protocol-virtues-study/text_coding/snippets.csv

AFP//You have a past, but you remember it with more detail than you should. And these details cannot be stopped by time. They have become a tradition.
AFP//You have no past. Either you have forgotten it or it was erased from you. You are piecing together the rest of the story from the information of others and you have placed yourself inside. This is your protocol.
AFP//Identifying and working against these protocols necessitates civil disobedience against the limitations of institutionalized knowledge and biopolitical power that seek to govern and interpellate our bodies, our health, gender, sexuality, and (re)production.
AFP//Investigating protocols as such allows us to contribute to the creation of new protocols that are inclusive and equitable.
AFP//We were interested in how this process may contribute to long-term political organizing, which requires ongoing cycles of action, reflection, and adjustments to the dynamics and protocols of shared struggle.
AFP//Ultra-red has no single organized political affiliation. The collective’s members are engaged with anti-racist movements in Britain, migrant struggles in Germany, community-based education in London, New York City, and Los Angeles, and struggles for housing and just community development in East Los Angeles.
AFP//At the passing of four and a half minutes, the workshop organizer announced, “Time.” Then we asked, “What did you hear?” We noticed that this practice increased concerns with and discussion of the contexts within which people gathered to address the crisis.
AFP//Who speaks? Whose voice is amplified? What do we speak of and to whom? Who listens, and to what end do they listen? Who has a place at the table? Who determines who has a place at the table? And on whose behalf do those seated at the table speak?
AFP//The failure to address this hegemony perpetuates divides between those who circulate within the art world and those who do not. The only acknowledgment of this divide comes in the form of “audience development” initiatives based on liberal notions of inclusion.
AFP//When effective, constitutive protocols place experience in dialogue with principles and regulations. This is what I consider the most powerful use of protocols, which is when disciplinary and constitutive protocols form a contradiction or dialectic.
AFP//This led us to borrow the concept of “desire lines”—trails or paths carved out over time, usually emerging as shortcuts between destinations. In built landscapes, they break protocol with prescribed routes. In natural environments, they often reveal animal migrations, paths used across generations. Desire lines are always a record of behavior—lines of movement suggested by previous path-takers and followed by future path-takers. Apparently, we cannot all be trailblazers. We love to follow in each others’ footsteps.
AFP//Breaking protocol with accepted modes of behavior in public space can feel dangerous—especially given current and historical restrictions on sexual desire and, in particular, same-sex desire.
AFP//Freedom and desire mean different things to different people at different times. So one of the central tenets is the liberating notion that we don’t all have to agree. Of course, with a proposal
AFP//If I had been outside of my homeland, I then would have acknowledged whosoever’s territory I was visiting, as a political affirmation of their sovereignty and self-determination and a practice of respect.
AFP//Maria’s smile, though, was not protocol. There is no rule that Anishinaabe begin meetings, visits, or events with a big smile; if anything, our elders tend to show less emotion in facial expressions in comparison to Euro-Canadian or American culture. I experienced her smile as entirely Anishinaabe because it was contradictory to the colonial form of our encounter and the formality of artist talks and academic conversations.
AFP//we are not the first Indigenous women or artists to sit down and have a conversation about protocols. These conversations happen all the time around kitchen tables, on sidewalks, in galleries and studios, and in the bush.
AFP//I didn’t set out to break protocol; my intention was to expand our ideas around protocol or to place protocols back within the larger network of Anishinaabe ethics. If the intent of protocols is to show respect and create spaces where we could be our best selves, what happens when there is such rigidity that the protocol erodes our foundational values of consent, diversity, self-determination, and non-interference? What happens when protocol backfires and causes harm?
AFP//How can we break the cage of protocol and embody a deeper understanding of Anishinaabe ethics and values?
AFP//Anishinaabe life, to a great degree, is care work. Our foundational teachings, the Seven Ancestor teachings, in my area called the Kookum Dibajimowin, are not a set of laws or commandments, or protocols that we have to follow. Rather, they are a complex set of practices that, when embodied, both individually and in relation to other living things, create a world in which consent, accountability, problem solving, and kindness are embedded.
AFP//remember very early on in my career being out on the land with an Elder hunting geese. We shot one, and he had forgotten his tobacco. I remember wondering what was going to happen, because it is our practice to show gratitude through reciprocity, and normally this is done through an offering of tobacco. The Elder who I was with left a tiny bit of his baloney sandwich. When I asked him if this was going to be OK with the geese, he said “Of course,” because the gesture was thoughtful and would be seen by the geese as an expression of deep respect.
AFP//Avoid using protocol to demonstrate how much of your culture you’ve recovered and instead use our practices as a point of connection and to create belonging and nurture relationships.
AFP//It needs to go back to family and community, figuring out who you are, where you come from, what your family gifts, what your gifts are that you have to contribute, ‘cause they are not the same, and they are not always what we want them to be either.
AFP//An essential element of my practice is what I call spiritual fieldwork, or the process of developing relationships with the human and nonhuman entities of a particular place or field in tandem with gathering information.
AFP//I think time is an Indigenous currency, one that we especially lack in our capitalist society. Listening also requires that you be present, allowing what you hear to shape the process at every step.
AFP//When trust has been built, it is important to be aware of one’s limitations, not to overstep, and not to overcommit. Trust is maintained by keeping promises, contracts, and boundaries.
AFP//reciprocity takes shape in responding to calls for mutual aid at any level, and by doing so it supports collectivities through personal and professional interactions.
AFP//In all Indigenous cultures, there is a natural law, a model of the world in which energies fluctuate between different levels. Associated with this vision of perpetual energy movement is the protocol of pagamento, or payback, which is the need to act based on the principle of reciprocity, to always give something in exchange for what is obtained, be it something material or service of any kind.
AFP//The protocols I have shared here are not set in stone—they shift as I learn and grow, as society grows, and as the circumstances of our planet change rapidly.
AFP//Let us collectively recommit to center and sustain life through our diverse practices. Let us remember that we are all related and that our futures are intertwined.
AFP//Stay low to the ground. Stay nimble and mobile (shifting between places, scales, times, elements). Keep it trans-local. Attend to the lower parts of the body. Think with and of pregnancy, with and of forms of degraded trans*ition, transformation, metamorphosis. Use your nose.36 Follow the shit. Follow the power. Follow the money.37
AFP//I argue that this is the kind of approach we need as we think through the nexus of ecology, climate, and racism. This grounding approach does not take refuge in ideal theory (climate ethics) or abstract calculations of emissions (some climate justice) but rather gets down in the muck, in the matter of life and death, to think and be in ways that (to borrow from Wynter) are “down to earth.”
AFP//The behaviors that we think liberate us are based on the disappointments of the past and keep us constrained within the confines of colonial imaginations dispossessing us of our purpose and, ultimately, our freedom.
AFP//To choose the self without fixing, changing, guilting, or blaming, we also have to choose rather than deny, escape, or wish away the histories that made us. We have to embark on a new protocol.
AFP//Escapism is one of the various epigenetic expressions I carry as a descendant of enslaved Indigenous peoples. I have the ability to not be here now as a way of enduring the present and making my way toward the future. Afrofuturist narratives like the folktales of High John and Brerer Rabbit were an already-always part of me when I needed hope—a cartography towards freedom letting me know that other ways of being are possible and that I am not stuck here.
AFP//It does not honor our ancestors to create a binary construction of embodiment as celebration and disembodiment as problematic. We will not dismiss and flatten the narratives of escape.
AFP//Whether slow or fast, micro or macro, invisible or detectable, this unseen world is responsible for a deep interconnectedness across species, substances, and timescales.
AFP//if we think through our vast entanglements under the molecular semiosphere, there are no such categories. We are already alien.
AFP//These exercises produce what AiG calls “cultivating an art of combinations,” or an art of symbiosis that “recomposes the commons in an odd world.”10 Working with AiG was the moment I began to see the potential of biohacking and collective world-making and the possibility of neutralizing a deeply ingrained fear conditioned in us from birth. More importantly, I learned that only from this point of emancipatory
AFP//There is no hard separation, clear boundary, or final destination in the form of an apocalypse, and perhaps we should all stop hoping for one. There are only relations—entanglements that transform us every day.
AFP//We ask that, in entering this essay, you do not merely distill the offerings emerging from it for your needs and desires.8
AFP//Access as accommodation cannot truly value disability culture, joy, and knowledge of ways to live otherwise, as it is fundamentally a project of normalization that neutralizes the political world-building potential of access as it is and has been practiced between humans unmediated by vast organizational bodies. The ableist world is just fine as it is and surely everybody wants in, right?
AFP//Access-centered practices include protocols because certain needs are best met with consistent solutions (like ASL interpretation), but access overall can’t be reduced to protocols.43 When access practices are responsive to the nuance and mutability of needs, responsibility for access becomes collectivized into culture rather than held by experts or individuals with static roles in policy, protocol, and procedure.
AFP//Dependency and interdependency are where we materially and affectively meet: our needs are what connect us to one another, they bring us into the vulnerabilities of both love and harm.
AFP//These artworks hold the persistence and necessary creativity of access-centered life, embodying how disability justice organizer Mia Mingus’s concept of access intimacy comes out of (conscious or unconscious) praxis. Mingus emphasizes the possibility for access intimacy to occur instantaneously between people without shared experience or political identity. This intimacy need not be communicated linguistically, offering an intuitive, non-identity based, affective lens onto modes of relation beyond policy.48 Access intimacy centers the affective aspects of access essential to access-centered practice.
AFP//Within, we learn each other’s protocols (How do I inject you? When do you have to go to hospital despite the risks associated with being undocumented?). We cultivate practices of care that exceed what protocols encompass (What types of touch does my body welcome? Do you enjoy metaphors when I describe images to you? Who has space to host others?). Amongst, we fuck with policy—negotiate, circumvent, and refuse it. Work it, flip it, and reverse it.
AFP//The infrastructure and its limitations have predetermined the communication trajectory and centered the West as a hub through which all information moves, making the internet’s architecture political.
AFP//To Wood, Web3 is about building systems that don’t rely on trusting people, corporations, or governments to make moral choices, but that instead render evil choices impossible.”
AFP//By care-based internet protocols, I mean a set of rules and guidelines that prioritize the well-being of users, their privacy, and their security over other considerations such as convenience or profit. These protocols move us away from technical jargon and encourage access through consentful participation.10
AFP//Redesigning the collective timeline cannot be accomplished by a single, solitary voice or action, nor by a small group of individuals. It requires shared responsibility and agreement from multiple communities and their branching timelines. It calls for the collaboration of multiple forces from different times, spaces, and narratives.
AFP//participants were invited to create their own representations of space-time disentangled from racial capitalist patriarchy. They were encouraged to imagine and visualize a space-time that transcends oppressive systems and structures through a series of reflective questions exploring the aesthetics and sensory experiences of their alternative space-time, such as: What does it look, sound, smell, and taste like? Who is present within this space-time? How do individuals choose to act or refrain from certain actions? And most importantly, how do they feel within this space-time free from the constraints of racial capitalist patriarchy?
AFP//Protocols, resolutions, and practices are meant to be replicable and will be revisited at some collectively agreed-upon time and space.
AFP//That part of the thinking of Blackness in terms of Black studies is something other than the individual biography, individual greatness, or the individual artist being an individual genius. I think we’re all invited into something other than individuation in this symposium with the mode of artistic practices. Part of what I hear from Nadir’s cloud science is also a science of collectivity. That collectivity is a protocol for conducting science.
AFP//Each individual cloud, as you can see, it’s kind of chaotic. They all have their small differences, but it turns out that they actually have a lot in common. The best way to describe it is by thinking of them as one collective entity and describing their behavior collectively.
AFP//happening in the atmosphere is instantaneous from the point of view of the deep ocean; three to five years is nothing. When we’re thinking in terms of this deep climate time or this deep time, again, relative to a concrete change that’s happening here, the adjustment time here is invisible. It’s instant.
AFP//what if rather than remixing and repurposing existing protocols, we orchestrated new ones—protocols that, instead of summoning us into productive labor, compliant tool use, or compulsive consumption, cultivate a soundtrack for camaraderie or care or caprice? Can we imagine an alarm clock whose aubade, or morning song, awakens us into an otherwise world of possibility?
AFP//Each day, especially after I have taken photographs of the desk, I write in the notebook. How I have managed to do that all month takes me by surprise. I have never undertaken such an activity, habitually skirting through several notebooks as though incapable of regimen. I imagine this sudden focus has to do with five years of attempting to write a novel—novels, in fact, at one point, coming to forty thousand words—and failing to see the point, the throughline to connect story with imperative.
AFP//I was an active participant in the perpetuation of the protocols of that very culture, which I grew accustomed to over many years. These unspoken criteria applied not just to job interviews but to all kinds of curatorial closed-door meetings where we would discuss research, invite scholars to speak on certain topics, or discuss issues connected with exhibitions.
AFP//the particular role of the art museum as a tastemaker, gatekeeper, and arbiter of high-end culture has created the demands of a particular economic and cultural model and its intrinsic protocols that, as I will try to argue, are highly fragile and, because of their fragility, highly conservative in their financial and intellectual ambitions.
AFP//Once we step outside the metaphorical classroom, we put protocols in motion in order to welcome everyone into these encounters: we work across platforms; we adjust language, design, content, technology; and we insert periods of reflection and time to accommodate different time spans and evolutions in thinking.
AFP//Taking the topic of protocols at its most radical form of collective intervention, we had hoped to push the standards of peer review even further with this volume.
AFP//For this book, we decided to produce two separate versions and make them available. One is a designed PDF fixed layout—a version that mirrors the printed book and foregrounds the design as a protocol-related feature—and the other is an EPUB file that does not have many of the design features, but it includes all the text of the book while still being extremely accessible to assisted reading devices.
AFP//What we’ve learned from this volume is that a protocol—a form embedded in the origins of publishing itself as a medium—can be unbound from any particular monovocal convention.
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.