlessly following a protocol. Like bad habits (which are, after all, effective habits), effective protocols make it easy for people to continue following protocol.
PR//order to pursue flourishing, one must take responsibility for one’s actions and life—if participants are disposed by the protocol to reject responsibility, and if the protocol forms a significant part of their life (say, as a social, cultural, or religious protocol), then flourishing is hindered
PR//In some situations, all that is needed for the emergence of a good protocol is the recognition and diffusion of good solutions that are also easy to imitate.
PR//Good protocols learn, grow, and mature in ways that catalyze thoughtful stewardship and sustained generativity. Bad protocols on the other hand, if they avoid early mortality, tend to become increasingly neglected over time, leading to extended periods of sterility and stagnation, and succumbing to capture and corruption.
PR//Good protocols seem to strike a robust balance between ensuring order at some loci, and inducing serendipitous creative chaos at adjacent loci. As a result, within their sphere of influence, they create conditions of exceptional serendipity, or at least significantly reduced malevolence,
PR//good protocols seem to thread the needle between too much and too little automation, and too much and too little room for discretionary governance decisions, stabilizing at the right level for their circumstances. They are sufficiently stewardable.
PR//consideration of trade-offs, costs and benefits, and thorough evaluation of designs, leading to good engineering outcomes. They are neither so underconstrained that arbitrary tastes can drive outcomes, nor so overconstrained that there are no good solutions to problems at all. Instead, they encourage a search for opinionated but principled solutions to core problems
PR//areas in the study of protocols, and the one that comes closest to rising to the level of a science. Our ability to design and build better protocols is strongly driven by the quality of our understanding of fundamental limits, and cultures of tastefully opinionated leadership for navigating them
PR//A feature common to protocols and adjacent categories such as APIs, grammars, or rules, is their relationship to literacy. Every protocol, arguably, is by definition also a literacy that takes effort to acquire and practice. The value of a protocol is a strong function of the ease with which participants can acquire literacy and fluency in the behaviors it codifies.
PR//An effective culture of literacy around a protocol ensures that all participants have the skills necessary to safely and productively participate in it. Mass or retail participants must have sufficient literacy to use protocols safely. For example, pedestrians and drivers must understand and respond to traffic signals. Expert participants and stewards must have enough literacy to govern the protocol and evolve it in the face of changing circumstances and evolving domain knowledge. Creating and sustaining a broad-based culture of literacy around a protocol is a non-trivial task, but is often underestimated, and either treated as a promotional task, to be handled alongside marketing or public relations, or a matter of foolproof user-experience design.
PR//Good protocols are not just sufficiently learnable, they are sufficiently hackable to do without formal educational institutions, especially early in their histories.
PR//This ludic quality is arguably essential for meaning-making, and is conceivably the spiritual essence of protocols.
PR//Good protocols, arguably, are sufficiently ludic to serve as engines of meaning-making beyond their nominal functions, while also fulfilling their nominal functions.
PR//surprisingly many protocols manage to survive early mortality threats and achieve equilibrium states where they are sufficiently defensible to function anyway, even if in significantly diseased conditions. Surprisingly small groups of well-positioned stewards can keep established and critical protocols going long past the point where critics predict they should have succumbed to their varied apparently fatal vulnerabilities.
PR//While protocols can be hard to kill, and sufficiently defensible against their threat environments, they are neither impossible to kill, nor naturally immortal. They are sufficiently mortal that they do not persist indefinitely, choking the domains they organize. The League of Nations, which preceded the United Nations, is an example of a geopolitical protocol that died after it failed to fulfill its functions in the 1930s.
PR//Standards-making, it turns out, is high-leverage design, ripe with the ability to change the technological playing field in ways that no individual firm can on its own. It’s like finding the control room of our modern world.
PR//best way to learn how to work with standards is by studying how they’ve evolved over time.
PR//true standards movement must be rooted in the fundamentals. The idealism can’t outweigh the pragmatism
PR//My professional focus has been, as long as I can remember, about designing for comprehension. That is, understanding what’s going on in one’s surroundings, how things in the world work, and effective ways of thinking and talking about it.
PR//need to get more people model-literate, which means an order-of-magnitude (or two) increase in the efficiency of uptake. We need to figure out a way to bulk-load models into people’s heads, simultaneously bringing the cost down and the salience up so it becomes something people perceive to be worth doing
PR//Instead we need to adapt and extend the existing protocols to the internet and its engaged communities. A first step is acknowledging the deep bench of untapped talent.
PR//major lesson of cryptocurrency protocols is that when you design something with a trust-minimized architecture, people approach it with a mercenary perspective
PR//Exploration involves trying out new options that may lead to better outcomes. Exploitation involves choosing the best-available option based on exploration. Finding the optimal balance between these two strategies is a crucial challenge in many decision-making situations, where the goal is to maximize long-term benefits.
PR//Protocols are designed in reaction to some troubling condition rather than being conceived of independently from their environment. This argument is more obvious for some protocols than for others.
PR//stating that protocols are conservative is not a political assertion. This statement does not challenge the value of preservation and conservation during periods of undeniable turmoil. The intention of highlighting the backward-oriented nature of protocols is merely to underscore—as some of the researchers did—that these tools often possess their own agency. They assert their temporal logic upon anything we endeavor with them, especially where there is no conscious reflection on their use.
PR//value can oscillate quickly into costs and at such a magnitude that even precious systems must have a stop. This poses the question of how to shut the thing down, and who should make the decision to do so. While the options that have predominated up to now involve highly centralized control of the killswitch protocol, this form of engineered system death is also the least interesting from a systems engineering perspective because it boils down to designing a killswitch that a concentrated authority can exercise
PR//Whereas the Linux kernel doesn’t produce anything for users until distros add their features, running Ethereum software produces a usable artifact right away.
PR//The protocol system conveys the people and their relationship to data, spaces, and other people, describing it as a “role in a box” with different preset levels of access, permissions, and incentives to represent and augment the organization.
PR//The interoperability allows for a seamless transfer of users and data between apps and cities, while the composability comes into play when any aspect of the protocol becomes shared infrastructure that can be combined together or taken apart.
PR//“Copying was such a taboo back then, less so in the software world, especially in open-source, but outside of those bubbles it wasn’t considered acceptable. People were still romanticising the idea of the lone genius or decision-maker,” recounts Das.
“It wasn’t until we were forced to work together during the collapse that folks realized ideas were meant to be shared and modified; that it was ok to edit and improve upon them.
PR//Without a critical capacity, it becomes difficult to keep the checks and balances averaging. Furthermore, the whole system relies on trust. Without it, the IOU-based system fails as people become unsure if the value they’ve given to others will be returned when they’re in need.
PR//The study showed there were some conditions to the benefits of diversity, however, which only began to take effect when at least four functional groups or different plant species were present and increased as the number of plants in each species increased. When this minimum diversity threshold was met, researchers saw it triggered a change in the behavior of the fungal network that supported the nutrient and water uptake of the plants towards mutualism, rather than competition or parasitism seen in less diverse and dense plantings.
PR//The je ne sais quoi of protocols, after all, is an ineffable quality of openness,
PR//Beyond hardening our activities against capture or co-option by narrower agendas, and doing our best to articulate, in honest but unapologetic ways, the opinionated tastes we are bringing to our curation and catalysis efforts, we aim to keep our role small and limited, and indeed, shrink it over time.
1 PR//the modern burglar often understands the protocols of urbanism better than the insiders who are their nominal stewards. In a world that increasingly comprises protocols, power follows knowledge, not ascriptive authority.
2 PR//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.
3 PR//what we might call the protocol punk hero operates from within a protocolized environment where boundaries separating insides and outsides are increasingly meaningless.
4 PR//the protocol punk hero, unlike the bureaucratic hero or the outsider maverick, is master of both smooth and striated spaces, and able to navigate both arborescent and rhizomatic epistemic environments.
5 PR//It is easy to miss the myriad invisible ways in which clock time structures our lives, from train schedules and norms of scheduling meetings to begin at half-hour boundaries, to the structuring of work and leisure hours by calendars with roots in ancient religions.
6 PR//Every successful protocol, arguably, is the result of successfully anticipating some sort of traffic jam, and presciently engineering mechanisms to manage the underlying tensions.
7 PR//Unlike the epic heroes of antiquity, or even cyberpunk heroes, protocol punk heroes are rarely lone wolves. Instead, they often exhibit remarkable social skills. Their uncanny protocol-whispering abilities often rest as much on social engineering skills as on technical engineering or architecture skills.
8 PR//major component of the work of protocol whisperers is to manage constantly shifting tensions at an ecosystem level, rather than within a single organization
9 PR//trusted relationships with allies on many sides of many active arguments
10 PR//a strong sense of the collective memory of an evolving commons.
11 PR//protocol design and architecture conversations, a truly remarkable amount of conscious and active attention is devoted to things like selection pressures, incentives, red-teaming, and modeling of emergent equilibria. Unlike the engineer in a private corporation, or the bureaucrat in a hospital or a government agency, the protocol whisperer must simultaneously think like an Organization Man, a central banker, a hacker, a market maker, and a military strategist
12 PR//Efforts to create the right engineered arguments are the exceptions. Playing to win is the norm. Playing to continue the game is rare.
13 PR//The pluralist infinite-game idea of a protocol as an engineered argument can be contrasted with a complementary “playing to win” definition of an API
14 PR//There are also non-human single points of failure (SPOFs). In a thoughtful critique, Moxie Marlinspike, co-creator of the Signal messaging protocol, pointed out the many SPOF vulnerabilities in the Ethereum ecosystem.14 In the worst cases, they can lurk unseen until they cause the unexpected fatal collapse of a valued protocol.
15 In well-managed protocols, SPOFs are broadly recognized, consciously managed, gradually mitigated, progressively moved to less and less critical loci, and in the best cases, eliminated altogether.
16 PR//When it comes to protocols, sticking to any kind of ideological hardline position cedes agency to those willing to participate in the engineered arguments. There is no winning move, and the only way to continue to play is to recognize that you’re not in traffic, you are traffic.
17 PR//Part 4, Living With Protocols
18 PR//is easier to reorganize the furniture in one’s house than to change the building’s structure or expand the site on which it’s built. Longer-term interventions in the built environment that adapt the base layers to new conditions are still worthwhile—they are as critical as ever—but, for individuals working at smaller spatial and temporal scales, the “software” (and the protocols that mediate it) may be a more fruitful domain of intervention than the hardware
19 PR//Today we build fulfillment centers, freeways, container ships, and supertall skyscrapers, all accidental monuments to the various protocols that utilize them, and equally impressive (but usually more esoteric, largely appreciated by the “protocol literate”). Unlike cathedrals and pyramids, the charismatic qualities of protocol monuments are likely to be incidental, a side effect of their primary purpose.
20 PR//As our world becomes increasingly automated, networked, and sensor-filled, our levels of awareness regarding the invisible interfaces, processes, and protocols through which computers comprehend our world will translate into a new awareness of physical space. Our digital literacy will enable us to retain a sense of effective agency as we design and navigate what is a new category of virtual worlds operating (through the assistance of automation) within the medium of physical space.
21 PR//To deal with limited memory and processing powers, we get used to things going well. The result: our brains only notice when things go wrong—when there is an event. We do not notice the non-events (i.e., the status quo, the day-to-day). But events and non-events are both consequences of human actions. No actions, no events. Action performance varies, putting the dynamic in dynamic non-event.90 Safety is a dynamic non-event. Talking about safety (and health) is difficult because it is a sustained absence of events, not an event itself.
22 PR//health protocols don’t have fast feedback loops, so adoption is challenging. From my experience, we operate more proactively when the risk is obvious, probable, and has the possibility of immediate harm. Safety issues trigger acute stress responses that encourage action. Anything beyond obvious risk requires empathy for a “future version of oneself” that is difficult to nurture. This can change via instrumentation, such as calorie, nutrient, movement trackers, and continuous glucose, heart rate, and sleep monitors.
23 PR//Following protocol involves several actions: perceive another person following protocol or receive instructions on how to follow the protocol; store the protocol in memory; and replicate the protocol. Errors can occur during any one of these actions. The primary way that protocols mutate is via such unintentional errors. A protocol is a type of meme: like genes, protocols reproduce using humans as hosts.
24 PR//The other two ways that protocols mutate is through tinkering and design.
25 PR//The three sources of protocol mutation, characterized by their pace and strength, are design, tinkering, and memetic error. They fall on a spectrum of pace and strength of mutation
26 PR//Protocol systems are always two things at once—individuals and a group. A bistable perception—individual versus system—is actually important in examining them. If we only think about the aggregated whole, we may overlook harms suffered by individuals within the system or problematic power dynamics masked by the continued functioning of the system. On the other hand, if we only focus on individuals within the system, we may miss emergent risks and benefits coming from the system as a whole.
27 PR//If there is a bad fit between your internal self and your role, you can suffer from a sense of compelled inauthenticity, or dysphoria, while if there is a good fit, and you authentically align with your role, you can thrive.
28 PR//If Pip has awareness of a protocol system, they are “seeing the water” that they swim in—the culture and world (protocol system) that surrounds them, shapes them, and constrains them. When aware, Pip sees the ocean they swim in, knows that other oceans and non-oceans exist, knows how they got into their ocean, and understands that the ocean currents affect their movements.
29 PR//Pip has awareness with regard to a particular protocol system if they know:
30 that they are entering, participating in, or exiting it;
31 that they play a certain role within it;
32 that there are alternatives to joining or participating in this particular protocol system;
33 whether they entered the system by choice or under the influence or control of others; and
34 that the protocol is influencing their thoughts and actions.
35 PR//Insight is about the depth of knowledge and understanding Pip has about a protocol system.156 Insight allows a person to make a meaningful choice about their participation and role within a protocol system.
36 PR//As we become more networked, opportunities for alignment and attunement technologies will become increasingly apparent. They present a possible path to support the success of swarms and other online formations while addressing platform business needs.
37 PR//A nascent sensibility defined here, orientation can be understood as a form of situational awareness that arranges knowledge in a selective and associative manner aligned with a particular purpose. Orientation enables navigation based on partial cues, feelings, and hints within an environment, without presuming complete situational awareness.
38 PR//Fixed, hard points across time that let us make the world more predictable.
39 We need these hard points because it is impossible to coordinate at scale without them. Money doesn’t work unless there is a degree of certainty it will still be valuable in the future. Trade is very risky if there isn’t confidence that parties will follow their commitments.
40 PR//Good rituals can liberate the individual—in the case of the artist—by helping them coordinate their actions towards their creative goals. Protocols are not just about constraints that are necessarily enforced at the cost of creativity and liberty; they can generate creativity and liberty, if well-designed and implemented.
41 PR//the art of protocol subversion looks more commonly like tai chi, where participants follow protocol, but in a way that better suits their needs. As Galloway proposed, “it is through protocol that one must guide one’s efforts, not against it.”
42 PR//Instead of resisting protocols, we ought to bring a greater awareness to their overall influence, so that we can make better decisions about which protocols we wish to be a part of and how we might live peaceably under their reign.
43 PR//Any sufficiently healthy world will spawn activity in peripheral forums where the protocol is discussed. It will spread and animate spaces outside itself. The life of the world is not only in the world. Looking for these spaces is an important and often overlooked world-assessment criteria.
44 PR//Protocol makers, know this: your protocol will die. It may become so inflexible that it must be discarded —“if the constitution is too rigid, it becomes necessary to kill the king”412—or the conditions around it may change so much as to become unrecognizable.
45 PR//to your protocol and whether they would withstand an existential question
46 PR//In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander argues that patterns in architecture and the urban organization have a “quality without a name” that makes a house, a street, a town more or less “alive.” We perceive a place as alive when it is structured or organized to allow congruence within us—this congruence is the capacity to align us with our biological reality and natural desires, allowing those forces to move freely.
47 PR//Flourishing requires the cultivation of character, which almost always requires that we examine the systems to which we are beholden and that we break with our narratives and frames. This requires us to take responsibility for our own development—a mindset at odds with mindlessly following a protocol. Like bad habits (which are, after all, effective habits), effective protocols make it easy for people to continue following protocol.
48 PR//order to pursue flourishing, one must take responsibility for one’s actions and life—if participants are disposed by the protocol to reject responsibility, and if the protocol forms a significant part of their life (say, as a social, cultural, or religious protocol), then flourishing is hindered
49 PR//In some situations, all that is needed for the emergence of a good protocol is the recognition and diffusion of good solutions that are also easy to imitate.
50 PR//Good protocols learn, grow, and mature in ways that catalyze thoughtful stewardship and sustained generativity. Bad protocols on the other hand, if they avoid early mortality, tend to become increasingly neglected over time, leading to extended periods of sterility and stagnation, and succumbing to capture and corruption.
51 PR//Good protocols seem to strike a robust balance between ensuring order at some loci, and inducing serendipitous creative chaos at adjacent loci. As a result, within their sphere of influence, they create conditions of exceptional serendipity, or at least significantly reduced malevolence,
52 PR//good protocols seem to thread the needle between too much and too little automation, and too much and too little room for discretionary governance decisions, stabilizing at the right level for their circumstances. They are sufficiently stewardable.
53 PR//consideration of trade-offs, costs and benefits, and thorough evaluation of designs, leading to good engineering outcomes. They are neither so underconstrained that arbitrary tastes can drive outcomes, nor so overconstrained that there are no good solutions to problems at all. Instead, they encourage a search for opinionated but principled solutions to core problems
54 PR//areas in the study of protocols, and the one that comes closest to rising to the level of a science. Our ability to design and build better protocols is strongly driven by the quality of our understanding of fundamental limits, and cultures of tastefully opinionated leadership for navigating them
55 PR//A feature common to protocols and adjacent categories such as APIs, grammars, or rules, is their relationship to literacy. Every protocol, arguably, is by definition also a literacy that takes effort to acquire and practice. The value of a protocol is a strong function of the ease with which participants can acquire literacy and fluency in the behaviors it codifies.
56 PR//An effective culture of literacy around a protocol ensures that all participants have the skills necessary to safely and productively participate in it. Mass or retail participants must have sufficient literacy to use protocols safely. For example, pedestrians and drivers must understand and respond to traffic signals. Expert participants and stewards must have enough literacy to govern the protocol and evolve it in the face of changing circumstances and evolving domain knowledge. Creating and sustaining a broad-based culture of literacy around a protocol is a non-trivial task, but is often underestimated, and either treated as a promotional task, to be handled alongside marketing or public relations, or a matter of foolproof user-experience design.
57 PR//Good protocols are not just sufficiently learnable, they are sufficiently hackable to do without formal educational institutions, especially early in their histories.
58 PR//This ludic quality is arguably essential for meaning-making, and is conceivably the spiritual essence of protocols.
59 PR//Good protocols, arguably, are sufficiently ludic to serve as engines of meaning-making beyond their nominal functions, while also fulfilling their nominal functions.
60 PR//surprisingly many protocols manage to survive early mortality threats and achieve equilibrium states where they are sufficiently defensible to function anyway, even if in significantly diseased conditions. Surprisingly small groups of well-positioned stewards can keep established and critical protocols going long past the point where critics predict they should have succumbed to their varied apparently fatal vulnerabilities.
61 PR//While protocols can be hard to kill, and sufficiently defensible against their threat environments, they are neither impossible to kill, nor naturally immortal. They are sufficiently mortal that they do not persist indefinitely, choking the domains they organize. The League of Nations, which preceded the United Nations, is an example of a geopolitical protocol that died after it failed to fulfill its functions in the 1930s.
62 PR//Standards-making, it turns out, is high-leverage design, ripe with the ability to change the technological playing field in ways that no individual firm can on its own. It’s like finding the control room of our modern world.
63 PR//best way to learn how to work with standards is by studying how they’ve evolved over time.
64 PR//true standards movement must be rooted in the fundamentals. The idealism can’t outweigh the pragmatism
65 PR//My professional focus has been, as long as I can remember, about designing for comprehension. That is, understanding what’s going on in one’s surroundings, how things in the world work, and effective ways of thinking and talking about it.
66 PR//need to get more people model-literate, which means an order-of-magnitude (or two) increase in the efficiency of uptake. We need to figure out a way to bulk-load models into people’s heads, simultaneously bringing the cost down and the salience up so it becomes something people perceive to be worth doing
67 PR//Instead we need to adapt and extend the existing protocols to the internet and its engaged communities. A first step is acknowledging the deep bench of untapped talent.
68 PR//major lesson of cryptocurrency protocols is that when you design something with a trust-minimized architecture, people approach it with a mercenary perspective
69 PR//Exploration involves trying out new options that may lead to better outcomes. Exploitation involves choosing the best-available option based on exploration. Finding the optimal balance between these two strategies is a crucial challenge in many decision-making situations, where the goal is to maximize long-term benefits.
70 PR//Protocols are designed in reaction to some troubling condition rather than being conceived of independently from their environment. This argument is more obvious for some protocols than for others.
71 PR//stating that protocols are conservative is not a political assertion. This statement does not challenge the value of preservation and conservation during periods of undeniable turmoil. The intention of highlighting the backward-oriented nature of protocols is merely to underscore—as some of the researchers did—that these tools often possess their own agency. They assert their temporal logic upon anything we endeavor with them, especially where there is no conscious reflection on their use.
72 PR//value can oscillate quickly into costs and at such a magnitude that even precious systems must have a stop. This poses the question of how to shut the thing down, and who should make the decision to do so. While the options that have predominated up to now involve highly centralized control of the killswitch protocol, this form of engineered system death is also the least interesting from a systems engineering perspective because it boils down to designing a killswitch that a concentrated authority can exercise
73 PR//Whereas the Linux kernel doesn’t produce anything for users until distros add their features, running Ethereum software produces a usable artifact right away.
74 PR//The protocol system conveys the people and their relationship to data, spaces, and other people, describing it as a “role in a box” with different preset levels of access, permissions, and incentives to represent and augment the organization.
75 PR//The interoperability allows for a seamless transfer of users and data between apps and cities, while the composability comes into play when any aspect of the protocol becomes shared infrastructure that can be combined together or taken apart.
76 PR//“Copying was such a taboo back then, less so in the software world, especially in open-source, but outside of those bubbles it wasn’t considered acceptable. People were still romanticising the idea of the lone genius or decision-maker,” recounts Das.
77 “It wasn’t until we were forced to work together during the collapse that folks realized ideas were meant to be shared and modified; that it was ok to edit and improve upon them.
78 PR//Without a critical capacity, it becomes difficult to keep the checks and balances averaging. Furthermore, the whole system relies on trust. Without it, the IOU-based system fails as people become unsure if the value they’ve given to others will be returned when they’re in need.
79 PR//The study showed there were some conditions to the benefits of diversity, however, which only began to take effect when at least four functional groups or different plant species were present and increased as the number of plants in each species increased. When this minimum diversity threshold was met, researchers saw it triggered a change in the behavior of the fungal network that supported the nutrient and water uptake of the plants towards mutualism, rather than competition or parasitism seen in less diverse and dense plantings.
80 PR//The je ne sais quoi of protocols, after all, is an ineffable quality of openness,
81 PR//Beyond hardening our activities against capture or co-option by narrower agendas, and doing our best to articulate, in honest but unapologetic ways, the opinionated tastes we are bringing to our curation and catalysis efforts, we aim to keep our role small and limited, and indeed, shrink it over time.