"Routinizing human behavior into a protocol can be characterized as a form of forgetting in the same way political engagement can feel exhaustingly endless." – Business Class Wine

Introducing the Bridge Atlas podcast – a limited series of interdisciplinary conversations to level up how you think about protocols. It’s time for bridge-building at an unprecedented scale. youtu.be/6KpWypVFL2o?...

"Unlike stacks and platforms, protocols tend to define and regulate flows of codified behaviors rather than stocks of technological artifacts." – The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols

“There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.” – Alan J. Perlis

“Debugging is like being a detective in a crime movie where you’re also the murderer.” – Filipe Fortes

“It is no longer sufficient, if it ever was, for diplomacy to address advances in science and technology as they become manifest: it must begin to consider and address their consequences before these become foreseeable.” – Marga Gual Soler

“Argue as if you are right and listen as if you are wrong.” – Karl E. Weick

“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.” – Aldous Huxley, Island

“Good fences make good neighbors.” – Robert Frost, Mending Wall

“As infrastructure, a platform’s regularity is often guaranteed less by laws than by technical protocols, and this is one of several ways that the sovereign decision is built into the platform’s interfacial partitions and surfaces.” – Benjamin Bratton, The Stack

Meet the Protocol School's Class of 2025! summerofprotocols.com/protocol-sym...

“Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.” – Igor Stravinsky

“We’re not very good at paying attention to invisible or gradual outputs. The trick is simple: If it’s important, make it visible. If it happens over time, create a signal that brings the future into the present.” – Seth Godin, The Pinocchio Protocol

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” – R. Buckminster Fuller

“I go back to what Mrs. Roosevelt taught me: ‘Always compromise, but compromise upwards.’” – Esther Peterson

“The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change.” – Barbara Tuchman

“Standards are not established by your proclamations; they are established by your routines.” – T. Jay Taylor

"Good, fast, cheap: pick two.” – RFC 1925, The Twelve Networking Truths

"Protocol is a language that regulates flow, directs netspace, codes relationships, and connects life-forms." – Alexander Galloway

“Standards are power in slow motion.” – Susan Leigh Star

Issue #18 protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/egregoretex

"Standards make the world." - David Lang

Issue #17: protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/dirt-simple

“Though we leave behind innumerable traces, it has become commonplace to forget the source, origins, or authenticity of the information we carry.” - Kei Kreutler

“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.” - Venkatesh Rao

Starting at 9am PDT (in 25 minutes): www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBc7...

“The average person’s awareness of protocols, in the built environment and elsewhere, likely suffers from adverse selection: the most visible protocols are the most dysfunctional ones.” - Drew Austin, Protocols Don’t Build Pyramids

“...if we do not start with a strong conception of what we and the world ought to be, we risk succumbing to designs that reward short-term payoffs or are dictated by those who stand to profit from our attention.” - Janna Tay

"Most life capable of meaningful interstellar travel is indistinguishable from technology." - Kevin Kelly, 12 Assumptions for Extraterrestrial Life

In a world that increasingly comprises protocols, power follows knowledge, not ascriptive authority.

Starting in ~30 minutes (19:00 PDT) www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjVj...

Issue #14 protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/a-chronicl...

Tomorrow’s guest talk is timely and powerful. What is Public Intelligence? Catch @vgr.bsky.social and @kevinkelly.bsky.social in conversation, tomorrow, April 22nd at 19:00 PDT, to find out. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjVj...

“The real world was full of larger structures, smaller structures...than the tiny portion comprising sentient creatures and their societies, and it required a profound myopia of scale and similarity to believe that everything beyond this shallow layer could be ignored.” - Greg Egan, Diaspora

"I had been told that the training procedure with cats was difficult. It's not. Mine had me trained in two days." - Bill Dana

Issue #13: protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/zero-knowl...

“A clash of doctrines is not a disaster — it is an opportunity…In formal logic a contradiction is the signal of a defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.” - Alfred North Whitehead

“You’re telling me that seeing has a cost?” “No one wants to believe it, but yeah. Collective awareness is finite. Too much load, and the System starts dropping frames." protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/fault-tole... #decentralization #fiction at @protocolized.bsky.social

“Design is the beauty of turning constraints into advantages.” - Aza Raskin

“The internet has let us build the early stages of a global, digital civilization. But today it is built on weak foundations... And most of it is owned by a handful of companies, controlled by a small group of people, who live in one country.” - Josh Stark

"Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert." - Hannah Arendt

“A historical look at protocols suggests that their purpose has always been to simplify coordination and communication. With enough time, protocols converge upon conformity. They do not liberate us, but rather seek to control us completely.” - Nadia Asparouhova

"See, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places." - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.” - Jon Postel

Join us tomorrow, April 2nd, at 7pm PDT for a talk by @vgr.bsky.social titled A Protocol Fiction Protocol. Want a reminder? Tap play, then tap the one-time Notify Me button. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2xd...

“Good protocols liberate in the same way disciplined habits and routines can liberate artists.” - @saffron.bsky.social

“Instead of viewing natural and artificial memory on a spectrum of authenticity, it’s more useful to regard them as unprotocolized and protocolized approaches to memory.” - @keikreutler.bsky.social

"Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths." - Umberto Eco

Live now!

“Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.” - Joseph Schumpeter