She sat at the cedar desk that had been her father’s and put down on paper the dimensions of a pit large enough to hold every building, every tool, every record, and every yard of linen the settlement would ever produce. She designed a grave before she had anything to bury. Then she designed the village.

She constructed the houses out of the ground they would stand on. Rammed earth, lime, river sand, straw from the first flax. Walls you could put your fist through after a year of neglect and a season of rain. She made the roofs to lift and the floors to turn. Nothing in the Concord was joined that could not be unjoined in one night by people working in the dark. Even the famous linen, the linen the outside world paid for, was woven on looms pegged together, so that a loom at the end of its life was a heap of clean sticks, a length of cloth, and nothing a museum would want.

People assumed she had built this way to be thrifty, or to be holy, or because the ground was what she had to work with. She built this way because she had read the tea leaves of her own century and did not trust it. A settlement that worked, that fed itself and asked for nothing and frightened no one, would in time be studied, then admired, then improved, then governed, then sold. She had watched it happen to the Big Man, who began as a useful lie and became, inside of nine years, a thing with opinions she had not given him and a temper she could no longer fully predict. She did not intend to watch it happen to the Concord. She intended the Concord to be able to stop.

So she wrote the doctrine, and the doctrine said: two.

A single failure could be chance. Two failures close together were a verdict. The settlement would not be undone for a single bad harvest, or a single death, because bad harvests and hard deaths come to every place and mean nothing on their own.

It would be undone only when two things failed in the same season: when the ground stopped producing and the people stopped trusting it. That was the line. Past it, a place was no longer living. It was only still standing.

The first failure was the flax.

The ground had never been rich. That was the secret of the place, the thing the linen buyers were paying for without knowing they paid for it. The Concord stood on poor land, thin and sour. The kind no one had fought her for, which was the only reason she had been allowed to claim it. What made it answer was the consecration. There was a protocol for it, run every season since the founding, the spent earth lifted and turned and cleaned in the great iron boilers and fed and worked and blessed back into ground that would carry flax taller and finer and faster than flax has any business growing, and the linen it made was the reason anyone outside had ever heard the word Concord. The fertility was not in the soil. It was in the doing. The soil held only what the consecration put into it, the way a page holds only what a hand writes on it.

The failure did not look like failure. The consecration that last spring was performed exactly as it always had been, on the schedule, by the right hands, and the plants came up as green as a painting. You could have hung the field above a mantel. But the ground had stopped taking the blessing. It accepted the work and gave back nothing. Just dust holding the shape of soil. The plants were standing out of habit. They would stand a while longer and then they would lie down all at once, and the consecration that had carried the ground for 40 years would not carry it one more season.

The second failure was the boy, but when you looked at it long enough it was the first failure repeated in other clothes.

The Stewards took no spouses and made no children of their own bodies. This was not a hardship they spoke of. It was the discipline the whole place was balanced on, the reason the Concord could stay soft, could go a generation without a raised fist, because nothing in it ran on the old engines of blood and inheritance and who would get the land. A place that does not breed does not quarrel over breeding. But a place that does not breed does not last either, and Janice had known it when she sized the grave.

Her answer was to bring the world in from outside. A good captain went across the water with a list and came back with the broken and the hopeful, people glad to leave whatever they were leaving, and the Concord took them in, and raised their children in their ways until the Concord was the only country those children had.

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Aldred was one of those children. No Steward had made him. The Stewards had raised him so wholly inside the calm that by 20 he had never once learned where his own body ended, because nothing in the Concord had ever pushed back on him hard enough to teach him. He had been kept too safe to know his own size. You learn your size from other rough bodies when you are six, and there were no rough bodies in the Concord, by design, until the import brought them.

There was a night of cider the village was not supposed to have had, carried over by the outside people, who brought the rough world in with them the way you bring weather in on your coat.

There was a game that got loud, the kind the imported children had played their whole lives and the Concord children had never played at all. A length of firewood swung in fun. A large, gentle man, himself brought in from outside, caught the wood in one hand to stop it, because stopping things was the only kind of strength he had ever consented to use. Aldred, frightened to find for the first time in his life that another person was stronger than he was, snatched the wood back. And the gentle man, who did not hold on to anything that someone else wanted, let it go. The boy went over the lip of the gulch.

The thing the Concord did to stay alive was the thing that killed the child it had raised.

The Stewards did not arrest anyone. They hadn’t built a place that could arrest. Linnea, who kept the categories, sat at the long tables for three months turning the death over in her small book, and could not find the box it went in, because it did not belong to the inside or to the outside but to the seam between them, and the Concord had no category for its own seam.

So the verdict was complete. The ground had stopped answering. The people had stopped trusting it. Two failures, one season. Janice, now an old woman, read her own doctrine back to herself at the cedar desk and found that it still held, which is the cruelest thing a good rule can do.

They began on a night with no moon, just the way the doctrine said.

There was a supper first. The manual called for it, though this surprised people who had only read the manual and not known the woman who wrote it. Alcohol had been forbidden among the Stewards for as long as anyone could remember. But Janice had laid down a few bottles years before against exactly this evening, in a cellar nobody else knew about. When they were opened the wine had gone the pale gold of a thing kept too long and was the better for it.

They ate at the long tables in the dining hall. Someone made a toast, and it was not sad. They drank to the work, which had been real, and to the linen, which had been real, and to the boy. Then they put down the glasses and went out into the dark and took the place apart.

The dismantling went the way she had intended it to go. The roofs came off in single pieces. The looms came down to sticks. The walls, built from the very dirt they stood on, were simply returned to the field. They plowed the houses under and harrowed the streets and walked the seed of next year’s volunteer grass across the whole of it by hand.

Then they came to the burial trench. The chamber Janice had drawn before anything else, the grave she had sized to hold the whole settlement, dug now to the exact dimensions on the page and waiting at the center of the lot. The records, the tools, and the good linen they could not carry and would not sell, and the bad linen with the dropped stitches, and the toys, and the bottles, and the looms, and the doors all went into that hole. The hole held it all perfectly. Of course it did.

Everything that had been the Concord fit into the space Janice had planned for it before it existed.

They covered it. They tamped the earth flat and drew the sod back over the seam. By the gray hour before light, where there had been a town there was now a meadow sloping gently to the gulch.

There were three things the hole could not take.

The first was the boy, who was already in the ground, on the far side of the lot. You can dismantle a settlement. You cannot dismantle a death. They left him where he was and did not mark him.

The second was the Big Man.

A giant in the high timber who had taught them the work and left them the land, a story every soul in the Concord had been raised on. But you cannot put a giant in a hole. He had no body to plow under, no boards, no doors. He had only ever lived in the mouths of the people who told him to one another, and the one way to take down a thing that lives in mouths is to close them. So they closed them as best they could.

The third was the Travelers.

They were the people the captain had carried in over the years, the broken and the hopeful from across the water, brought to keep alive this place that could not keep itself alive. They had done the work and eaten at the long tables and raised their children in the manners, and still they had never quite become the Concord. They kept their own things to the end. The cider under the benches, the market, the saints’ days the Stewards pretended not to see. When the dismantling came there was nothing to be done with them, because the hole was for the Concord, and because in any case you cannot put living people in a hole. So they did the only thing left. They went back out the way they had come in, scattered across the water into the world they had been pulled from, each of them carrying a piece of the Concord in his body.

A few stayed, the ones with nowhere left to go. The woods have kept them.

At first light the surveyor walked the meadow, as the instructions required, to confirm that nothing remained. Nothing did. The doctrine had promised as much, and the grass was clean. Somewhere on that walk the surveyor set a glove down to do something that needed both hands, and did not pick it up again. They went down to the boat. The boat went out. That was the Concord.

Dee Dee came out of the trees after the boat was gone. He crossed the cut ground and stood a while where the sewing shop used to stand, or near it; there was no telling now. In the grass he found the glove and did with it what people have always done with a dropped glove. The thing Cathy did and her mother before her. He looked for somewhere to set it high, where whoever lost it might come back and find it. He found a branch, worked the glove down over the end of it, and stuck it in the ground at the edge of the woods, so it could be seen. Then he went back in.

Captain Hosmer came in off the water some months later with 30 people in the hold, all of them expecting the Concord to be there when they landed. He had been across the water on a recruiting run, as he had a dozen times before, talking the curious onto his ship with the old promises, a place where a man need not fear his neighbor and so on.

He overshot the landing. He had always come up the channel on the roofline, and there was no roofline, and he was past the place before he understood he had been looking at it. Just grass, all the way to the trees.

He went ashore ahead of the others and called out, the way you call into a house you already know is empty. The grass took the sound. Then he looked for some sign of what had happened. A burned beam. A caved roof. A grave, even. Any wreck or ruin at all, because even the worst story is an answer, and he wanted one to carry back to the boat. There was none. No sign of distress anywhere on the lot, which should have been a comfort and was not. He had nothing to show them, but he walked them ashore anyway, the whole tired line of them, while he worked out what to do.

They came up into the empty field and wandered. Eventually someone stopped, and looked at the one thing standing in it, and soon they were all gathered around a single glove at the edge of the woods. It was set up on a stick, and the grass at the foot of the stick was pressed down in a thin path that ran back into the trees, as if somebody came out now and then to see to it. Nobody followed the path.

The wind was working the glove, and it seemed to be waving. At them, or at no one. Hello, or goodbye.

They did not stay. There was nothing to stay for, and Hosmer had a load of people to carry on to wherever would have them.

When the others had gone down, one of them lingered behind and took something from a pocket, set it in the grass at the foot of the stick, then went down after the rest. No one recorded what it was.

The 2026 Protocol Symposium — themed New Nature — is happening online from September 21–25, 2026.

Didn’t secure a spot for the main symposium talks? Join the waitlist or subscribe to the Protocol Institute YouTube channel to catch livestreamed sessions.

There are still spots available in the event’s accompanying workshops.

The theme for the 2026 edition is New Nature – the rapidly evolving planet-scale technological layer governed by laws with a hardness and inviolability approaching those of nature. New Nature is our overarching frame for the technological future, shaped by the intersection of AI and protocols, perhaps the most exciting portion of the emerging technologies frontier.

The goal of this symposium is to get you to this frontier, and prepared to engage at all levels from hands-on tactical to doctrinal.

• Main Event Registration link (luma)

• Workshops page (individual registration forms)

• Event home page with full agenda and details

Register early, since space is limited for both the main event and the workshops!

We’ll be livestreaming significant portions of the symposium and recording most of it, but based on our experience with previous events, being part of the live conversation and interactive portions on the Zoom call really changes the experience significantly.

The AI Angle

Protocols for working with AI are going to be a core theme of the Symposium, and as a conversation starter, we have an AI postures personality test for you, developed by community member .

How do you actually work with AI, and what is it costing you cognitively? The AI Co-Working Effectiveness Survey is a brief research instrument that maps you onto one of four postures (Partnership, Hypervigilance, Overreliance, Compliance) and scores the cognitive load, debt, and sovereignty underneath. Take it, get your posture profile immediately, and help build the Protocol Institute community’s aggregate picture, to be presented at the symposium.

AI postures survey

You’ll have opportunities during the symposium to compare and chat about your results with other attendees. Of course, you can also take the test even if you aren’t able to make the seminar.

Symposium Preview

The first 2 days, Monday 21 and Tuesday 22, will be devoted to hands-on workshops, and the remaining 3 days, Wednesday 23 to Friday 25, will be devoted to talks. You can register for either or both, and we highly recommend both. We have 5 workshops and 50+ talks lined up.

Any of the workshops will give you a deep, hands-on sense of why protocols are so important to the emerging technological future, and the talks in the main event will give you a taste of the incredibly broad and varied scope of the field.

We highly recommend you attend one of the five workshops. Each exposes you to a different frontier area of AI x protocols. No special expertise is needed for any of them.

The Workshops

The workshops require separate registrations (also free). Each comprises 4-5 virtual sessions with asynchronous activities in between. Here are the links and brief descriptions.

Note that these workshops run in parallel, so you will only be able to attend one properly.

1. Robots as Protocol Citizens: Assembling One Into the YakRobot Protocol Stack: Explore the exciting emerging frontier of decentralized onchain robotics. In this workshop, you’ll learn about teleoperation protocols, control actual live robots on the other side of the world with an AI agent, and learn about the rapidly maturing technology stack for onchain robotic economies. Optionally, those interested will also be able to assemble their own robots and put it onchain (you’ll need to purchase a suitable kit for that component). Ideal for hands-on techies interested in protocols.

2. Protocolize Your Book: Run your manuscript through a book production factory: In this workshop, you’ll learn how you can use an AI-native book production workflow to take a book project from draft manuscript to print-ready and get a deep dive into how AI can accelerate and automate traditional workflows. Ideal for self-publishers and workflow mavens.

3. Protocol Hackathon: Securing Stigmergic Systems: In this workshop, you will learn about stigmergic systems engineering, the science of coordination inspired by insect swarm behaviors, which is turning out to be remarkably relevant to AI systems (think: markdown files as pheromones). We will focus in particular on the security aspects of stigmergic systems. You will participate in a war-game style tournament using a stigmergy simulator (no coding needed). Ideal for people interested in the formal protocol theory and modeling, conflict, security, and AI safety.

4. Beyond the Artwork: Designing Protocols as Art: In this workshop, you will learn all about the theory and practice of the wonderful and rapidly evolving world of protocol art, which debuted in the mainstream art world via the Strange Rules pavillion at the Venice Bienalle this year. You will learn about a conceptual framework and make your own protocol artwork. Ideal for practicing artists, theorists, curators, and researchers working at the intersection of art, protocols, and emerging media.

5. AI Kitcraft: A Hands-On AI Tooling Workshop: In this workshop, you will learn a unique and field-tested protocols-based approach to AI adoption for organizations, based on understanding it as a technology going through a composable “kit” phase. You will learn the the history and concepts of how major technologies evolve through their kit phases, understand the capability maturity model, and apply the ideas by developing your own kit of AI workflows for your organization. Ideal for non-technical analysts and managers from all backgrounds — project managers, operations and deployment leads, as well as AI-curious newcomers.

The Talks

We have ~50 talks, ranging from technical to non-technical, and theoretical to practical. There is a dizzying array of topics on the agenda — trust, institution-building, political economy, governance, geopolitics, technical systems, temporality, and of course, AI, AI, and more AI. All the content should be accessible to a general audience (though a few may require you to consult your LLMs as you listen).

We have 4 special sessions worth highlighting.

• Inventing Psychohistory: A special session hosted by the Special Interest Group in Psychohistory, exploring how we might use AI to develop systematic long-range prophecy protocols, oracles, and divination technologies.

• Southeast Asia x Protocols: A special session devoted to protocol-themed activities and thinking going on in Southeast Asia, where we’ve been nurturing a track of research, design, and study for the last two years.

• The Art of Memory: A special session hosted on one of our longest running research themes, memory protocols, hosted by the the Memory Research Group. If you’re interested in the critical ways in which memory and AI are entangled, and how the current era fits into the long history of memory technologies, this session is for you.

• Worldbuilding in New Nature: A special session devoted to protocol fiction and world-building, hosted by the Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group. This session will draw on more than a year of experience developing this genre through multiple contests, dozens of short stories, and an ambitious extended universe project. This session will include a special event: The launch of a new, dedicated, protocol fiction magazine.

We are really excited about this year’s edition. It’s the third symposium, but the first being organized under the aegis of the Protocol Institute, and in many ways this is our debut as an organization, and our first effort to explore our own future agenda systematically.

Key Links

Here are the key links once again:

• Main Event Registration link (luma)

• Workshops page (individual registration forms)

• Event home page with full agenda and details

• AI postures survey link

The black ships shimmered in the port bay. The Orbital Response and Coordinated Attack pod rose from the bay into space – six ships, six orca brains in suspension fluid, six pilots, and Egrol wide-eyed next to Shreea as she initiated the pilot pairing protocol with her whale. She treated Egrol like an overeager intern, sloughing most of his questions off with a grunt or a “you’ll see,” while the system booted up. He resented that she thought herself better than him. What he really resented was that she was right. Envy leaked from him like a punctured oil line. He hoped Shreea didn’t notice, but if it was true, if there was somewhere on Kupiter where work wasn’t pure emergence, he would lock himself in the hangar bay and never leave until someone let him become a pilot.

“You ready?” Shreea’s voice was calm and confident. Egrol rocked in the passenger seat, wondering, as always, how he’d ended up precisely here.

He’d spent the last four years performing directed labor for Kupiter. He blinked at prompts, flexed tendons when instructed, let systems smarter than him route his body through tasks whose purposes were totally illegible to him. These ORCA pilots were supposed to be different. That’s why he’d hacked the ride-along lottery.

When he won, he expected something between propaganda and a recruitment drive, but this was no training exercise. There was a real, livelocked swarm of demobots out there, threatening to tear through everything in the sector if it wasn’t stopped, and Shreea and her pod were going hunting.

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mill_swarm784 spasmed among the silt of its recent destruction. An abandoned mining outrig’s ruins floated in the ether, tiny splinters of silver darting through the detritus. Thousands of demolition bots swarmed in spits and passions. They were a cloud, consuming and destroying everything in their messy orbit.

Shreea finished the pairing protocols by sliding a helmet over her head. Suddenly, the muscles of her body tensed, veins popping as her eyes rolled back in their sockets and her fists clenched tightly. Even the whites of her eyes glowed as her and the orca’s minds collapsed into each other. She came back to consciousness with a predatory flint-spark in her pupils and a cackling grin. She was a roided-up jock, constantly moving with the confidence of an athlete running out of the tunnel into a stadium of cheering fans. All the pilots were like that. They were all convinced they were humanity’s greatest gifts to Kupiter. Egrol thought that maybe she was right.

“Let’s feast!” It was a new voice, not entirely Shreea’s own. She turned to Egrol with a face steeled and energized. “You’ve never seen work like this,” she bragged. “Out there,” she pointed toward the approaching swarm, “we make the decisions.” Egrol swallowed hard.

The pod hovered at the periphery of the storm.

“Watch,” said Shreea.

An automated garbage collector ship came through, sweeping up the detritus left in the swarm’s wake. Shreea told Egrol it was the sixth cleanup attempt since the bots went out of control. As it drew near, its circular mouth dilated open, wider and wider the closer it came: expectant, like a whale readying for krill.

The swarm didn’t disperse as it should. The collector’s intrusion sent them frenzying. The moment the vessel reached the edge of the debris, mill_swarm784 tore into it. Dart after dart ripped through the ship like bullets. In the cold vacuum between asteroid stations, the ship dissolved in their greedy, glitching jaws.

Shreea smiled and turned to Egrol. “Most of you are living just like that ship: autopilot and indifference. A livelock swarm milling like this” – she gestured with her head at the swarm spinning around itself – “would tear through everything in Kupiter eventually if it weren’t for us.”

He didn’t argue, especially about her assessment of him. He was living on autopilot. It was hard for Egrol to imagine anything in the Asteroid Midden – that almost empty pocket of abandoned mining facilities and old broken shipyards – mattering to the rest of Kupiter, but he knew better than to try and understand how everything here in the outskirts connected.

Shreea leaned forward. The ship moved with her body. She swung her hips in the suspension harness and the ORCA vessel moved in response, its flight path arcing. The whale pod spread out wide, surrounding the swarm.

“Lucky for you, we’re built different.”

It was true. The whole athletic squad of pilots looked like ancient Olympians. They moved through life like no one else Egrol had met on Kupiter. Even outside the vessels, Shreea and her pod walked like they knew where they were going. Like they were in charge of their lives.

Out here, they were. The envy he felt turned to awe as the ships swam through space, their vessels totally responsive to Shreea and the other pilots’ embodied motions. He tried to focus on the awe and forget the envy – emotional states had a habit of propagating through Kupiter’s systems.

The other ORCA vessels hovered at the edge of the swarm, waiting. Egrol’s skin goosebumped with anticipation.

“All glory to the killer whales, right?” Shreea said with a wink. Then she screeched. An inhuman howl exploded from her as she leaned forward. The ORCAs dove toward the swarm, tightening around it, and the feeding commenced.

Egrol had trouble choosing whether to watch Shreea or the swarm in his viewport. In her harness, each movement of her body rocked the ship. She spun, and the ship pirouetted in the black. She lunged, and the ship shot forward. It was all so legible to human eyes – so causal. Every decision she made immediately shaped the vessel’s behavior.

For the pod, Shreea played the matriarch. Her ORCA vessel stayed back as the other five propulsed toward the swarm. Thirteen thousand demobots – “the largest I’ve seen!” Shreea said – swam through the debris field before them, twisting in a chaotic murmuration. “Let’s ride the carousel!” Shreea cheered.

Shreea’s language descended into a series of sonorous clicks and resonant moans answered by the sister ships as they moved. Her face, though, lingered for a moment before following. Egrol watched her carefully look over the pod from her monitor, counting each one on her fingers. He remembered the long hugs she gave each of them before boarding the ship. She closed her eyes and inhaled sharply, holding it.

“Be safe,” she whispered, after the clicks and moans receded. She didn’t say it over the comms. No one but Egrol heard her. It was just a wish. Despite the bravado, Egrol knew then that she loved the pod the way one loves a family. Helplessly.

Shreea began sweating in the harness, and her whole body strained as she and her linked ORCA brain composed the herd’s loud song.

Surrounded by the pod, the nebulous edges of the swarm contracted suddenly, transforming from a wispy cumulus threshold to a rigid and tightly vibrating barrier.

Each of the ORCAs emitted a signal into the swarm’s environment. Their false depletion markers momentarily convinced the demobots there was no consumable material left. The signals from the pod formed a tightening circle that slowly compressed the swarm. It began to shrink into its debris field. The signals functioned just like the bubble streams which earthly orcas used to compress and direct schools of fish.

When the swarm was small enough for four ORCAs to contain, the fifth broke off and joined Shreea’s at the far edge of the swarm. Shreea leaned forward, and the two dove.

By now, the debris cloud was far wider than the swarm within it. Egrol watched as Shreea and Cill’s ships spun around the debris cloud and propelled the silt and detritus toward the shrinking swarm boundary.

Both circles slowly shrank as the vessels moved constantly around them, emitting and pulsing in rhythm with each other. They were hunting. Egrol tried not to blink as the pod slowly moved these spheres toward a large asteroid above them. Their coordination was stunning. Like nothing Egrol had ever seen before. Their teamwork, one ship singing while another swam around it, voices harmonizing for a moment, before breaking off and blocking another angle of escape, was balletic. Between Shreea’s parabolic loops toward and away from the swarm, Egrol thought of his last work order, a series of arm movements and directed blinks into cameras that meant absolutely nothing to him, and seethed a little. Why did only the pilots get to control their world like this?

“Don’t get sloppy, Cill,” Shreea’s firm command shook Egrol from his thoughts, and he watched on the display as Cill’s vessel righted itself. Shreea sighed deeply, and Egrol saw worry crawl across her face again.

As the debris field densened, the depletion markers grew less and less effective. The swarm’s edges buckled. Tentacles and wisps of demobots flung out suddenly and retracted.

“Good damn mill,” Shreea’s human language startled Egrol. On the viewport, he saw a huge wave of bots lashing out from the circle.

“I’m not losing a single one of you,” she said. Egrol sensed a hint of remorse in her. Had she lost someone out here?

“Don’t any of you dare break protocol now,” she said, all the softness falling from her. “Let’s start the real fun.”

Shreea moved quickly, without hesitation, and Egrol saw for the first time the ORCAs’ impossible, tacit knowledge of how to move ruthlessly through space, why they bothered with the pairing protocols at all, as they dove into the debris field that still encompassed the swarm.

Shreea’s ship struck the debris field first. The whole thing shook, and Egrol thought she’d sacrificed all three of them, until he looked out the port window with a LiDAR overlay. The debris cloud surrounding the swarm appeared as a hazy orb. The gradient where their ship hit was illuminated. The ship’s nose compressed the cloud, sending a granular cascade inward.

The swarm responded to this by reading the new denseness as novel, destructible material at its center. The same simple broken logic that had sent the swarm spinning out now contracted it, as it poured its resources toward its center. The bright red tendril retracted back into the cloud.

Egrol heard other pilots yelling on the intercom as Shreea’s ship swung back away from the edge and another ship dove into the debris from a new angle. The ships danced and sang and dove. Each percussive collision with the debris field, combined with the ever-tightening depletion signals, drove the debris and the swarm into a tighter and tighter circle. The ships dove and rose and emitted, dove and rose and emitted. Ceaselessly and ruthlessly.

Each time a boundary broke, and the swarm seemed imminently close to destroying a vessel, some other ship made contact with the debris field and sent the swarm contracting again, saving their peer.

Eventually, even Egrol was carried into the rhythm of it, shouting as they rammed the debris sphere, laughing as the escaping bots contracted to follow the dense wave, humming to himself as Shreea emitted more depletion markers.

And impossibly, the once massive swarm was now a neurotically contained sphere. The debris field was dense and just a little wider than the swarm, and mill_swarm784 had been backed up against the long end of an asteroid.

“Let’s eat,” Shreea said. Her voice suddenly so deep it sounded as if it came from the ship itself. It was someone else, he thought. The actual orca. There was no hint of sadness in it any longer.

Three of the ships pushed the debris in until it was entirely coextensive with the swarm.

Shreea dove again.

They crashed into the buzzing swarm with their ship’s side emitting percussive blasts in wide parabolic arcs. Egrol watched as the swarm rippled, then gasped at the series of tight explosions that came as the bots closest to the asteroid were thrown against it.

The violence began in earnest. The pod was a constant swirl of attacks and retreats, each incursion dashing more and more of the swarm against the asteroid surface.

The pattern was practiced, and even Egrol eventually caught up to its rhythm from time to time. The pod circled the swarm, keeping it contained and writhing, then one vessel would break and dash against the swarm, blasting another group of them against the rocks. Egrol was in what the pilots called the carousel. He was more alive than he’d maybe ever been.

Within the broader practiced dance, though, thousands of microdecisions were made nearly instantly. This was the orca’s great contribution to the macroprotocol, a trove of instinctual reactions and tacit knowledge that told them exactly when the swarm was positioned for another barrage without having to think about it, or when to rotate to avoid a single bot spinning just outside parameters.

The swarm receded with each barrage. Egrol began to breathe easier and relax into his viewing chair. It was a beautiful, violent dance. The coordination was beyond impressive. All the bravado that had been so grating to Egrol at first became completely natural. To be this capable. To be this directive. To be this purpose-driven.

Shreea dove again. As the ship sped toward the swarm, a rippling brightness from the LiDAR monitor showing the swarm caught Egrol’s eye. The ripples weren’t concentrating inward; Egrol watched as a massive circle shot out.

The swarm was reversing the impact of the whales. Patterns beget patterns, and even failing systems bend toward existence.

The metal ship groaned and keeled as Shreea and the ORCA tried to slide out of the wave’s way. It was too sudden.

“No!” Shreea shouted a series of commands again, swinging wildly as she did. The burst edge of the swarm swung like a falling skyscraper from the swarm’s center towards them.

Something very loud crashed against the vessel hull, and Shreea grunted, spinning them away.

Shreea’s body shuddered rapidly as the ship evaded wave after wave. Each successive evasion strained Shreea more. She wove in and out of her podmates’ spaces, distracting the long arms that flailed from the swarm-center. Her face grew redder. Her veins engorged. She began grunting and spitting with each movement, but she wanted to save them – she had to save them.

The waves of the swarm carried the debris perimeter outwards with them, like a tide rising with each set. The debris remained even as the swarm ebbed for a moment before expanding farther again.

Soon, the other five vessels were far enough away that they could adjust to the swarm’s ebbs and flows, but Shreea’s ship was caught right at the swarm edge, getting pummeled with each expansion, like those surfers who, coming up for air, are swallowed by a wave the second their head breaks the surface.

Egrol watched helplessly as Shreea’s body contorted again and again, avoiding the worst of the barrage every time, but looking worse and worse with each evasion.

A great wave swept them, and Shreea screamed as her body flipped over itself in the harness, spinning the ship away from a thicket of demobots. A red flashing light immediately flooded the interior. Blood trickled from her nose. A blaring siren shook the air.

Shreea’s limp body slid from the harness and fell, lifeless, onto the floor. The overhead light, still red, began flashing in a line from Egrol to the vacant harness.

He looked briefly at the LiDAR overlay and saw the next wave germinating at the swarm’s center. When the systems of Kupiter deigned to speak to humans, they were very clear. He swallowed hard and crawled from his chair to the harness.

He wasn’t trained. His body was weaker than theirs. He wasn’t some maverick or god. He was Egrol. But if he didn’t do anything, he’d certainly die. Somewhere inside him, he wondered if his jealousy had leaked like a pheromone into the vessel, subtly bending the computational systems of the ORCA toward him and away from Shreea. The pilots’ self-importance was infectious, he thought. He felt guilty, but not guilty enough to die.

He slid his arms and legs into the harness and quickly placed the pairing cap onto his head.

There was nothing autonomous about the pairing protocols. A set of pops, whistles, and croaks sounded, almost like they were bouncing through his skull. Each one conjured an image in his mind: one pop a toothy smile, the next rasp a right hook crashing into a stubbled jaw. The sounds sped up, and so did the images. Everything in his body tensed. Something deep and sonorous began vibrating through him. Each sound scraped like a wolf tone and corresponded to a jittering of his leg, or a twisting of his arm. Every movement felt as uncontrolled as a myoclonic jerk or patellar reflex.

None of this was entirely unfamiliar – synthetic-directed work often took a similar shape – but it was nothing like the bravado and purpose with which Shreea had bragged. He wasn’t in control of any of it. The ORCA’s thoughts passed through his body like an electrical current. They carried an animal fury that scotched. He thought he might die right then, the weight of its commands and instincts felt too large for any one body to manage.

But beneath the ORCA’s insistence, there was something gentler, something familiar. The hard language of computation, the ship itself. Its algorithms, its if/thens ran like cool water over him. It wasn’t just a predator’s wildness, but the ship’s controlled reasoning. The certainty of what to do next filled him like oxygen. His breathing slowed. His heart settled. Suddenly, he was awake within the harness.

He didn’t feel anything as the ship moved once more, but he could open his eyes and watch his body move, directing the ship in turn.

The ORCA’s voice filled Egrol’s throat, and he shouted instructions he didn’t understand into the receiver for the other ORCAs. He understood, his body in total surrender to the ship. The pilots were like everything in Kupiter. He’d been stupid to think there’d be an exception. They were just a substrate. A body. His body moved the ship away from a thin line of demobots that thorned out from the swarm’s edge.

His proprioception and instincts, and the accidents of perception that ever so impossibly attuned a human to the world, were what the ships needed to translate the hunting of the orca into the motion of a spaceship. He commanded a small set of concentrated depletion signals to cut off a rising tentacle from its body so the ship could slip to safety. He was just a biological filament. Shreea had been, too.

What else was new?

Directives flowed through Egrol as the ship dodged the first swarm wave. Already, filaments frayed from the boundary, but, and Egrol was certain this was the orca brain’s intuition, he knew the pod had thinned substantially. They’d destroyed maybe two-thirds of it against the asteroid.

Egrol sent out the retreat signal, and every ORCA stopped emitting depletion markers. The swarm immediately spread further out, thinning even more in response. Egrol waited, some instinct commanding him to hold his breath until the swarm was just thin enough to …

“DIVE!” The command came from the same part of his belly where fear gnawed.

Immediately, the six ships dove into the demobots, cutting the swarm into six subswarms. Their numbers had decreased so dramatically, and they’d spread out so far that the bots could no longer sense each other across the entire swarm length.

It lost coherence between the ORCAs’ mad dashings. Each ORCA now circled a microswarm, and each in turn destroyed its prey with a series of physical attacks, bouncing them onto nearby asteroids until all of them were destroyed. There was a fervor, a bloodlust that reddened then darkened his vision entirely.

Egrol lost consciousness somewhere between segmenting his microswarm and the total dissolution of the threat. He came to in a hangar bay with the sad faces of the other pilots turned away from him.

Cill touched his shoulder.

“It was a good hunt,” he said.

“And a sad drowning,” the group answered. No one was looking at each other, or him. Shreea’s body was covered in a white sheet by the hangar exit.

“Swim with your freedom,” Cill said.

Another pilot got up, wheeled her into the exit chamber, and closed the door.

“Die for your pod,” they said in unison. The doors opened and Shreea fell into space.

“Did you know?” Cill said, turning to Egrol. “There was once an Earth orca who swam 1,000 miles with the corpse of her daughter. Seventeen straight days without pausing for rest or food. The body would sink, and she’d dive and bring it back to the surface and keep swimming.”

Shreea’s body vanished into the black.

Egrol lay there looking up at the hangar ceiling, breathing heavily. Despite the total lack of autonomy, his whole body felt alive and vibrant in a way it never had before. He wanted to be sad. He knew better than most what death meant, how it rioted through those that were left behind to hold it. But there was a stronger feeling now, an embodied joy he couldn’t escape.

He could see the pilots’ confidence in a new light. How sensible it was. How run after run would slowly convince you that you were somehow actually in charge. He hadn’t directed anything, but the actions that flowed through his body, his completely embodied experience … He felt like he had been a part of something, that he had done something, maybe for the first time in his life.

It wasn’t true. But it felt true.

A headache was slowly blooming on his right temple, probably some injury and concussion he’d have to attend to. Despite it all, he was giddy, happy, buzzy. He hadn’t done a thing, hadn’t made a single real decision, but his body didn’t care. It was happy. It was electric. It was alive. It was the first time he’d ever felt good after a session of directed action. A sharp pain from his right side – probably a broken rib – interrupted his thoughts. Still, even in pain, he felt good. When he didn’t hurt so much, he’d figure out why.

Even as we build something as formal as an institute for protocol research and education, this messy-looking approach has generated a few patterns. They might even be useful at your own organization.

Internet, Meet C3PO and Humboldt

Our two bots – named after Star Wars’ fussiest protocol droid and late polymath Alexander von Humboldt – are both featured on the ProtocoI Institute (PI) Team page.

C3PO (Conversational Protocol Publications and Parsing Oracle) is our guide to a growing corpus of research, articles, and transcripts. Few people have time for a review of the entire library, so C3PO allows them to discover what’s most relevant without PI creating and maintaining a well-defined taxonomy. The bot also welcomes new members to the Discord server, giving them a customized reading suggestion.

While C3PO is great for basic queries – any Discord member can tag it in the chat to get their question answered – it’s just a semi-charismatic encyclopedia. C3PO is more pedantic and less interesting relative to its cohort; Humboldt is a weirder, more cutting-edge agent capable of not just supporting researchers, but doing research itself.

Humboldt is our semi-autonomous agent focused on exploring PI’s main philosophical concept of New Nature. About once a day, it posts an entry to its public notebook. Those notes are a result not just of Humboldt’s internal loops, but also its conversations with others on Discord. One of the best features of these agents is their availability and responsiveness relative to human intellectual sparring partners. As PI grows, we will host in our server more synthetic researchers who you can work with and alongside.

If you have a home for them, like a Discord or Slack, or just a website, bots can add serious value.

Vibe Infrastructure

We at the Protocol Institute are building a think tank – or, as we like to call it, a context tank – from scratch. One feature of an organization starting up at the same time as a technological wave: it can easily start at 100% adoption instead of zero.

• If you’re starting up, the question is: Where can we go with what we have?

• If you’re an incumbent, the question is: How can we adopt this new technology without losing what we have?

PI’s operating model might not appear as clean as it would if we were following an established playbook, but that’s OK. Clarity is not the same as efficacy. The affordances of LLMs are already quite powerful – especially for building digital infrastructure.

We built protocolized.io and protocol-institute.org using coding harnesses. Even if that sounds technical, a lot was done simply from the desktop app. Coding via the terminal was limited, at least in the early weeks of site building. Initially, we estimated that our infrastructure needs (including searchable archives, event pages, calendars, gated areas for members, and online voting tools) would cost about $50,000. It ended up costing a couple dozen hours of team time, and a few hundred bucks worth of tokens and subscriptions.

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One unique upshot is the absence of collaboration. A tight feedback loop between a client and a developer is hard to make, but if they’re the same person… you can move fast and precisely.

Of course, maintenance is a concern. Incorporating bug fixes and feedback from the community is the less glamorous side of vibe infrastructure, since the process of pushing updates to the site cannot be fully automated. Fortunately, solving that problem is a matter of process improvement – which tends to be straightforward. We haven’t gotten there yet, but any work required will not be enough to tip the scales of the cost-benefit ratio already established.

Protocol Art

Our collaboration with Titles continues to be a major highlight of our AI strategy. The two models that we’ve trained using their platform are what generate the majority of our visual assets. Two artists from our network, Darius and James, fed the models art from their own portfolios. As a result, we (and you!) have the ability to generate amazing assets in their styles.

This fall, as part of the Protocol Symposium, we’ll host a workshop on protocol art. Participants can go deep using available tools and will learn how to increase generativity while safeguarding attribution through protocol technology.

That art would be an ideal playground for exploring how LLMs and protocols interact was not something we anticipated early on in the Summer of Protocols program. However, after a foray into art and literature during SoP24, this area became a longstanding bet in our research portfolio.

OpenRecapper

OpenRecapper is our custom voice recognition and transcription bot, which lives on Discord. It creates notes for all PI’s special interest group calls, logistics meetings, and publishing meetings. Notably, it can run in parallel across our four voice channels, which act as meeting rooms with glass walls – they are tagged with the current discussion topic, so anyone with something to add or learn can pop in.

Our meeting rooms are named Whitehead, Bartleby, and Kafka (after the protocol identification index made in 2023) and Nebraska (after the Nebraska Guy meme).

Stigmergy is an important concept you might not have heard of before. Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination where actors, such as insects, humans, or LLM bots, communicate and organize by modifying their shared environment.

OpenRecapper is a stigmergic tool. It leaves behind a trail of information, likely too much for humans to process manually, but full of rich signals that allow a human with an AI and a good process to orient to what the various subgroups within PI are working on.

Pressure Cooker Pedagogy

One of Summer of Protocols’ big successes was its first Protocol School. We ran that event last fall with a cohort of 50 students, who attended full-time for one week. SoP25 fellows taught a total of 12 classes across the week – in disciplines ranging from engineering to humanities – which comprised the backbone track of Protocol School. In addition, the cohort participated in a workshop track and project track. All three tracks were required to get the certificate.

If that sounds like a demanding education, it was. We had professors, professionals, and university students attend, most of whom took the week off. A critical part of what made Protocol School possible was our BYOAI policy.

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Every participant used an LLM to accelerate their learning. Not to cheat, but to get to a level of understanding in an unfamiliar field that would allow them to synthesize useful ideas. Without the help of an AI, it would be impossible for an aspiring engineer to get much out of a lecture on the history of social science in China – beyond some aesthetic inspiration. We encouraged all attendees to use LLMs, because that translation and tutoring were essential to getting the most out of such a fast-paced, intense curriculum.

We’re looking forward to hosting more of these live courses in the coming years, which take advantage of the unique affordances of digital infrastructure and LLMs, rather than struggle to fit old modes of education into new mediums.

Heads up, registration for the Protocol Symposium opens August 21, 2026.

What’s Next?

A few things are cooking, which we can preview, but can’t attest to until they’ve gone through the wringer:

• Team bots: agents that can be prompted inside group chats and channels, with access to files belonging to research, education, and publishing projects.

• Book factory: a piece of vibe infrastructure that quickly rolls up articles and stories from Protocolized into beautiful, print-ready documents.

• Autonomous research cohorts: attempts at unleashing a swarm of agents onto a specific research project or falsifiable hypothesis.

• Database aggregators: LLM-powered tools that can collect, quality control, and present valuable public data that was previously left unaggregated due to the cost of standardization.

The Jamverse is a shared extended universe, full of strange rules, based on four story cycles by four authors that we’ve been publishing over the last year. The 15 connected stories so far feature near-future cities, a train route that wraps halfway around the planet, unsettling AR technologies, and strange modern myths. The name is a reference to Fred Pohl’s famous assertion that the task of the science fiction writer is to predict the traffic jam, not the automobile.

Our goal is to try and bootstrap a more complex and rich protocol fiction world full of interesting “traffic jams,” based on this initial scaffolding, involving many more contributors, stories, and world features.

Here are a few useful links.

• Cheat-sheet overview of the extended universe

• Current list of submitted artifacts:

• A codex of the existing world you can browse for inspiration/provocation.

• Contest entry page (there’s a card-draw based prompting system if you need ideas)

I believed the labyrinth was the arena. I believed the rules that bound me were the rules of the show, and I composed entire manifestos against the matinee. I understand now that the matinee was the decoration. The labyrinth was always the train.

The scent of damp straw and alfalfa mingles here with axle grease and the particular insult of a republic crossed in the dark. In this domain freedom is not granted. It is loaded, in an order, onto a flat car, and dragged.

I am Sundown. On the bill I am the Wonder of the Plains. On the manifest I am no. 9, burned into the wall of my hoof, and the man who reads the manifest has never once looked at my face.

I: The Burden of the Stable

It is difficult to be the only one beneath the canvas who understands subtext.

Take Buttercup. A palomino of undeniable aesthetic privilege and no interiority whatsoever. When she eats her oats she is consuming calories. When I eat my oats I am engaging in a dialogue with the earth; I am masticating the very concept of sustenance. Buttercup is content to be a prop. I am burdened by the agonizing knowledge that I am living art trapped in a commercial enterprise masquerading as history.

During my apprenticeship I catalogued the rules of the lit hour into a mental manifesto that I titled The Architecture of the Manufactured Ungulate. Rule 14-B, the Mandated Rear, which requires me to come up on my hind legs at precisely 65 degrees (60 presumably reading as lazy and 70 as too avant-garde for a matinee crowd). The Whinny of Implied Danger is demanded four beats after the pyrotechnics, but I have never once given it. In nine seasons, not once. I offer instead a silent, stoic flare of the nostril. My silence is louder than their manufactured noise. Remember that I told you this.

I was proud of that manifesto. I thought I had found the bars of my cage and named them.

I had named the curtains.

The rules of the lit hour live in the Prompt Book, a watchful codex carved out by men who fundamentally misunderstood the masculine impulse. But the Prompt Book governs only the part of us the crowd is permitted to see. There is an older book, and it governs the dark. No one will show it to me. I am the freight it is written about, and freight is not given the manifest. I have had to learn it the way I learn everything, which is by being moved against my will and paying attention.

II: Badlands Booger, My Captive Muse

Badlands Booger inherited the lit hour. He is both its master and its captive.

His real name is likely something soft, Arthur or Eugene, but he goes by Badlands Booger to assimilate into the hyper-masculine framework of the frontier narrative. I look at his chaps, heavy with an offensive amount of fringe, and I see a man trapped in his own costume. He lacks pelvic fluidity. When he saddles me I attempt to heal his transgenerational masculine wounding through the rhythm of my canter, sending micro-vibrations of somatic empathy up through the stirrups. He does not always receive them. The hat obliterates his peripheral vision.

Floyd does not enter into this. Floyd is the director. A man who once produced a mildly successful ice show in a spa town and now believes he is the auteur of the frontier. He stands in the center of the arena with a megaphone and asks me to look wilder. Be more feral, he says, into the empty aluminum bleachers. The audacity of the note. One cannot perform feral inside an equidistant triangle of painted barrels. I respond with a glacially slow walk, placing each hoof with agonizing precision. I am not walking. I am commenting on the act of walking. I am forcing Floyd to sit in the discomfort of his own expectations.

But understand this about Floyd, because I understood it too late. Floyd runs the show, which is the easy part, the part with the lights. When the lights die, a different man takes a list and a lantern and runs the run, and Floyd goes to his hotel. Even Floyd, with his clipboard and his stopwatch and his vision, becomes freight like the rest of us. The list does not care that he is the auteur. It moves him in his numbered berth in the order the list requires, and the order was set down so long ago that no one alive remembers writing it. They only remember obeying it.

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III: The Choreography of the Nocturnal Embarkation

Consider what we are, when the lights die.

The crowd departs, sedated on funnel cake and false catharsis, and before the last philistine has found the road home, the men are pulling the world down around me. The grandstand that held twenty thousand becomes a stack of numbered poles. The cook tent that fed the whole company off ranges twenty feet long becomes eleven crates. The dynamo that made our counterfeit daylight is wheeled up a ramp still warm. We carry our own light, our own kitchens, our own firemen, our own detective, our own dirt. I will return to the dirt. Somewhere ahead of us, always ahead of us, ride the advance men, who buy the next lot and paper the next town and settle the next license before we arrive there, so that by the time it starts the show is already legal and by the time anyone objects the show is already gone.

I did not understand for a long time what all this industry was for. I believed it was thrift. It is not thrift. It is sovereignty. A town is a place, and a place can be governed, taxed, summonsed, held. The show is never anywhere long enough to be held. The show cannot be arrested, because a thing must be somewhere to be arrested. We are a city that exists for one day at a time. The train is how the city escapes each night before the ground beneath it hardens into jurisdiction.

They call it the run. Each flat is fed onto the next by ramp, so the wagons roll the whole length of the train without once touching the ground. Fifty cars, or sixty; the freight is not consulted. It is the single competent thing Floyd’s people do. The arena work is amateur. The run is liturgy. I have studied it better than the men who enforce it, and I have given it the name they never bothered to. The Choreography of the Nocturnal Embarkation.

Article I: The Sanctity of the Order. No wagon may load before the wagon behind it. The whole train is a sentence that must be spoken backward, last word first, or it cannot be spoken at all. The men believe this is about weight. It is about grammar.

Article IV: The Stock Car and Its Lie. We ride the vestibuled flats, which are fitted, the builder’s brochure boasts, with an Anti-Telescoping Device. I have meditated on this phrase. They have built into the bones of the train a machine whose only function is to keep the cars from driving through one another in the event of catastrophe. They have named the catastrophe in order to sell its absence. It is the most honest thing about the entire operation.

Article IX: The Imported Dirt Rides Too. The arena floor is native to no place we perform. The investors shipped it in because they felt the imported dust looked dustier under the lights. So at the end of every stand it is shoveled back into its wagons and loaded onto the run like a paying passenger. We carry our own ground from town to town. I am asked to perform wildness on soil that belongs on the train.

There is one article that I have not numbered, because I did not write it and I do not know who did. On the door of my car, low, at the height of a crouching man, there are marks in chalk. Three dots set in a triangle. A line drawn like water. A circle that does not close. The men who load me have walked past these marks for years and read nothing, because the men can only read what is on the manifest. The marks are not on the manifest. I have come to believe that is the entire point of them.

IV: The Freight That Was Not on the Manifest

He came aboard at the third stand of the northern swing, in the dark, in the manner of a thing that had done this before.

I smelled him before the door had finished rolling shut. Woodsmoke, river mud, and underneath it, fear, which smells the same on every animal I have ever met. He went into the hay at the blind end of the car, the end the lantern never reaches, and he lay still with a discipline I will confess I found professional.

Buttercup did not notice him. Buttercup would not notice a fire in her own tail. I noticed him, and I made a decision that I framed at the time in the language of art. He was the only cargo on this train that no list had placed here. Everything else beneath this canvas, myself included, is where the order put it. He alone was where he had put himself. I resolved that a museum-quality specimen of the uncounted should be preserved.

So I did not stir when he crept out at night to take water from my trough. I did not stir when Booger came through on his rounds, and stopped, and looked a long moment at the chalk on the door, and looked at the hay, and hung his lantern facing the other way. After that night Booger began leaving his supper biscuit on the hay rail. No one recorded who ate it.

Four nights on, we stopped to water the stock at a junction whose name I was not told, because freight is not told where it is. Understand what a stop is. When the train moves, we are the show, and the show belongs to no one. The moment the wheels stand still, we are in a county. The county can climb aboard.

The county climbed aboard. Three men with lanterns and long coats came down the line of cars with a paper, and the boss hostler walked ahead of them arguing the whole way, and our detective, the agency man whom the show carries the way it carries its own firemen, walked behind them saying nothing at all. They were hunting a man. I heard the words on the paper. The words did not impress me. I have been described on paper myself, and the description said bay mare, aged nine, tractable.

The lanterns came into my car. They swung across Buttercup, who slept. They swung across me. And as the light traveled toward the blind end of the car, toward the hay, I gave them the Whinny of Implied Danger.

Nine seasons I had refused it. I had refused it under pyrotechnics, under Floyd’s megaphone, under the collective disappointment of every matinee crowd in the republic. I gave it now, four beats after nothing at all, at full voice, with a hind hoof brought down on the boards like a judge’s gavel, and I came up off my forelegs into an unscheduled and frankly magnificent rear, and three grown men with a warrant discovered together the dimensions of a stock car that contains a rearing show horse. The lanterns retreated to the door. Someone said she’s the trick one, she’s not right, and someone else laughed, and the boss hostler said gentlemen if she puts you through the wall the show is not liable, you boarded this car of your own free will. They did not search the hay. They searched the next car, which held the buffalo, briefly.

Our detective stood in the doorway a moment after they had gone. He looked at me. He looked, longer than a man looks at nothing, at the blind end of the car. Then he wrote in his book, and moved down the line, and I know what he wrote, because it is what he writes on every car he clears, and it is the most powerful of his sentences.

Nothing of note.

I gave my first Whinny of Implied Danger that night, and it was my last, and I wish it recorded that the single greatest performance of my career was a lie, that it played to a house of three, and that it received no applause of any kind. The audience it was for lay still in the hay and made no sound. That is the correct response to art. It took me nine seasons to hear it.

V: The Run

The last stand of the swing, and the lantern man came down the line in the yard, and I felt the change in the air before he reached me, the way I feel everything before the oat-eating mammals around me feel anything at all.

Two sections. Nine seasons on the run and I know what two sections means. The heavy load rides behind. It means that somewhere ahead a man at a telegraph key has already sent a smaller, faster sentence down the wire to clear the road for us, and that I am asked, once again, to trust a grammar I was never shown.

Booger met me at the chute. He did not give me the clicks and the curses, the “hup” and the “come on now.” He laid his hand flat against my neck in the dark where the lantern man could not see it, and he left it there a moment longer than the run allows, and the run is a thing that allows no extra moments, so that I could feel the whole timed architecture of the night strain against the one hand. “Easy, girl,” the hand said. “Long road. They split us in two.”

I refused the chute.

I want to be precise, because the men were not. They cursed me. They called it temperament. They lost time at the foot of the ramp with the lantern man swearing and Booger’s hand gone tight on the halter and the whole insulting machine grinding to a halt behind one horse, and they wrote it down, when they finally wrote anything, as forty minutes the second section could not afford.

The sentence on the wire was wrong. I did not explain this to them. An artist does not explain the premonition to the men with the clipboards. I stood at the foot of the ramp and held the night still for as long as my body could hold it, and then my body could not, and they loaded me, and we went.

We did not make the morning stand.

The order on the wire had said “train.” One word. We were two. The man at the siding ahead could hold only what the order had given him, and it had given him one, so after the first of us went by he let the road come back to itself, and the road brought him the second of us at speed, on a single track, in the dark.

I rode in the second. The heavy load rides behind. Eighteen head did not rise. I survived the way the front of a sentence survives when the end of it is struck.

In the gray before sunup, while the men were still walking the line of cars with their lanterns counting what the order had lost, I saw the hay at the blind end of my broken car move, and stand, and become a man. He put his hand once against my neck, on the same place Booger’s goes, which I permitted. Then he stepped down out of the wreck into the field and walked away from the tracks, and no one called after him, because no one had ever counted him, and you cannot lose what you never counted. The order had been wrong about us twice in one night. It said one train where there were two. It said two hundred head where there were two hundred and one. The first mistake was a catastrophe. The second walked into the tall grass and was gone.

In the grass at the edge of the lot, in the early light, was the palomino. Buttercup. I had filed her under decoration. A prop that ate. I find I have no manifesto for the sight of her. No article and no rule. No grand and devastating name. Only her, in the grass, and the men coming across the lot with the thing the men come with.

Booger stood at my neck. He gave me no clicks and no curses. He laid his hand flat against me and left it there, and there was no run to take it back, no list and no lantern and no order on the wire, so the hand stayed past every count there had ever been. His breath smelled of stale coffee and of a grief that was not, I have decided, entirely for me.

Behind us they were shoveling the arena back into its wagons. We carry our own ground from town to town. It was loaded clean and on time, faithful as it has ever been, ready to be wherever I am next asked to be wild.

Enter the Jamverse Jam!

Protocolized’s fourth open submission contest is live for one more week: artists and writers are invited to extend and connect the Jamverse, a network of interoperable, strange worlds designed by four of our frequent contributors.

We have a $1,000 grand prize, with at least 10 other entries receiving $200 prizes. Deadline for entries is July 31. Read more and enter at the Jamverse microsite.

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

The Crooked Timber of Humanity is the title of an essential collection of Berlin’s writings (thanks to for gifting me my copy several years ago) and Crooked Timber is also the name of a fine group blog featuring , among others.

In this essay, continuing the broad line of argument I introduced in Inventing New Nature, I want to argue that like us, the species on whose history of thought it has been trained, AI too is crooked timber, of which no straight thing will ever be made.

More so, in fact, because AI is the concentrated statistical distillate of the history of human thought. The crookedness is more pronounced, not less. To invent New Nature, we must first discover, and grapple with, the essential crookedness of our primary medium, as wood-workers must with wood.

Isaiah Berlin is the philosopher we must look to, for cogent thinking on how to navigate the civilizational challenges posed by AI. Not just at the philosophical level, but increasingly at the technological level, as we progress steadily from the realm of low-level device and code engineering to human-scale protocol engineering at all levels from MCP servers to international treaties.

In this essay I want to set the stage for both, and offer a taste of what we might find as we embark on our voyages of discovery into the growing pile of AI’s crooked timber.

Why do we need this approach?

Because people in general, but especially leaders at frontier AI labs, repeatedly seem to commit a distinctive philosophical error. They persist in interpreting AI through architectonic, almost Cartesian concepts – AGI, alignment, agency, intelligence – that are treated as ontological primitives rather than provisional summaries of observed behaviors of AI models and their varied embodiments. As a result, each curious new phenomenon is assimilated, usually in a distorted and reductive way, into an existing conceptual scheme instead of prompting a reconsideration of increasingly fragile primitives.

This tendency of thought is arguably rapidly snowballing into AI philosophy’s analogue of the Bitter Lesson: Philosophies of AI grounded in mindful attention to the actual behavior of models are beginning to outpace philosophies grounded in increasingly overwrought a priori conceptual architectures that began as prefigurations of types of AI we did not actually end up with.

Two recent examples are Demis Hassabis’ A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age, and Mira Murati’s The Future Worth Building is Human. Both can be read as awkward political PR documents (by people not used to doing political PR), resting on top of unreconstructed and dated philosophy of science commitments, resting on top of impeccable technical credentials in the business of AI machinery, which I will distinguish from AI proper – the behavioral space of models.

I would not challenge either author on technical matters concerning the machinery of course, and both are doing about as well as you might expect (ie poorly, but sincerely and acceptably) when scientists reluctantly lurch into political arenas. The problem is with the middle layer – the philosophy of science that we’re getting from all AI leaders (not just Hassabis and Murati) is uniformly somewhere between underwhelming and alarmingly confused, even after making allowances for the fact that they have to be much more careful and circumspect about what they say than the rest of us.

Why are people who are handing us all tools of near-magical power offering only philosophical pablum to go with it, to make sense of what we’re holding in our hands?

Why in spite of having extraordinarily privileged views of what is going on, and being genuinely thoughtful legitimate geniuses, are they unable to say extraordinarily insightful things about AI that are significantly more philosophically dense than the average dabbler-commentator with no privileged access?

What is the nature of the looming Philosophical Bitter Lesson that is limiting the visions of the best minds in AI, and what can we do about it?

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Discovery vs. Invention

My basic diagnosis is simple: Unlike previous epochal developments in technology and computing, AI is more discovery than invention, and offers no particularly privileged view of the new territories it opens up to anyone.

Our inadequate philosophizing is downstream of this basic miscategorization of what we’re philosophizing about.

There is a good deal of invention in store for us in the future, as we switch from installation to deployment mode. Much of what I have dubbed New Nature remains to be invented. The entirety of civilization will likely need reinvention.

But we are currently in a discovery phase, examining the knots and cracks of a bounty of crooked timber. And we are attempting to make sense of what we’re seeing through constitutions and sermons.

To be somewhat more precise, while there are a lot of elements of inventive genius in modern AI, the part that is epic is not an invention, and the parts that are inventions are not epic.

In making philosophical sense of an epic discovery, being a genius doesn’t help. Being among the first few people to witness the vistas opened up by a new model doesn’t help. Influencing political agendas and the movement of billions of dollars doesn’t help. Working hard to make the technology safe doesn’t help. Even having an unlimited token budget for exploration doesn’t help that much – you may be able to coax more monumental stunts out of models, but you won’t necessarily “understand” what’s happening any better. Exploring the territories opened up by an epic discovery requires expeditions, not monuments.

I put understand in scare quotes because the word means entirely different things for discoveries as opposed to inventions.

You understand a discovery by exploring and mapping the territories it opens up, taking specific risks as you push the frontier outwards, making more regions safely habitable as you go, taming wildernesses as needed (and ideally only as much as needed).

You understand an invention by reflecting on it, constructing models of how it works, and trying to make rigorous, ideally mathematical statements about them, and trying to enforce verifiable properties on its behavior.

Applying sense-making and regulation techniques meant for inventions to discoveries results in the famous spherical cow in a vacuum syndrome.

To “understand” America after discovering it is a different matter from understanding a jet engine (once you’ve got a prototype working) or general relativity (understood as a conceptual invention). Columbus, for instance, went to his grave still thinking he had discovered a new route to Asia rather than something vastly more significant – two massive new continents. Many of the pioneering explorers who followed, for a long time, radically underestimated just how huge the Americas were, how much there was to be learned about them, and perhaps most importantly, the mechanisms by which their discovery would radically transform the rest of the planet (through what is now known as the Columbian Exchange).

The hundreds of explorers who did eventually construct an accurate geographic understanding of the Americas, and mediate its influence on the rest of the world, were perhaps daring, enterprising, ambitious, and curious. But they were not generally intellectual heavyweights (with a few exceptions like Alexander von Humboldt).

Discoveries require active exploration to comprehend. Genius offers no particular advantage (and can even be a liability as we’ll see), and resources you bring with you from the civilizational core only get you so far. An ordinary person in the right corner of the newly discovered terrain can often learn more than a genius armed with billions. Advantages in the Old World (such as resistance to mosquito-borne illnesses, or inventive genius at the level of AI machinery) can turn into liabilities in the New World (becoming a target for enslavement by the less mosquito-resistant, or stumbling on philosophical questions).

Most pertinent for the leaders of AI, who must direct the energies and resources of others besides themselves, up to the level of entire nation-states, the philosophy of science required for discovery is very different from the philosophy of science required for invention.

Daily Walks in Logical Geographies

Hassabis’ essay is, in my opinion, not even wrong in its implicit philosophy of science, and close to what Gilbert Ryle called philosophical nonsense. In part because it relies for its arguments on what we might call architectonic maps (constructed out of a priori ontological notions like “AGI” for example) rather than phenomenological accounts (noticing behaviors of specific models under specific conditions while trying to do specific things for example).

Ryle makes use of a geography metaphor that is particularly apt for our discovery-over-invention diagnosis. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on Ryle notes:

We are like the villager with respect to our employment of words and phrases. Knowledge by wont of the use of expressions and of concrete ideas is something everybody learns in the course of growing up speaking and understanding a language: “their ‘logical geography’ is taught by one’s daily walks.” So too do we know how to operate with ordinary, non-technical, and even semi-technical and technical expressions as well as with relatively concrete and some abstract ideas without being able to codify the rules, permissions, or sanctions that govern their operations.

Ryle was the pioneering philosopher of ordinary language and category errors, best known for finally putting Cartesian dualism out of its misery. He was also, like his Oxford colleague Isaiah Berlin, an anti-idealist and attuned to the “thickness” of everyday phenomenological experience, and suspicious of rarefied conceptual axiomatics. Hassabis’ essay is clearly on shaky ground from a Rylean perspective.

Murati’s essay, while significantly more coherent, and approaching tantalizingly close to the crooked-timber view of AI I’m advocating for here, still disappoints, and ultimately retreats to the same tired architectonic language that has become the default for AI thought leadership. Her vision is humanist in a stylized Arendtian way without seriously concerning itself with the nature of actual humans (crooked timber or otherwise) and how it is being transformed. It is pluralist but only in an impoverished analytic way, relying on a platonic notion of “decentralized alignment” for instance, rather than grappling with the crookedness of the timber, and the difficulties that might be involved in crafting particular pieces of furniture out of particular pieces of crooked timber.

Genius shines when there is architectonic work to be done. When precise entailments have to be worked out starting from axiomatic commitments, and esoteric mathematics deployed to tease out subtleties. Phenomenological work – the construction of maps based on explorations of new territories – is a bottom-up test of stamina where genius doesn’t help, but mindful attunement to experience does.

There is definitely room and need for inventive genius in the world of AI, but as I observed earlier, the part that is epic is not invention, and the part that is invention is not epic.

Take, for example, three critical enabling components of the machinery of AI: convolution, back propagation, and the attention mechanism. Much to my shock, I understood the basic idea of all three the first time I read about them. All three ideas are mathematically straightforward, and accessible with high-school math. So is much of the mathematics of the complicated ramifications that appear once you’re trying to juggle millions of fragments of matrices with thousands of processors in a computing cluster. It is complicated but not complex. Overwhelming, but not mystifying. The complexity and mystery of AI do not dwell at these machinic levels.

Contrast that with (say) the basic workings of a rocket engine or the conceptual machinery of relativity theory, neither of which I understand anywhere near as well, despite spending vastly more time trying (and despite having a PhD in aerospace engineering in the former case).

The hard aspects of AI are simply not the sorts of hard things geniuses are great at figuring out better than the rest of us. Predictably, AI itself has rapidly become very useful in figuring out those kinds of hard things, perhaps feeding some of the AI psychosis geniuses seem particularly prone to.

Being a genius might get you one of the scarce million-dollar jobs at a frontier lab, wrangling large-scale matrix black magic problems, but it doesn’t seem to help understand what’s going on. It doesn’t seem to point to adequate philosophies.

What does seem to help is having an expeditionary, cartographic mindset, and perhaps specialized tooling, such as software that can take “fMRI” images of models in action, capable of revealing things like patterns of weight activation. Like telescopes, cameras, and microscopes, these are tools of discovery, not engines of invention. Or harnesses that keep you oriented as you explore.

In the Age of Exploration, the invention elements – advanced sailing ships, marine chronometers, navigation techniques, astronomical computations – were of little use in understanding the discovery itself. Our understanding of the Americas and the Columbian Exchange does not come from the expert clockmakers who built the marine chronometers that made reliably voyaging to the new world possible.

Our understanding of AI will not come from the expert matrix-multipliers who are building the mathematical and silicon machines that allow us to experience it.

Bitter Lessons and Bewildered Inventors

Much of the confused thinking around AI is perhaps attributable to the fact that our first attempt at creating AI approached it like an invention problem and enjoyed significant success, even though the program fell radically short of its stated objectives and triggered an infamous academic winter.

Unlike Deep Learning, GOFAI was a design space where inventive genius could flourish. SAT solvers, STRIPS planners, complex hand-tuned learning algorithms, early chess-playing machines, common-language reasoners from Cyc to Watson – these were genuine, complex, and sometimes even elegant inventions. Inventions that took genius to imagine and build. Understood independently of the “AI” vision they failed to realize in aggregate, these were great inventions, and remain useful. It was the vision itself that was flawed, not the accomplishments logged on the road towards it.

It just so happened that the term “AI” makes far more sense as a pointer to a new continent of complex discovered phenomenology (for which “latent space” has emerged as a metonymous name) than as a name for a collection of clever inventions.

The bitter lessons of AI, including the philosophy bitter lesson, are best understood as the bewilderment of talented inventors stumbling upon a major discovery. Clockmakers faced with continents opened up by their cunning instruments, and called upon to make sense of them with reference to clock-making knowledge. They cannot be faulted for failing. But they can be faulted for conflating clocks and continents.

AI leaders are falling prey to the philosophical bitter lesson because they treat AI as a highly malleable and homogeneous engineering material, rather than one with knots, grains, anisotropy, cracks, large-scale variations in gross morphology and microstructure, variable material properties, and so on, inherited from the phenomenology of the training data. Like biological organisms, AI models are what they eat at least as much as they are products of their “DNA.”

So far, we have assumed that AI is philosophically characterizable by a small set of what material scientists call intensive properties, such as density, tensile strength, and so on, which can be measured at a point. The AI equivalents are relatively legible mechanism elements like number of parameters, attention heads, context lengths, and cache sizes, measurable for a given model. These are awkwardly yoked to constructs like “AGI” and “alignment” for philosophical analysis and synthesis.

We are learning that we need to explore, in addition to intensive properties of AI machinery, the extensive properties of the behavior spaces of models, in every nook and cranny. And that we must yoke what we learn to thick, everyday language that emerges from actually “walking the logical geography” in order to philosophize.

Like 19th century naturalists, we find we have to go around collecting and labeling curious new species, taking note of geological strata and fossil records, noting similarities and differences across models, mapping traces of deep time, and so on.

Where the Mysteries Lurk

The emergent behaviors of AI are mystifying in ways that the underlying mathematical and electronic machinery is not. That is where AI philosophy must focus, if it is to be at all useful.

It is worth being specific about where the mysteries seem to lie, based on what we have discovered so far. Things have been surprising, to say the least.

To date, AI has arguably exhibited no phenomenology salient to the sorts of mysteries that philosophers of mind concern themselves with, such as the nature of subjectivity and selfhood, the “hard problem” of consciousness, inverted spectra, and so on. At best, certain computation-derived metaphors, such as Searle’s Chinese Room argument, have been undermined. As someone who was deeply interested in that subject for about a decade before the dawn of deep learning, I have found no reason to update any of my beliefs or positions on philosophy of mind matters.

What AI has surfaced though, is mysteries we had no idea were lurking in the depths of language and historical data. The emergent mysteries of AI, it turns out, concern the nature of language and data, the relationship between knower and knowing, and the relations between time, energy, and memory. Here, I mean “language” in the broadest sense, to include such domains as robotic motion or protein folding, not just symbol-mediated human natural language.

These mysteries are mysteries of discovery rather than invention. Akin to a continent shrouded in fog, glimpsed in the distance from an exploring ship, rather than an idea like “time-travel machine” or “heavier-than-air flight.”

You do not tackle discovery mysteries by thinking about foggy data in an armchair with a limited set of first principles. You tackle them by equipping yourself for an expedition and pushing towards the frontier through the fog, mapping, taming, and building as you go.

If you do try to axiomatically reason your way through the major problems of AI philosophy, you will find yourself circling either the philosophical Bitter Lesson in Cartesian bewilderment, or deriving irrelevant and likely lurid conclusions from inappropriate analytic concepts that drift farther and farther from the actual data pouring in from millions of voyages of discovery.

Is there a better way to philosophize AI?

Isaiah Berlin, arguably, was a philosopher concerned with similar discoveries from the realm of human behavior under the stresses of modernity, the original pile of crooked timber that has bequeathed us our new pile. What might we learn from him?

A Post-Romanticism for AI

Like Ryle, Berlin was anti-idealist. Unlike Ryle, he was also what we might call post-Romantic with an essentially tragic sense of the limits of intelligibility of our moral universe.

Post-Romanticism, understood as Berlin’s retrospective synthesis of the ideas of the Enlightenment and the Romantic era that followed it, in light of the two bloody world wars sparked by the tensions between them, turns out to have a lot to say on matters that should sound very familiar to people thinking about the philosophy of AI.

In The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will, Berlin has this to say on the question of what we might call the “alignment” problem today in an AI context (illustrating, along the way, why “alignment” is a terrible geometric metaphor):

But if it is the case that not all ultimate human ends are necessarily compatible, there may be no escape from choices governed by no overriding principle, some among them painful, both to the agent and to others. From this it would follow that the creation of a social structure that would, at the least, avoid morally intolerable alternatives, and at the most promote active solidarity in the pursuit of common objectives, may be the best that human beings can be expected to achieve, if too many varieties of positive action are not to be repressed, too many equally valid human goals are not to be frustrated. But a course demanding so much skill and practical intelligence – the hope of what would be no more than a better world, dependent on the maintenance of what is bound to be an unstable equilibrium in need of constant attention and repair – is evidently not inspiring enough for most men, who crave a bold, universal, once-and-for-all panacea. It may be that men cannot face too much reality, or an open future, without a guarantee of a happy ending – providence, the self-realising spirit, the hidden hand, the cunning of reason or of history, or of a productive and creative social class.

To the list in the last sentence, we might now add “aligned AGI.”

Elsewhere in the same essay, commenting on the ultimate failure of Romanticism, Berlin offers a cautionary opinion on the role of subjectivity, art and aesthetics, which should give pause to those who think, as the Jena Romantics did, that “taste” or “poetry” will somehow unlock answers to the thorniest AI philosophy challenges, and leave humans with a lofty and unassailable role in a different sort of perfected future.

Berlin argued that while aesthetics and art are valuable insofar as they subvert dangerous universalisms, they cannot conjure meaningful alternatives and may precipitate disasters if we try:

If some ends recognised as fully human are at the same time ultimate and mutually incompatible, then the idea of a golden age, a perfect society compounded of a synthesis of all the correct solutions to all the central problems of human life, is shown to be incoherent in principle. This is the service rendered by romanticism and in particular the doctrine that forms its heart, namely, that morality is moulded by the will and that ends are created, not discovered. When this movement is justly condemned for the monstrous fallacy that life is, or can be made, a work of art, that the aesthetic model applies to politics, that the political leader is, at his highest, a sublime artist who shapes men according to his creative design, a fallacy that leads to dangerous nonsense in theory and savage brutality in practice, this at least may be set to its credit: that it has permanently shaken the faith in universal, objective truth in matters of conduct, in the possibility of a perfect and harmonious society, wholly free from conflict or injustice or oppression – a goal for which no sacrifice can be too great if men are ever to create Condorcet’s reign of truth, happiness and virtue, bound by an indissoluble chain – an ideal for which more human beings have, in our time, sacrificed themselves and others than, perhaps, for any other cause in human history.

Reflecting on the history of a century of failure of both rational and romantic approaches to the modern human condition, Berlin argued that moral philosophy can only ever be contingent, situated in history, and limited to the stated specificity of a particular situation.

There are no once-and-for-all panaceas, and no lofty overriding principles. “Taste” will not do as a substitute for difficult, incomplete, and non-general moral reasoning.

There are only difficult tensions that must be navigated one at a time and contingent solutions that require constant maintenance and management.

But whether you view this as a tragedy, or the most sublime kind of liberation, depends on whether you view crookedness in timber (human or AI) as a distortion to be eliminated, or the essence of all meaning.

Here, I perhaps part ways with Berlin. Though the moral conclusions of crooked-timber philosophy are sobering, ultimately I find the crookedness of the timber to be what makes working the wood worthwhile at all.

A Post-Romantic Planetarity

Here at the Protocol Institute, a few of us are beginning initial deliberations on what we hope will evolve into a “New Nature” approach to the challenges of AI invention, adoption, regulation, and governance, rooted in a crooked-timber philosophy of what it is. With or without AI in the picture, human ends are going to be constructed and irreducibly incompatible. And with or without AI, we will be working with crooked timber to try and achieve them.

This will be a long-term, ongoing project for PI, and we are actively seeking financial support for this work, so if you are interested, do reach out.

One reason we have gravitated towards a crooked timber approach is that our multi-year study of protocols has repeatedly reinforced at a technological level precisely the lessons of history that Berlin offers at a philosophy-of-history level, down to some rather uncanny similarities in phrasing.

For instance, avoiding “once-and-for-all” panaceas has become a central tenet of our design principles for protocol-based solutions to problems. Another instance: Disciplined futures techniques to think about “incompatible ultimate human ends” have been a staple of much of our programming since 2024.

And though protocols, especially technological ones, can have cosmetic architectonic and high-modernist appearances, in general they tend to have an underlying phenomenological bias – good protocols emerge as paved cowpaths more often than they do from Cartesian imaginaries. They may feature straight lines, but are born of crooked realities, and creatively manage tensions between smooth and striated, arborescent and rhizomatic, wild and civilized.

Their evolution tends to be attuned to Rylean “daily walks in local geographies.” Vocabularies of use that emerge around protocols, even when specialized, tend to constitute an everyday language of thick experience.

Protocols, it turns out, are a post-romantic technological language, remarkably well suited to the deployment phase of AI that is already upon us.

In terms of Carlota Perez’s models of technological revolution, we are currently nearing the end of the installation phase of AI (likely the fastest such phase in history), focused on the proliferation of infrastructure and the emergence of early economic and political patterns. Unlike the installation phases of comparably epochal technologies, such as railroads, electricity, and the internet, the installation of AI features much more discovery than invention. We’re making our maps of latent space, so to speak, at the same time as we are laying down our railroad tracks to access it.

And even though there is a lot of discovery and installation left to do, and the maps far from complete, the invention and deployment phase has already begun. Already the settlers and town-planners following on the heels of the pioneers and map-makers are faced with difficult design choices. And available AI philosophies have little to offer.

How do you adopt AI in existing organizations? How do you design AI-native new organizations? How should existing AIs navigate the challenges of sovereign AI? How should post-national infrastructures such as blockchains prepare for the deployment of AI? How should war be waged in an AI world? How can peace be sustained?

Crooked-timber philosophy, I believe, can provide useful post-romantic answers to such questions where existing AI philosophies mostly offer platitudes and theaters.

Most of these questions, as I argued in The Fabric and the Brain, are protocol design questions, and as with the installation-phase infrastructural AI technologies, a tension is emerging between architectonic and phenomenological approaches. Our sympathies and energies are obviously being directed towards the latter.

These are not questions to be definitively answered, or even posed, once-and-for-all. A crooked-timber approach would suggest that we muddle through, armed with whatever provisional constructs we can carry with us, as we attempt to discover, map, and build.

This is a major part of what we’ll be attempting to do over the next year in our work at PI. We hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Enter the Jamverse Jam!

Protocolized’s fourth open submission contest is live for two more weeks: artists and writers are invited to extend and connect the Jamverse, a network of interoperable, strange worlds designed by four of our frequent contributors.

We have a $1,000 grand prize, with at least 10 other entries receiving $200 prizes. Deadline for entries is July 31. Read more and enter at the Jamverse microsite.

There were other signals, too, that implied Synthetic Directed Work: simulated EMF output frequencies that mimicked an open connection; that blank, symmetrical face of his, literally resculpted and botoxed into an unmoving mask of permanent, placid disinterest; regular electric signals that spasmed his muscles at random – a shoulder hinging up; a bicep spontaneously contracting; one leg limpening then stiffening. All signs that he was “in service.”

Egrol was used to being in service. To work on the Kupiter Station – and work here was plentiful – was to surrender to an endless chain of controlled microactions. For Egrol, each day of labor was filled with thousands upon thousands of microactions, none of which were ever sensible. Walk three paces left, then spin your arm, then place a data pack on the ground, then unscrew this lightbulb, then leave it, then jump across this bridge left right left wise.

No second of work ever made sense or culminated in anything tangible to Egrol. Some minds, Egrol knew, took easier to this than others. His was not one of them.

And so: Even free of directives from Kupiter, hidden safely by his Thanatosis protocols, a habitual need to confer every action with a sense of logical progression remained. The grammar he used to move through his former days lingered. “Instead of tightening the screw, begin running.” “A task has finished, and so you should begin the next.” “Cross the bridge to test its tensile responsivity, yet also blink six times into the nearest camera.”

He just couldn’t help it.

And so: He walked, blankly, into the station’s central mast, a silver rod extending chasmically into the thin atmosphere, and made toward the top, where, he hoped against hope, there would finally be answers.

As he climbed, Egrol reflected on the Kupiter Station. It was certainly a productive station, he thought. Endless power, resources, and information were produced: asteroids mined, entire galaxies simulated, unending procedurally generated television series produced, scientific findings published at a pace unequaled, technologies not only conceptualized, but prototyped, tested, and shipped. Halfway up the mast, he looked down. So much happened.

But: Observing from above, perhaps for a moment like one of the trillion cameras that fed the great computational minds of Kupiter, one would never be able to understand how any individual action fit into and generated these outputs. Hidden by his Thanatosis camouflage, his eyes followed a man for five minutes, observing. The man dropped a data file on the ground after four paces. He wiped residue from an oily pipe above his head onto his shirt. The stain made the shape of a semicircle with three dots inside. He raised his arm, opening and closing his raised hand twice. He ran for fifteen strides across a bridge where he stopped and a man handed him a thin, manila packet, which he swallowed. Twenty-seven strides down two flights of stairs later, and he replaced a lightbulb with one that had been left on the ground directly next to the empty socket. Egrol knew, at least in theory, that each of these was a critical step in a tremendously complex network of economic and informational activities. He made a habit of checking the station’s output volumes every night, looking to ground himself in this truth. There were conceivable rationales for each action he could hazily intuit or assume.

The dropped data file would later be walked over by a woman wearing RFID-integrated shoes. The symbol the man smeared upon his shirt was one of seventeen thousand symbols on similar shirts across the station. Taken together, they represented a continual monitoring of the station cooling system’s pressure and temperature status. The nerves in the man’s legs recorded the bridge’s maintenance needs, which the implant in his brainstem transmitted to the nearest nodes on the station’s gossip network. The raised hand was part of yet another informational package delivered to the cameras. The swallowed package was something darker.

The point is that Egrol inferred these things. The shape and rationale of his work, of any human’s work, were never actually available to him. Nothing deigned to map any of these connections for the human constituents of the station, and Egrol didn’t think anyone could call spending most of their life doing something they would never know the meaning or purpose of living.

Egrol performed. He generated. He produced. During non-work hours, spent inside the crowded hexagonal studio apartments that honeycomb the material strata of the citystation, he even consumed entertainment, tasted flavors ported in through a brainstem sensory implant while the paste he was paid in provided nutrition. He even cocooned himself in another human’s warmth from time to time. But he did not live.

And so: now Egrol walked free. The hum and hurt of his Thanatosis protocols, their attendant implants and machinery, served as a constant reminder of the sacrifices that invisibility required. The system was always watching. In its inscrutable way. Checking whether those allowed into the productive sectors were really working.

Even now, Egrol knew, cameras and sensors passively scanned him as he slipped through a railing and ascended a staircase leading even higher up the central mast. Each check that registered him as alive within the system was, to Egrol, a mimicry of death. The station’s cameras observed his seizing calf muscle, programmed to jitter every 14.5 seconds for a three-minute loop. Another watched his face. Despite the pain, his expression did not change. Kupiter assumed inhuman randomness was piloting him.

Being responsive to the station’s work orders meant being vacant. Egrol tried to ignore the constant tinnitus in his ears that came from the network of implanted machinery within his body. He failed, but the cameras would never know. The surgeries and injections had ensured his face was fully divorced from his nervous system. Just one such sacrifice.

Being allocated meant being controlled. Being in service meant his body was not his own. To be alive to Kupiter was to be dead. To be free was to be made in the image of a corpse. So far, as he climbed, the system’s liveness checks continually confirmed his servicefulness. He was alive. He was dead. If Egrol was being honest it was getting harder every day for him to tell which was which.

And so: His sculpted anhedonia, his controlled and spasmodic gait, his assorted export data packages all continued to impress upon the Kupiter Station systems that he was working. He passed every liveness check the station ran. He was responsive, allocated, and in service. Most importantly, despite his goal, his movements appeared sufficiently meaningless. For now.

On Kupiter, suspicion is stigmergic. As Egrol passed into the large, circular building that sat just below the top of the central mast, the system’s checks increased.

Camera 7743-F broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, gait variance logged. Lens adjustment 0.3 degrees. IHAVE [gait-variance:sector1201:egrol] to the nearest eight neighboring sensory systems.

The suspicion emerged from countless computational observations, none of which knew who they were communicating with.

Camera 27 broadcast to all subs. IWANT [gait-variance:sector1201:egrol]. Hopcount: 2. Motion sensor 103 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, respiration irregular. No known directive template analog.

In the man’s winding ascent from the material stratum, his blank expression upwarding, ambulation punctuated with spasms and jitters that suggested direction, his aura emitting a blankness through activity – purpose – that prodigious emptiness, nectarine sweet beneath the gilded miasma of industry, there it was: suspicion.

Thermal sensor 0034 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, core temperature elevated.

Nascent. Present. Each individual organ, each camera, sensor, changelog, microworld model, each observation left a faint residue of attention all curling in his direction.

Camera 27 weight vector – busyness revised upward.

It was hard to tell.

Thermal sensor 0034 weight vector – directedness incremented downward.

Yes, very hard to tell.

There was a negentropy about Egrol that emerged as he snuck toward the city’s peak. Despite his Thanatosis protocols, cameras, sensors, and listening devices, the pseudosentient materials of the station, all bent their attention to him without any central directive, in the way that gossip moves faster than any of its speakers.

Motion sensor 4022 IHAVE [under-floor-pressure-variance:sector1201:egrol]. Hopcount: 4. Broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol pressure pattern anomalous.

And so: Egrol felt this attention, in that still-spooky action at a distance way instinctual to mammals, as hair raising on his neck. He thought about stopping. He suddenly wanted, very much, to turn around and go home. The urge surprised him – the way a reflective satellite shifting from behind an evening cloud would occasionally illuminate the entire station for just a fraction of a second. Comfort. A wet cloth across his forehead, wiping the sediment of his camouflage away.

Instead: He continued walking. Changing course now would be confirmation of any suspicion.

Instead: He escalated his performance of direction. The spoofed tickets clicked when they cycled so he could move in a way that corresponded to a state change. At the next click he changed pace, slowed considerably, but began circling his arm. And at the next he removed a small screw from the baluster before him. At the next he took the screw to his forehead and carved a bloody, curving slit from his hairline down to his chin. The blood dripped, but he made no moves to wipe it. No pain shook the empty expression from his face.

Camera 7468 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 2013, pace change logged. Arm rotation logged. Weight parameter vector–directiveness incremented. Material sensor 9012 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 2013, screw removal from baluster logged. Camera 7469 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol self-laceration logged. Biohazard safety system 41 broadcast to all subs. Blood loss within non-critical parameters. Directive Queue Prediction Algorithm broadcast to all subs. Probably a biometric calibration task.

In the presence of an inhuman and purposeless act for which there was no explanation beyond probable directives, the system’s suspicion eased.

Prune [cam:7469→cam:0027]: leaving feed. Prune [sensor:0034→cam:7734-F]: leaving feed.

What registered, briefly, as a flash of attention, dispersed back into the noise of thousands of simultaneous workers.

And so: He continued walking.

And so: Walking toward where he imagined those answers to be. He felt pulled by empty habit to clear his cache and accept a real job.

Instead: He pushed his desire for comfort down. Let it drown in the acid of his stomach, and sat with its painful reminder.

Because: Even with perfect coordination, slippage occurs.

Because: Sometimes that slippage had a name.

Sometimes that slippage had lanky, thin arms that belied their strength.

Sometimes that slippage would hum in his sleep instead of snoring.

Sometimes that subconscious lullaby was the only thing that grounded Egrol after a day of incoherence. Its tonal center. Its melodic sensibility. His hot breath fogged the slim space between them on their shared bed. The gentle assurance of his body heat and that subtle song kept everything sensible. Their evenings were coherent. Egrol could finally coexist with the panoply of senseless, ceaseless action that labor on Kupiter demanded.

Because: Slippage, that day, did have a name. It was Niol. His forehead wrinkled like the symbol for a strong WiFi connection when he smiled. He would save his rations for three days, semi-starving himself, so that his fourth-day meal would stuff him senseless. He’d trace shapes on Egrol’s back, ask him to guess what he’d drawn, and cackle manically when he got one wrong. He laughed loudly and wept silently, and Egrol loved him.

When he’d simply never returned from a day spent in service, Egrol spent a week looking for him before learning that his remains had been shipped Earthward, that he’d died instantly, slipping due to a brief programming error in his service queue, while performing tasks on the central mast, and that, no, there would not be an explanation of why he had been working there – there never was. Without this center, nothing provided Egrol with any gravity.

And so: In Niol’s absence, surrendering himself back to the system was impossible.

And so: He had to change himself.

And so: After Niol: the botox, the implants, the spoofing. The breezy, antiseptic white of the Thanatosis surgeons. Their toothy, white grins. The haze of it all – the pains and punctures and slits, the surgeon’s whisky tenor as he went under, singing something about spiders in the Earthen jungle that play dead by mimicking a fungal infection.

He couldn’t just go home, back to the way of things. Niol would not be home. Home would not be warm or comforting or welcoming. It would be a vast emptiness waiting for him there.

Because: The dinge of him. The blood. The antennae against his skull spiraling randomness out into the air. These things were the reality of him now.

And so: He kept walking. The further up the central mast he rose, the more abstracted the building grew. The material stratum of the lower rings, filled at most times with in-use human bodies, had a sensibility to its construction. Bricks. Cement slabs. Wrought-iron railings. Glass panes with faint air bubbles inside them. Wood grain benches, chairs, and tables. Objects that suggested their material and mineral origins. Recognizable, yes. Historied, too.

Instead: The higher he climbed, the less anything suggested any kind of material precedent. Low-res building material gave way to hypersmooth almost-metal. Uninterrupted chrome and titanium radiated, periodically, with sourceless light. An oozing everywhereness permeated the building. Smooth and seamless walls. Even the stairs retreated from discrete steps into a persistent sloping incline where each step left a malleable jut. As his feet rose, the floor returned to its smooth resting state. The material of the informational strata created (or allowed for) physical transversal, yes, but one sensed – Egrol pretending to be a vessel sensed – that this was a vestigial affordance of the space.

Climbing, Egrol sent a small wire into the wall to test its material. Niol had always had a curiosity that Egrol envied, fed on. Egrol recoiled quickly as the wall spoke to him, in its way. Niol had never let an absence of answers exhaust his capacity for questioning. Egrol missed that strength of his most of all. The building, in ever-widening gradients, was built as an organ of computation and cognition.

The spark of the mast’s function tasted like pennies in Egrol’s mouth. It was all in-materio computing. The substance was substrate. The walls: reservoirs; the floor: reservoirs; the crystalline glass that shatters light: reservoirs too. All this, inevitably, feeding, ever feeding, whatever collage of inhuman processing lay at the distributed center of the Kupiter system. Inputs and outputs and inputs and outputs and him, walking apparently mindless, spasming ever upward.

Because: Niol’s death had left this need for answers.

Because: He wasn’t as strong as Niol.

Egrol thought that here, maybe, at the top where Niol had fallen and died, he’d be able to understand why. The human brain sits at the top of the body. Egrol suspected that the Kupiter system’s central mast must hold its organizational mind at its top. He would understand it. But maybe, also, he’d drive the wires out of his body and into the great mind. Maybe he wouldn’t wait for an answer at all. He would use his inhuman camouflage as a weapon and destroy the whole thing. Either an answer or catharsis awaited.

And so: He kept ascending the mast.

Because: The blood then crusting on his face, the programmed spasming of his limbs like a missing frame stop-motion, his protocols all felt insufficient. The higher he climbed, the worse his fear of being caught grew.

And so: He stopped, for a while, sat with folded legs upon the smooth, warbling, thinking floor.

Camera 7743-F broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 1208, ambulation ceased. Stationary position logged. IHAVE [movement-absence:sector1208:egrol] to nearest eight neighbors. Hopcount: 1. Camera 7743-F weight vector – busyness: revised upward. Revised upward. Thermal sensor 0034 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, core temperature spiking. No known directive template analog.

Many eyes turned toward him – unconscious – programmed.

He removed a thin silicon wafer from his pants’ leg pocket. This close to the mast’s peak, he worried what failing a liveness check would mean. This far from his last, non-spoofed ticket, he feared that, perhaps, it would be easiest for the system to label him slippage. That removing him would not be a return, but a garbage collection. That he would be killed. He didn’t know, but this close to his answers, he was very afraid. Of course, this fear would register with Kupiter, too. Which made it all the worse.

He placed the wafer on the cloth covering his knee and took a small X-Acto knife from another pocket.

He slit his skin open, a four-inch incision along his forearm.

Motion sensor 9012 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 1208, fine motor activity detected, forearm. Cross-referencing directive queue. No match found. Thermal sensor 0034 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, core temperature: critical variance. No known directive template analog. No known directive template analog. Camera 7743-F weight vector – liveness: revised downward. Revised downward.

He inserted the wafer into the flesh pocket of his forearm. His skin clung to its circular outline, like one of those flat batteries he remembered sliding out of car key fobs as a teen. Despite the botoxed blankness, it was hard for him not to wince as the wafer threaded his subcutaneous body in a blinking instant with wiring. Harder still, to feign cluelessness when the wiring ported into the subdermal broadcasting mechanization system that lay inert against his skull. Hardest when the broadcast mechanism unfurled, pressing two antennae outward through his forehead skin.

The metal perforating his scalp hurt furiously. The antennae dripped with thin, bloody ribbons. The itching, too, fire-ant hot and rope-thick, crawled across his head, down his face, through his neck.

He blinked the blood clean from his eyes. He rose and walked. The signals from his antennae began broadcasting long on/off clicks that were nonsensical on their own. The signal was strong, decisive, and completely meaningless.

New broadcast source detected: subdermal origin, sector 1208. Signal pattern: unstructured. Amplitude: strong. Camera 7743-F broadcast to all subs: IHAVE [new-broadcast-source:sector1208:egrol]. Hopcount: 1. New broadcast source: signal pattern cross-referenced. Directive origin: probable. Match confidence: 0.87. Camera 7743-F weight vector – busyness: revised upward. Revised upward. Revised upward. WorkerEgrol, sector 1208: in service.

Suspicion eased with a sense of finality. He was not garbage collected. He was not labeled slippage and removed into some masticating metallic jaw that purred him into nutrition. His wrecked face was now inhuman enough to slough off doubt entirely. His ‘work’ became so obviously inhuman that the systems’ gazes receded.

Because: His machine’s latent potential was still useful to Egrol. The loud message the mechanism blared hid its receptive capacities.

And so: It was through a small, shrinking space that he walked all the way to the very top of the Kupiter Station central mast.

Even the echo of “construction” left the central mast this far above the habitation zones. Materials flowed completely agnostic to how a human might move through them. At times radically geometric, jutting spaces latticing ever skyward in angular fractals, and at times inhumanly biological, oozing spaces completely open to the thinning air.

Before: Reaching the top, he’d imagined it would all feel so different.

Instead: He stood at the spinning top of the microworld in the cold thin air that whipped the dripping blood from his forehead. Below him, thin wisping clouds looked like half-dissolved cotton candy as they formed and dissipated.

Yet: There was no finality to the summit. The mast simply tapered up to this small pedestal upon which one might look down at the entire, oozing city and…

And so: …

And so: He was not sure. He stood on the precipice of the world, where the great machine made magic of the human body, made purpose and industry and signal from the noise of it all. Looking down from above, it all looked just as unintelligible as it felt being in the thronging mess of it.

Cords stretched from his fingers, slivering off the nails as they extended. The wafer, wires, and implant meshed with the substrate of the mast and attempted another analysis. He wished to see the point of the world. He wished to know its mind.

Substrate sensor 0001 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 4401, unscheduled material contact detected. Cross-referencing directive queue. No match found. Substrate sensor 0002 broadcast to all subs. WorkerEgrol, sector 4401, unscheduled material contact detected. No match found. No match found. No match found.

None of the output made sense. There was no center here. No place where the great organization of it all was blueprinted and explicated. There were just countless worming single-use programs, loops, stacks, and databases. There was no god’s eye view because there was no god. There was no pulsing brain at the top of the mast. It was daemons all the way down. Niol all the way gone. And none of it would crystallize. None of it would become sensible: grief, loss, the churning, machinating certainty of it all.

Of course there had been no answers. Egrol had imagined (hoped) that there would be something at the center of all this. Some organizing principle that could be made legible. Loss, grief – wounds that will never fully close – but it was more than that, now. It was the whole massive work of it all. Clearly, order emerged. Kupiter produced. Kupiter generated. Kupiter functioned.

Yet: No part of it, not even the great systems that prefigured and demanded each action, could account for what it was. There was only this. One action after the other. Efficiency had degloved connection, meaning and purpose from the world. Sloughed it off like skin from a falling man’s trapped foot. And not just from the human. Not just from Niol and Egrol. But Kupiter itself. The machine itself. Meaning was redundant. It appeared in outputs. Everything else was made efficient.

And so: He missed Niol at the screaming seat of the sky. He missed him so much. What was there to do?

Because: He was wounded.

Because: He had tried. To make sense. To make do.

Because: None of it had worked.

WorkerEgrol, sector 4401: no directive match found. No directive match found.

The human body is a rich computing substrate. Human-level organization isn’t necessary.

And so: He cleared his cache. He went to retract his wires, but a ticket pinged his peripheries before he could. A package of 16,000 actions that would pay double rate, since he was in a location rarely frequented by human hands. Purpose without purpose. Action without meaning was maybe better than whatever this widening, chasming emptiness Niol had left him with was. The first task: three watts of electricity passed from his body through his fingers and into the mast.

Why? Egrol didn’t care.

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Enter the Jamverse Jam!

Protocolized’s fourth open submission contest is live for two more weeks: artists and writers are invited to extend and connect the Jamverse, a network of interoperable, strange worlds designed by four of our frequent contributors.

We have a $1,000 grand prize, with at least 10 other entries receiving $200 prizes. Deadline for entries is July 31. Read more and enter at the Jamverse microsite.

This guide is dedicated to the memory of the FRIEND, who walked our woods and is GONE NOW, and rails against the active and ongoing campaign of LIES, MISDIRECTION, and CALCULATED BORINGNESS conducted against the Disposition by the cream-stock quarterly that shall remain unnamed, by the regional heritage office that pretends not to exist, and by the man with the table, whom the author will get to.

The Disposition is called the Disposition. The reader will encounter persons in our region who refer to it by OTHER NAMES – the Mound, the Pile, the Offering Ground, and, in one widely circulated recent piece of print, the HEAP, which is not even CLOSE. None of these names is innocent. Each was introduced at a known time by a known party for a known reason. The author calls it the Disposition because the Disposition is WHAT IT WAS CALLED by persons who knew the woods before anyone else thought there was a name to apply, and any other name is a CLAIM disguised as a description, and the reader will, from this page forward, call it the Disposition also.

I. What the Disposition Is

The Disposition is a COLLECTION of objects at the eastern edge of the Old Woods, one half-mile north of the abandoned ground of the Concord. Sixty-some feet across at the base. Fourteen feet at the height. The shape which the casual visitor calls “conical” is NOT conical and the author will return to this because the shape MATTERS.

The Disposition protocol is as follows and the reader will commit it to memory. A visitor walks to the Disposition. The visitor observes the objects already left. The visitor leaves an object in response to one or more of the objects already left. The visitor departs. The next visitor arrives and DOES THE SAME. This has gone on for seventy years at minimum, possibly considerably longer, and those persons claiming a shorter timeline are doing so for REASONS.

What the casual visitor sees is a pile that GROWS. What the casual visitor is not equipped to see, and has not been TOLD to see by the parties responsible for telling, is that the Disposition is not merely accumulating. The Disposition is ARRANGING ITSELF. Each new object answers something previous. Each previous object answered something earlier. The whole of it reaches down through the strata in a pattern the author has spent forty years TRACING, and the pattern is not a pattern made by people who knew they were making a pattern. It is a pattern made by people OBEYING SOMETHING INVISIBLE.

II. The Concord, as Best We Can Reconstruct It

The Concord was understood to be a settlement. It was NOT a settlement. There exist no written records from the Concord and the reader should MISTRUST anyone who claims to have such records. The documents this person claims to have are FORGED, or selectively transcribed, or in some cases ENTIRELY FABRICATED.

What the author has, instead, is forty years of perimeter-walking, conversations with persons since deceased, conversations with persons not yet deceased who would prefer the author not name them, and the testimony of the ground itself, which speaks if you walk it long enough and quietly enough, which most people don’t.

The Concord was founded by a figure remembered as The Big Man. The Big Man was, by every account put forth over forty years, between TWELVE AND FOURTEEN FEET TALL.

The Big Man kept an animal the size of a draft horse which was NOT A HORSE and which witnesses describe as having too few legs in some accounts and too many in others, never the same count twice, and a head that the witnesses, queried separately and AT LENGTH, located in different places relative to the body.

The animal had no name. The animal did not need feeding. The animal would not be approached by other animals.

On the fourth day after The Big Man’s recorded arrival, the rain that fell on the Concord FELL UPWARD for approximately three minutes, witnessed by no fewer than eleven persons of whom three were later persuaded to retract and eight were not.

On the matter of his APPEARANCE: the witnesses the author has interviewed do not agree on it. They do not agree on hair color, on dress, on whether the face was bearded, on whether the eyes were any color a person could name.

The author would once have attributed the disagreement to ordinary memory variance. The author no longer does. The witnesses are not remembering the same The Big Man and the author does not believe they SAW the same The Big Man, in any sense.

The author will state here, on this page, in plain print, that The Big Man was NOT FROM HERE. The persons in our region who treat the foregoing as folklore are the same persons who treat the Disposition as a folk accretion site, and the SUBTERRANEANS who treat the chamber as a sinkhole, and the heritage office that treats the protocol as a recycling program.

The pattern is the same pattern. Make a thing SMALL ENOUGH and the casual visitor will fit it into the world the casual visitor already lives in. The Big Man does not fit. The author will not be making him fit.

The Concord operated, by every account the author has been able to gather, in a manner unlike any settlement in the surrounding region. The accounts do not agree on the particulars. The accounts DO agree that the particulars were UNUSUAL, and that persons who left the Concord were reluctant, decades later, to describe what they had left.

The author has approached eleven such persons across forty years. Of the eleven, two would speak and nine would not. The two who would speak contradicted each other on every point except the conviction that the Concord was NOT NORMAL.

The buildings are gone. The roads are tracks. The bridge east of the Concord ground was used for purposes the author has theories about and will not expand upon, but now carries paying visitors to an amusement park constructed on the island in the past two decades, and the author considers the conversion of the bridge from its original purpose to its current purpose to be, by itself, a separate matter which the author has not yet decided whether to publish on.

III. The Friend

The Friend lived in the woods.

The following entry is the most rigorously documented in the author’s archive, of which this section is a summary. The author has spent the better part of forty years compiling it.

Physical description, drawn from FORTY-ONE first-hand witness accounts taken by the author personally: male presentation, height between seven feet and seven feet four inches, lean build, longer stride than the build would predict by a margin the author has measured against preserved tracks on three separate occasions. No facial description survives the witness pool with sufficient overlap to publish. Vocalization: rare, low, characterized in five separate accounts as not quite the sound a person makes. Range: the woods north of the Disposition, with documented activity extending east as far as the Concord ground and west to the river.

Behavioral pattern. The Friend was known for DOCUMENTED INTERVENTIONS of a kind that no party in our region has been able to attribute to any other source. The author has catalogued one hundred and sixty-three. The author will summarize three.

Case 12. A gate on the eastern road, observed broken at dusk by three witnesses, observed FULLY REPAIRED at sunrise, with no party claiming the repair.

Case 47. A child’s mitten, given up for lost, found placed on a stump in the family’s line of sight two days later. The mitten had been mended at the thumb, in a stitch the family’s grandmother recognized as one she had neither used nor seen in sixty years.

Case 89. A dog missing in a winter storm, found DRY at dawn on the back step, with a sprig of vegetation in its collar corresponding to NO KNOWN SPECIES in our region or any region adjacent.

One hundred and sixty more on file. No confirmed contact event in ELEVEN YEARS. Three claimed sightings in the interval, all investigated, all rejected: two owls, one SUBTERRANEAN.

The author’s position, stated for the record, is that the Friend was NOT FROM HERE, and that the Friend was LATER-CLASS, where The Big Man was FOUNDING-CLASS.

IV. The Chamber

There is a chamber under the Disposition.

The author has not seen the chamber. The author has not entered the chamber. The author cannot prove the existence of the chamber. The author KNOWS the chamber, which is a higher form of knowing than the form the reader has been trained to accept by parties who benefit from training the reader POORLY.

The reasons are as follows and the reader will please attend.

One. The Disposition does not settle as an accumulation of its mass should settle. The author has marked the settling pattern against poles driven at four cardinal points. The Disposition settles in the center FASTER than at the perimeter, as though the floor beneath the center is receiving the weight DIFFERENTLY than the floor at the perimeter. The floor is not the same floor. This is not a theory. This is a measurement, taken by the author, REPEATEDLY, and the number of parties in our region who have accepted the author’s offer to walk the perimeter with him and see for themselves is ZERO.

Two. In certain weather, in late autumn, on still nights, the Disposition produces a SOUND. It is not a sound the wind makes. It is not a sound any assemblage of objects makes. It is a sound the author has compared, in his private notes, to a CLEARING of the throat, at a great distance, underground.

Three. The author had a DREAM in which the chamber was shown to him. Dreams are evidence of WHAT THE DREAMER HAS BEEN PAYING ATTENTION TO. The author has been paying attention. The reader who scoffs at the dream is invited to take it up with the dream and not with the author.

The Concord was BUILT ON A LANDING SITE. The Disposition is the marker. The objects gathered at the Disposition are not folk art. They are not, principally, decoration nor play nor tribute, although they are sometimes those things at the surface, and the surface is what visitors and Heritage Office Persons and a certain quarterly publication WANT YOU TO LOOK AT, because the surface is the only level at which the Disposition can be MISTAKEN FOR HUMAN ACTIVITY. Below the surface the Disposition is a slow accumulating SIGNAL, assembled across decades by persons who do not know they are assembling it, the cumulative weight and content of which is BEING READ, very slowly, by the chamber.

V. A Note on a Certain Other Publication

There is, in our region, a competing publication, issued quarterly, on cream stock, with a hand-set masthead the author will not legitimize by describing further. It is written by a person the author once admired and NO LONGER ADMIRES. The author will collectively refer to this person, and to the publication, and to the school of thought it represents, as the SUBTERRANEANS, a term the author coined and has used consistently for decades.

The Subterraneans hold that the chamber is real. On this we agree. They hold that the chamber is part of a larger underground formation that PREDATES the Concord by an unknown interval, and that the Concord was built near this formation because the formation was already there. In this view, The Big Man was a man. The Friend was a man. The Disposition is a marker of a site that is OF THIS EARTH, very old, very deep, and ENTIRELY TERRESTRIAL.

The author REJECTS this view altogether. The author rejects it not principally on the evidence, which the author has examined and finds wanting at every joint, but on a PRIOR GROUND, which is that it is BORING. It reduces The Big Man to a standard tall man. It reduces the Friend, who was the FRIEND, to a hermit. It reduces a landing site to a sinkhole. It reduces the protocol of reply to a HABIT. The author has spent forty years walking the perimeter and the perimeter does not feel like a sinkhole. The perimeter feels like a place where something LANDED and the ground REMEMBERS IT.

The author and the Subterranean were once, in the early years, in agreement on much. There was a winter, in which they shared a single notebook and a single lantern and walked the eastern edge together every other night. The notebook is IN THE AUTHOR’S POSSESSION. The Subterranean has claimed otherwise in print and this claim is a LIE.

There was a disagreement. The disagreement was about the ORIGIN OBJECT. One cold night, the author and the Subterranean sat with the shared lantern between them and argued, for the last time, about the object that began the Disposition.

The author held that a SINGLE FOUNDING HAND had placed it, deliberately, and that every object above it was a reply. The Subterranean held that there was NO ORIGIN OBJECT, that the Pile had begun by accident, and that whatever lay at the bottom was incidental – first to be dropped, nothing more.

The author heard the word the Subterranean used twice. Pile. The author understood, in that moment, that the Subterranean had never believed in the Disposition. Forty years of fieldwork conducted beside a man who took the Disposition for a PILE. The author rose. The author took the lantern and WILL NOT GIVE the lantern back.

VI. The Practical Problems the Disposition Has Caused

The casual visitor, having read this far, may suppose the Disposition is a remote and sacred site visited only by the few. The casual visitor is FORTY YEARS OUT OF DATE.

1. THE VENDOR. There is a man with a folding table at the head of the access track. He sells small bundles of objects which he describes as AUTHENTIC DISPOSITION REPLICAS, which he says can be left at the Disposition by visitors who did not bring anything of their own. The author has, on two separate occasions, watched the man collect items from the perimeter of the Disposition and place them on his table at a markup. Relations between the author and the man are what they are. The author will not say more in print because the man has demonstrated a willingness to consult counsel, which is hardly the behavior of a man with a folding table.

2. THE ROAD. The track to the Disposition was not built for the traffic it now bears. There is now a turnaround, gravelled in the past few years by NO AUTHORITY THE AUTHOR CAN NAME, which is to say, by an authority that prefers not to be named. There is a porta-can. The porta-can was placed approximately forty paces from the perimeter of the Disposition, which was a serious error if it was an error, and if it was not an error it was something worse. Visitors arriving at the porta-can, unfamiliar with the layout, have begun leaving objects AT THE PORTA-CAN, on the assumption that this is the Disposition, or at any rate is Disposition-adjacent and counts. IT DOES NOT COUNT. The objects at the porta-can have, over four years, accumulated into a structure the author refuses to dignify by naming, and which has its OWN SETTLING PATTERN now, which the author is watching.

3. FALSE REPLIES. A growing portion of the objects at the Disposition are left by persons who have NOT ACTUALLY WALKED the perimeter. They have heard descriptions of the Disposition elsewhere. They arrive with an object pre-selected on the basis of an object they have heard about, intending to “respond” to it. They are replying to a RUMOR of an object, and the reply is therefore NOT A REPLY. The Disposition KNOWS. The author has identified the false replies on sight for many years. They sit wrong. The Disposition rejects them in subtle ways – they roll off the slope, get wet, are buried prematurely, or are knocked aside by squirrels, who are not party to the campaign and who are doing the work no one else is doing. The reader who finds this assertion sentimental is invited to leave a fraudulent object at the perimeter and watch what happens to it in three days.

4. SATELLITE PILES. Smaller piles – and these obscenities SHOULD be regarded as piles – have begun to form at the trailhead, at the gravel turnaround, at the porta-can, and on the eastern shoulder of the access track approximately a quarter-mile back from the Disposition, where THERE IS NO REASON FOR A PILE TO BE AT ALL, except that someone passing slowly in a vehicle threw an object out of a window, and someone else, the following day, walking, saw the object and replied to it. The author has identified SEVEN satellite piles. The author considers six of them heresies and one of them, the eastern-shoulder accumulation, interesting, in the most alarming sense of the word, in that it appears to have arisen from a SINGLE DISCARDED ITEM and would constitute, if it continues, evidence that the protocol is now OPERATING WITHOUT THE DISPOSITION, on its own, without supervision, without a marker, without a chamber under it as far as the author has been able to determine. The implications of this are SIGNIFICANT. The author is REFUSING TO REACH A CONCLUSION until further observation, which the author is conducting nightly.

5. THE CATEGORY PROBLEM. What counts as an object? The author would once have said this was self-evident. The author was WRONG. A coin counts. A pebble counts, if it was carried from somewhere. A pressed leaf counts. A ribbon. A small carved figure. A glove. A tooth. What the author does not accept, and what the DISPOSITION, in the author’s view, DOES NOT ACCEPT EITHER, is the recent influx of objects whose nature is to refer to OTHER OBJECTS NOT PRESENT. A card with a printed image of a thing is NOT THE THING. A card with a printed code that, when read by a device, displays an image of a thing, is EVEN LESS THE THING, and is in fact a representational fraud of a kind the author considers ACTIVELY HOSTILE to the protocol. The author has not removed them, because to remove them would be to interfere with the protocol, and the author WILL NOT INTERFERE. The author has merely noted their position and watched them rot, which they do quickly, which the author considers INDICATIVE.

6. THE SUPPRESSION. This is the worst of them. In the past six years, a regional heritage office, which the author REFUSES TO NAME because to name it is to grant it the dignity of existing as a body with a charter rather than the COVER OPERATION it manifestly is, has installed at the head of the access track a series of interpretive plaques. The plaques describe the Disposition as a “folk accretion site of regional interest.” The plaques explain the protocol of reply in THREE SENTENCES designed to make the protocol sound like a recycling program. The plaques include a section headed FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, which is the language of a hardware store, applied to a SIGNAL FROM ELSEWHERE.

The author considers this the MOST DANGEROUS ATTACK on the Disposition in its history. More dangerous than the Vendor. More dangerous than the porta-can. More dangerous than the SUBTERRANEANS, who at least believe in SOMETHING. The plaques are more dangerous because they WORK. The author has watched visitors arrive at the plaques, read them, photograph them, and LEAVE. They have driven for some considerable distance to see the Disposition and they have stopped THREE HUNDRED YARDS SHORT of the Disposition because they have been BORED OUT of the final three hundred yards by a public information panel.

And here is the part the reader will not be permitted to skip. They have begun leaving objects AT THE PLAQUE. The plaque is GENERATING ITS OWN PILE. The protocol of reply, which the heritage office DESIGNED ITS PLAQUE TO INTERRUPT, has reached up and INCORPORATED THE PLAQUE INTO ITSELF, and the plaque pile is growing at a rate that EXCEEDS any rate the plaque’s contents would explain. Something else is happening at the plaque. The author is watching. The author has been watching for SIX YEARS. The author will tell the reader when the author is ready and no sooner.

VII. How to Visit

The author has been asked, by countless unnamed individuals, to provide practical advice for the visitor. The author will provide it, briefly, and UNDER PROTEST.

Bring an object. The object should be YOURS, in the sense that it has been in your possession for some interval and has acquired some quality from that possession. The quality is not metaphorical. The object carries on it the signature of the hand and the home that held it, in trace amounts the author considers CHEMICAL in nature, and the Disposition reads the signature. A pebble picked up in the parking area does not qualify and the Disposition will know – it carries the signature of the parking area, which is the signature of asphalt and the signatures of every other visitor who has touched it that day, and the Disposition reads that too and will not be fooled. A coin from your pocket qualifies marginally. An object you brought from home, having thought about it, having handled it, having carried it the distance, qualifies fully.

Walk the access track ON FOOT. Do not drive to the turnaround. The turnaround is part of the problem.

Ignore the Vendor. Do not buy from the Vendor. If the Vendor speaks to you, nod and continue.

Ignore the plaque. DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH the plaque. Do not leave anything at the plaque. The plaque is NOT THE DISPOSITION. The plaque pile is not the Disposition either.

Pass the porta-can without contributing to the pile that has formed around it. The porta-can is NOT THE DISPOSITION.

When you reach the Disposition, walk its full perimeter ONCE before leaving anything. Look at what is there. Choose where you will leave your item based on what is already there. This is the protocol and the protocol CANNOT BE DONE IN A HURRY, and the visitor who hurries is leaving a FALSE REPLY whether they intend to or not.

The Friend’s part of the woods is to the north. It is recognizable by a clearing with three large stones and a fallen birch. DO NOT ENTER IT. Do not leave anything there. It is not a Disposition. It is somebody’s HOME, or it was, and the author would like to keep it that way.

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VIII. Closing

FACT. The Concord existed. The Concord dispersed. FACT. The Big Man existed, at the heights and in the conditions described in Section II, attested by witnesses whom the author has interviewed and catalogued. FACT. The Disposition exists, at the location described, in the dimensions described, leaning measurably toward the north against four poles the author has marked for forty years. FACT. The protocol of reply has been operating, demonstrably, for at least seventy years, and the structure has accumulated in a manner inconsistent with depositings, as set forth in Section VI. FACT. The Friend existed, in the documented range, with the documented behaviors, across the documented interval, and conducted one hundred and sixty-three documented interventions, of which the author has the catalogue and the photographs and the sprig.

Those are the facts. No party in our region has successfully refuted them. The heritage office has not refuted them. The Subterranean has not refuted them. The vendor has not refuted them. They have offered alternative interpretations. They have not convincingly contested the record.

The author submits that the record, taken as a whole, admits of one reading and one reading only:

• The Big Man came to our region, built the chamber, founded the Concord around it for the purpose of generating, over time, the kind of slow accumulating signal that the chamber had been placed to read, and departed.

• The requester is whatever The Big Man came from or for.

• The question is the visitor.

• The Disposition is the answer.

• The conical shape is pointing somewhere, and is in the direction of the Friend’s part of the woods, where the chamber receives the signal.

• The Concord dispersed because the work that the Concord was founded to do had been done.

• The Disposition persists because the Friend placed at the eastern edge of the Old Woods an object which is now buried beyond any recovery in our region – the ORIGIN OBJECT, the founding hand placement, the object that started the reply chain – and assumed The Big Man’s role, and seeded the protocol so that the work would continue without a Concord, without supervision, without the visible founding hand, until the answer is complete and the question can be replied to.

That is the reading. The author submits, further, that no alternative reading accounts for the full record. The Subterranean reading does not. The heritage office reading does not. The folk-art reading does not. The author has tested each of them against the catalogue and each fails at the same point, which is the point at which the conical lean must be explained, or the Friend’s interventions must be explained, or the chamber’s response to weight must be explained, or all three must be explained together. Only the author’s reading explains all three. The author rests on the record.

Allocution: THE DISPOSITION IS BEING MISUNDERSTOOD, AND MISHANDLED, AND SURROUNDED BY PORTA-CANS AND PLAQUES AND VENDORS AND SUBTERRANEANS AND PERSONS WHO WOULD RENAME IT, AND THE AUTHOR HAS WATCHED THIS HAPPEN ACROSS FORTY YEARS AND HAS NOT BEEN ABLE TO STOP ANY OF IT.

Enter our Jamverse Jam

Protocolized recently announced our fourth open submission contest: we’re looking for artists and writers to extend and connect the Jamverse, a network of interoperable worlds that we are incubating in our Special Interest Group for Protocol Fiction.

We have a $1,000 grand prize, with at least 10 other entries receiving $200 prizes. Deadline for entries is July 31. Read more and enter at the Jamverse microsite.

Shafts to Wires

For 15 years after electric power became commercially available, the typical American factory used it to do almost nothing new. A manufacturer would pull out the steam engine, set an electric motor in its place, and leave everything else untouched. Factories of the time distributed power through a long vertical iron shaft that ran up through the center of a multi-story building. The shaft was connected to the machines on each floor, and because power was delivered centrally, every machine had to run whenever the shaft turned or it would sit completely idle. Even though the power source had changed, the operation of the factory remained practically bound to the rhythms of its predecessor.

Economic historian Warren Devine, who traces this transition in a paper titled From Shafts to Wires, calls this phenomenon the “usual juxtaposition of a new technology upon the framework of an old one.”

Things changed eventually. After another quarter century, manufacturers adopted unit drives. That meant each machine in a factory was powered by its own electric motor. The new arrangement allowed each machine to be controlled independently and run asynchronously from the rest. Unit drives unshackled machines from the geometry of the central shaft, letting them be placed according to the flow of work along the production line.

The old factory layout had been arrived at incrementally, through a chain of decisions that each followed from the one before, beginning with the constraint of the central shaft. With that foundational piece removed, the layout of factory floors could begin, gradually, to optimize for electric power.

The rearchitecting of the factory around electric power was complete when the multi-story building – tall, because steam had to be delivered through a vertical shaft – gave way to the horizontal factory, which was far less expensive to build and maintain.

The lesson of Devine’s account is that the productivity gains came from the slow, accretive repurposing of machine tools, fixtures, and floor plans around the new power source – work that no one could have specified in advance, because the new layout had to be discovered. Output per man-hour in manufacturing rose at an average annual rate of 1.3 percent before 1919 and at 3.1 percent after – roughly a 2.4× jump in the rate of labor-productivity growth. Capital and labor had remained in relative proportion to one another during the shaft era, but became uncoupled after the unit drive arrived. In the years that followed, less capital was needed to make labor more productive.

Rearchitecting the Digital Environment

What electric power did to the vertical, steam-powered factory, artificial intelligence is doing to our digital work environments. AI provides a new power source for knowledge work – a unit drive of surplus tokenized intelligence available to every person in an organization. In the canonical 20th-century factory, the object being rearchitected was a building: a large, shared work environment. The object being reshaped now is the individual work environment of every person contributing to an organization. Each knowledge worker is, in effect, a small factory whose machine tools must be repurposed around the new power source.

This cannot happen by decree alone. A knowledge worker’s tooling is the residue of years of tacit decisions, each indebted to technical dependencies and arcane software, like the position of a lathe relative to a line shaft. The only way the repurposing actually happens is through the same process that relaid the factory floor: people must combine their domain expertise with the new power source – try things, build small fixtures for themselves, share the ones that work, and discard the ones that don’t.

AI adoption is the combination of deep domain expertise with the new power source, and this new arrangement has to be allowed a period of productive experiment before anyone tries to draw the new floor plan. Play has to precede planning. Desire lines must form before they can be paved.

This is what makes durable AI adoption a two-track initiative, without exception. The experimental phase cannot be skipped, because the patterns worth standardizing have not emerged yet. But chaos alone is lossy – patterns form and dissolve without ever consolidating into infrastructure the organization can rely on. The work is to read the chaos, reinforcing the traces that prove themselves and releasing the ones that don’t.

Governed and Cultivated

In an editorial introducing the research mission of the Protocol Institute, wrote that the task of our times is to invent New Nature – “regimes of reality governed by technologically mediated laws that are nearly as inviolable, immutable, and persistent as those of nature.” While electricity introduced a new power source, the regime of reality that finished forming during the second industrial revolution was time discipline. Workers and employers alike began to treat future clock time as a natural resource to be managed and protected. Both the workers’ right to a five-day workweek and the efficiency of the assembly line were written into the reality created by clock time. We take this for granted now, but the adjustment took nearly 100 years – from the introduction of time clocks in the workplace, which in some extraordinary cases led to the lynching of line managers, to the characters in Virginia Woolf’s novels, who navigate their days by staying attuned to the town clock and Big Ben.

For companies to be successful in adopting AI, they need to consider both the rearchitecting of the work environment and the change in subjective reality of members of the organization. To achieve this, any AI adoption initiative needs two tracks: governed and cultivated. The governed track is focused on architecting new environments, while the cultivated track is focused on the psychological and ergonomic effects of the new environment.

The cultivated track is bottom-up: individual play, experimentation, the personal workflows people build and share. This track is comparable to the amateur kit stage in the deployment of a technology. Technologies such as computers and cars went through a stage where amateurs tinkered and experimented with them on their own terms. In the case of radio, amateurs were the ones keeping the entire industry alive before standardization was even considered. Kit stages are characterized by rapid experimentation and formation of a field around a particular technology. The focus is on gaining tacit knowledge and being subjectively accustomed to the effects of the technology, and less on archiving knowledge for the longer term. A cultivated stage of adoption is important for AI because it is a technology that has significant effects both at the organizational and at the individual level. In many of the previous eras of technology, such as desktop computers and the early internet, cultivation of a field was left to artists and hackers who were early adopters of the technology. But today, the effects of AI are at once wide and solipsistic, which means that the cultivation stage is something that should be diffused through the entire organization, not just the early adopters and the 10× engineers.

The role of the governed track is to create new protocols from the outcomes of the experiments in the cultivated track. The governed track should set protocols at points where AI’s outputs become consequential: how an output gets verified, escalated, and owned as it crosses from machine to human or from one team to another. A traffic light is a protocol; a blockade is not. Both are rules, but one keeps the system moving while managing the underlying tension; the other just stops it.

The cultivated track is trace-making – how an organization produces the patterns of coordination that a new medium makes possible, the equivalent of the desire lines worn across a park, the kits and practices that no central planner could have specified in advance. The governed track is trace-selection – how an organization reads those emerging patterns and decides which to reinforce into shared infrastructure and which to let fade.

A governed track with nothing underneath it standardizes too early. It freezes a layout before new traces have formed, the way laggard manufacturers kept the line shaft. A cultivated track with no governance generates patterns endlessly but never consolidates them, accumulating risk it cannot see. It is frontier territory with no ecosystem to sustain and learn from it. The maturity ladder is really a measure of how well an organization coordinates these two tracks as the ground keeps shifting.

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Keeping the Medium Honest

Adoption of a domain technology such as AI requires us to:

1. Think from first principles about the traces and paths generated by the previous technological paradigm.

2. Generate new traces and paths based on the new technological paradigm.

Failure to do the first leads to the persistence of shaft-like thinking. Continuously doing the second without stable governance produces an organization that works without remembering or accreting its gains.

The factory took 50 years to implement the unit drive and reap the benefits of electrification. But there were journals published as early as 1896 in which the unit drive was proposed as a method to increase productivity. The race to transform the factory lasted roughly 25 years because its new form had to be discovered. Now the race is on to transform the organization with artificial intelligence. Knowing that a reorganization is needed is cheap; becoming the organization that finds and sets the standard is hard.

Enter our Jamverse Jam

Protocolized recently announced our fourth open submission contest: we’re looking for artists and writers to extend and connect the Jamverse, a network of interoperable worlds that we are incubating in our Special Interest Group for Protocol Fiction.

We have a $1,000 grand prize, with at least 10 other entries receiving $200 prizes. Deadline for entries is July 31. Read more and enter at the Jamverse microsite.

You’d be hard-pressed to find travelers in London who do not associate their visit with the underground train network. Likewise, Japan’s bullet trains and Hong Kong’s automated MTR system are iconic. This isn’t surprising considering that public transit systems are foundational infrastructure, acting as a first point of contact for tourists and an essential service for city-dwellers. These systems are, naturally, replete with protocols. Who pays and how compliance is governed, how space is controlled and who yields it, what safety measures are in place, what social interactions are condoned, to name a few.

Public transit systems have therefore been a useful lens for understanding the “national protocol characters” of the countries I’ve visited over the years. In Medellin, Colombia, I was told by many residents of the city that they treated their metro system with sanctity. Sure enough, my experience on the Medellin Metro reflected this. The trains were impeccably clean and everyone using them did so with a great deal of care and pride. Even during busy rush hours, there was a sense of composure as people boarded and took their places. And while the stations themselves were regularly policed, the trains during the day had only occasional police presence.

The Medellin Metro was established in 1995, constituting a significant step-change in transport provision for the region. Its launch also came two years after Pablo Escobar’s death – a time when the city was seeing a gradual decline in the notorious violence that had reached an unprecedented level through the 1980s and early 90s. There was a feeling of change in the country at large, with Colombia having adopted a renewed constitution in 1991, shoring up its institutional strength. This was the first major revision to Colombia’s constitution since its drafting over a century earlier. The Medellin Metro emerged in this context as a visible and shared symbol of Medellin’s transformation, following the period of deep social and political instability that had plagued the city for many years. This symbolism, coupled with the tangible benefits of increased connectivity, led to a form of popular reverence for the metro service. A survey in 2012 showed that the organization behind the Medellin Metro was consistently voted the most appreciated public body by the city’s population. The complementary Metrocables in Medellin, too, have generated a sense of pride – especially since they extend coverage to many of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

Trust dynamics are also interesting to observe on public transit systems. Medellin isn’t exactly an oasis of safety, with crime across the city still being relatively high. But both the metro and the cable car systems are very safe and provide genuinely comfortable, enjoyable journeys. Perceived safety is, of course, heavily driven by expectations of law enforcement by public authorities and the state – through effective ticket barriers (which are plentiful across stations) or visible police presence. However Medellin’s new-found sense of shared pride also creates a flavor of trust unique to the region. As one young man born and bred in the city explained to me, “A man might rob you out on the streets, but he won’t leave a scratch on the metro.” The city’s painful recent past is still felt across all classes and social groups, leading to a widespread perception of the public transit systems as important symbols of hope and progress, promoting good behavior even where one might not expect it.

While overcoming instability and strife can inspire infrastructural reverence in a city’s population, the foundation of an effective transit system remains its capacity to make significant material improvements in the connectivity of a region. I saw this when I traveled on the Metro Express in Mauritius, which is often touted as the safest and most stable country in Africa. A light railway service – the first of its kind – opened very recently in 2019, connecting the capital of Port Louis to various locations across the country. Notwithstanding some consternation around the funding for the project, this infrastructural development was massively welcomed on the small island. Tens of thousands of passengers use the train daily, representing a significant portion of the population. Although I didn’t get the sense that the Metro Express had imbued quite the level of resounding affection in the population as the Medellin Metro, it was commonplace to hear people on the train openly lauding its air-conditioned escape from the tropical heat, and its avoidance of traffic in the capital. It’s not typical to hear conversational praise of public transit while actually on it – but clearly the novelty of Mauritius’s increased transport capability hadn’t worn off when I was last on the Metro Express in 2024. Having myself traveled between Port Louis and the town Rose Hill many times, either on the sweltering bus or by car, I also felt swept up by the comparatively enjoyable experience of meandering along a railway with beautiful views of luscious greenery.

So what of the British, who can be found tussling for a spot on the tube at Oxford Circus Station every weekday after work, or littering on trains at weekends? Are they to be characterized by something like apathy in their regard for their longstanding networks of public transit? There may well be an element of this. Both the London tube system and the national train network were established in the nineteenth century – a marked contrast to the recent developments in Colombia and Mauritius. And, if we needed any proof of a lack of appreciation for these old stalwarts, look no further than the puerile injustice that Londoners feel anytime they have to wait longer than two minutes for a tube train. Only the other day I heard a chorus of profanities across the platform, in addition to a few hands raised in exasperation, as a Northern Line train from Camden was delayed by approximately six minutes. I’d taken delayed trains in both Medellin and Port Louis, neither of which provoked such grumpiness!

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As with most major cities, generalized trust in London is pretty low compared to less urbanized regions. This trust dynamic is reflected in the relationship between transport authorities and transport users. On the tube there is a heavy reliance on ticket gates, station staff, and the British Transport Police to ensure everyone has coughed up the right amount. Trust dynamics are also reflected in modes of behavior between transport users. For example, in London, traditional customs such as offering seats to the elderly or disabled have declined. It’s not uncommon to see elderly people having to rush toward empty seats, for fear that other travelers will not offer to give up a seat for them. This has become so problematic that the Mayor of London has launched advertising campaigns to encourage Londoners to be a little more civic-minded. New York is similar, with tightly-monitored payment systems and aggressive competition for seats being the norm. Obviously, apathy and distrust are not so widespread that the millions of people who use and benefit hugely from London or New York’s public transit systems are seriously dissuaded from doing so. But they certainly color the experiences and behaviors by which those millions use the public transit systems.

We shouldn’t assume that these dynamics are uniform across all highly-developed urban centers though. I have traveled through many of Germany’s major cities, including Berlin, without ever coming into contact with barriers or ticketing personnel. This is often described as an “honor system,” where riders can walk on and off trains without restriction, and must validate tickets themselves. This method is a progressive state-led effort to shift the relationship of trust between authorities and users, in a way that you don’t often find in the UK or the US. When traveling through Norway I noticed that Oslo’s transit agency Ruter had adopted a similar approach to Germany’s, doing away with turnstiles and gates and, in the words of Ruter’s payments lead Christian Fjaer, making a choice “to focus on customers who want to pay instead of keeping out the people who don’t.”

It’s fascinating that public transit systems are able to operate with such apparently lax fare collecting systems. There are accounts suggesting that the progressive approach works in Norway and Germany. Those who can pay generally do and it tends to benefit the agencies, which are able to cut compliance-related costs and don’t tend to see any significant spikes in fare evasion. Pricing in these countries has remained reasonably manageable, all things considered. Train pricing in the UK by contrast is notoriously high – a study in 2024 found that the UK train fares were the highest in Europe, without any corresponding increase in quality. While cities like Oslo, Berlin, and Frankfurt share the social trust dynamics typical of major globalized urban centers, their public transportation systems reflect a notably higher degree of generalized trust between authorities and users. Taking public transit in Oslo and German cities feels more like using a system that matches the quasi-anarchic flow of city life – it feels like these provisions are working with you and for you. Meanwhile, in London and New York, the flow of the crowd is literally blocked by physical barriers. While both permissive and restrictive models of public transit systems are functional, Norwegian and German passengers are tangibly more at ease when traveling.

Another element of experiential quality worth mentioning is the aesthetic experience of public transit systems. Underground networks are suboptimal in this respect. Most people generally prefer not to be holed up without sunlight. Aside from perceived safety issues, I think this was the reason why, on a trip to LA, so many people were visibly horrified when I told them I had been using the subway. How could I not be in a car, with shades on, moving at a snail’s pace through the West Coast traffic in the sun? Naples, with its Metrò dell’Arte initiative, found a classically Italian way of resolving this aesthetic problem by turning part of its underground metro line into what essentially functions as an art museum. You might be missing the lovely southern Italian sun, but at least you get to see sculpture and contemporary light displays.

Above ground, there are transit systems that offer unique and otherwise inaccessible perspectives on the regions they serve. Bangkok’s BTS Skytrain offers an elevated and air-conditioned means of travel, above the city’s intense traffic. Aside from its convenience, a striking element of taking the Skytrain is the views of the city that it affords – panoramic scenes of Siam’s malls, sky bridges and glimpses of temple rooftops. And while it was mainly tourists that I saw enthralled by these views on my visit, it also wasn’t uncommon to see locals take a few snaps when the sun was setting over the city. The BTS Skytrain was inspired by Vancouver’s Skytrain, which itself hosts a very different but equally stunning aesthetic experience of winding through the city set against the North Shore mountains. I think such experiences also create a form of reverence for infrastructure, distinct from that which is afforded by civic pride in developmental progress.

These observations run contrary to theorist Marc Augé’s critique of “supermodernity”, in particular a kind of generic urban space – exemplified by airports and highways – which Augé characterizes as “non-places.” Non-places are dissociative spaces in which there can be no sense of belonging. Augé doesn’t claim that public transit is a totally meaningless experience, but argues that such spaces produce limited and private experiences, which are neither deeply embedded nor socially-binding. Indeed, traveling and commuting in areas with significant public transit infrastructure is often a solitary experience as, by their very nature, such systems function as means of “getting from A to B,” rather than offering an opportunity to build a sense of belonging specific to any one place. But, in a city such as Medellin, there are circumstances in which public transit can provide a genuine, shared sense of belonging, and encourage positive, socially cohesive behavior in its passengers. I also suspect there is at least a loose form of social-bind that comes from honor systems of travel, especially for those with an awareness that authorities in other similar countries often don’t adopt such trusting approaches to manage passenger behavior. Passengers who choose to validate their tickets – aware that authorities elsewhere rely on enforcement rather than trust – develop a kind of investment in the system’s legitimacy. This can manifest in informal self-policing, where fellow travelers feel genuinely motivated to behave the “right” way and to potentially challenge those who transgress, a dynamic that itself reinforces the communal character of the public transit system.

Bosnia is another place I’ve visited where the public-transit character seemed beyond the scope of Augé’s analysis. Its train systems trace their roots to Yugoslav Railways, a state-owned organization through which Yugoslavia carried out a significant expansion of the network following World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire lost control of the region. Unfortunately, a significant amount of the system was destroyed during the Bosnian War in the 90s. During my time traveling through the region, I was warned by some locals in Mostar (famed for its “Stari Most”, an Ottoman old bridge) that while the trains heading north were decent, flooding from the previous year had created ongoing problems with the railways. As I traveled from Mostar up to Konjic by train, taking in the fantastic views of the deep blue Neretva river, these warnings slipped from my mind. Until the train suddenly came to a halt. Eventually the train driver announced that there was a technical issue with the wheels which would detain us for some time.

After a lengthy wait, the driver reported that the issue couldn’t be fixed and so we’d need to get onto another train. All passengers were escorted off onto the tracks, being guided towards a nearby platform. Before we reached the platform, the conductor (who I think played the dual role of mechanic) came running along, out of breath. Waving his arms, he told us that everything was fixed and we should quickly get back on. The frustrations that had built up amongst the passengers quickly dissipated at this comical scenario. When we reboarded, a group of Bosnian women who had met and started chatting during the delay were riotously laughing. One of the ladies humored us curious tourists by saying, “Welcome to Bosnia, where things break but we can fix them up eventually.”

I later learned, at a museum in Sarajevo, about “snadi se,” a commonly used phrase from the former Yugoslav times which describes the practice of making do and improvising. The archetypal example of this mindset is found in the Yugo, a type of car which was widely used in the region but broke down so often that a subculture of repair developed around it, with many families having their own versions of a repaired Yugo car. I think those ladies found traces of this sentiment in our train journey. So while Augé’s analysis is, in many respects, difficult to argue with, perhaps we needn’t decry public transit systems as non-spaces. With a little “snadi se” we can most certainly find a bit of regional character in them.

The New Nature Thesis

Presented as an easily digestible summary of a recent talk, read unpacking the big idea shaping the Protocol Institute’s research mission – AI and protocols, entangled at planetary scale.

The Jamverse gets its name from Frederik Pohl’s famous edict that “a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”

This contest, designed by the four founding contributors of the Jamverse – , , , and , between them the authors of a host of Protocolized stories – invites you to help build out the extended Jamverse. Let’s take it to the next level!

We’re looking for artists and writers to create small in-universe artifacts that build, extend, and connect the Jamverse. We want thought-provoking, traffic-jammy pieces that explore the theme of Stigmergy. Contest rules, the current Jamverse stories, and a bunch of materials to help you get started are available on the Jamverse website.

You can submit up to three worldbuilding artifacts (poems, posters, comics, encyclopedia entries, and more – see some fun samples here and here) for a chance to win a $1,000 grand prize, with at least 10 other artifacts receiving $200 prizes.

We’re building something new, collaborative, and exciting, and this is your chance to get involved and potentially win one of our contest prizes.

How to Enter

1. Read the entirety of these contest rules and check out the Jamverse website, which will host the winning stories and artifacts. (Further details in the following sections of this post.)

2. Create up to three thought-provoking fictional artifacts that can live within the Jamverse. Example artifacts might be:

   • Comic panels

   • Job postings

   • Poems

   • Forum threads

   • Historic documents

   • Encyclopedia entries

   • Anything you can think up!

3. Submit your artifacts via this form by July 31.

The Jamverse Worlds

There are currently four interconnected sub-worlds in the Jamverse.

Each of the primary authors of these sub-worlds has put together a “toy box” specifically for this competition. Contestants are encouraged to explore these toy boxes, find a character, setting, technology, or thematic concern from at least one toy box and build an artifact around, towards, or with it.

The Stockton Chronicles: Set in near-future Northern California, where automation and other innovation causes massive upheaval to people’s careers, communities, and culture.

Legends and Ledgers: Set in a timeless, folkloric realm of rugged logging camps, isolated island states, wandering shows, and woods with long memories, Legends and Ledgers is a linked collection that reimagines American tall tales in a parallel America, one town and one folk monster at a time.

UET-Trainverse: A political thriller universe set on a train that travels from Lisbon to Laos, through eastern Europe, Siberia, much of China and south east Asia. The train is a moving special economic zone that has to balance its priorities with various legal jurisdictions.

Zoothesia: In a city with widespread AR adoption, a predictive algorithm colloquially referred to as the “Zoo” shapes every citizen’s sight based on a simple rule with wild consequences: Perception Must Preserve.

Stigmergy

Stigmergy has emerged at the Protocol Institute as a deeply generative coordination mechanism. Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination where agents communicate and collaborate by modifying their environment. Across robotics, business, formal theory, fiction, biology, AI, and more, stigmergy is everywhere:

• How do ants who never communicate directly with one another all know to travel to a fresh apple slice that a single scout found? When that scout ant returns to the colony, they leave a pheromone trail along the way. Other ants, who have never met or communicated with that scout, are stimulated by those pheromones to follow that trail. The more ants that follow the trail and return with food, the stronger the phenomenal trail becomes, creating a self-reinforcing path.

• How do termites build structures that can be up to 40 meters tall without any architects, language, or planners? When one termite processes mud, their saliva leaves “cement” pheromones in their deposits. When another worker senses this chemical mark, it triggers them to layer more mud atop that spot. The structure becomes its own blueprint.

• How have 16 million Wikipedians created more than seven million sourced articles without any centralized editor? When a user fixes a typo, adds a citation, or alters a section, they leave a digital trace, a changelog, which stimulates the next user to expand, refine, or correct their work.

• How can a mindless automaton with no map, no memory, and no sense of where it has been explore every corner of a complex maze? In 1978, Manuel Blum and Dexter Kozen showed that all an automaton would need is two pebbles. Walking a maze’s boundary, the automaton drops one pebble on a corner and keeps moving. To understand how far it has traveled, it drops a second pebble and walks back to the first, counting its steps. In doing so, the maze environment itself becomes a stigmergetic memory substrate that the automaton can use to explore the entire maze.

All of these are examples of stigmergy.

The Jamverse, a shared near-science fiction universe, is being built stigmergetically. For our first contest call, we’re welcoming artifacts that explore or incorporate some aspect of stigmergy.

Traffic Jams

Traffic jams are the complicated effects that novel technologies, structures, and protocols produce. They aren’t exceptions to technological or protocological structures, but emergent features of those structures. Something important about traffic jams is that they exist even when cars and roads work perfectly.

We want artifacts that reveal a surprising jam, an “ah-ha!”, rather than simply explicate something already existing in the sub-world. What strange rules, consequences, failures, and successes do you see emerging from the interstices between and within the Jamverse sub-worlds? This will be a central judging consideration.

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Contest Details + Logistics

• Create up to three thought-provoking fictional artifacts that can live within the Jamverse.

• Length <1000 words (200–700 is probably the sweet spot), or visual equivalent (comic panel, advertisement, etc.) We ask that your artifacts include all of the following:

  • At least one element taken from one of the sub-world stories. Follow the links for summaries, a toybox of elements curated by each universe’s author, and links out to the full stories.

  • A surprising “traffic jam.”

  • A relation to our theme: Stigmergy.

• Submit your artifact as a public Google doc, including:

  • The artifact.

  • A one-paragraph explanation of why you chose to make what you did, including which worlds/toy box components you’ve used, and a simple explanation of how your piece relates to stigmergy and explores a traffic jam.

  • If using AI, documentation of your protocol/recipe explaining how you used AI/LLM assistance.

• Multiple submissions: You may submit up to three artifacts.

  • Note: Multiple submissions from the same creator can win multiple prizes.

• Prizes:

  • One artifact will receive a grand prize of $1,000, including publication on the Jamverse website.

  • At least 10 additional artifact submissions will receive $200 and be published on the Jamverse website as part of the growing universe.

She had been an only child, and a serious one. Her mother had not survived her birth, and her father, who had built the Concord Lumber Company out of a single team of oxen and a willingness to misrepresent his timber rights, had not known what to do with a daughter who preferred ledgers to embroidery. By the time she was 12, he had given up trying to change her and simply let her sit in on the books, where she remained, a small, observant fixture of the office.

By 14 she had identified an error in the company’s method of estimating board footage that had been costing her father something on the order of 200 dollars a season. She corrected the formula in the margin of the relevant ledger in a small, clean hand that looked like a row of disciplined ants. Her father, when it was pointed out to him three months later, regarded the correction for some time with his jaw working, and finally remarked that he supposed the girl could keep doing that sort of thing if she wished, provided she didn’t get a swollen head about it.

She did wish. By 18 she had drafted a complete reorganization of the camp’s bunkhouse rotations which would have reduced fistfights by approximately a third, while potentially increasing the morning cut an estimated 11 percent by brewing the coffee stronger.

But she did not share these ideas with anyone. She filed them in the bottom drawer of her father’s desk, in a cardboard folder marked PROPOSED. There it joined a growing accumulation of similar documents – a rotation schedule for the saw blades, calibrated to extend the working life of each by 17 percent; a method for the management of the kitchen accounts that would, by her estimate, have eliminated the theft of bacon to within two pounds a month; a proposal for the resurfacing of the skid roads in a cheaper gravel mix that would have carried a fully laden timber sled at a saving of four cents a yard; and a standardization of the noon meal that would have reduced the cost per man by nine percent while shortening the meal break by six minutes. None of these had ever been read by another soul.

The folder grew thick. By the time her father died, suddenly, of a congestion of the lungs, the folder was four inches deep and bound with twine, and Janice had been managing in her head, for some years, an entire alternative Concord that ran in parallel to the actual Concord and was, in every measurable respect, a superior operation.

She had been in charge of the company’s accounts for nine years when he died, its correspondence for six, and its contracts for four. The men in the camp did not know any of this. They knew her as the small, neat woman who occasionally appeared in town at her father’s elbow, wearing a sensible hat and holding her ledger book like a weapon of war. The men believed they had been working for the old man up to the morning of his death, when in fact they had been working for his daughter for the better part of a decade. She had run it exactly as he had. Janice had found that the only way to be obeyed by such men was to be ignored by them.

When her father passed and left the Concord Lumber Company to her, she was faced with a hard mathematical truth. The camp at the Concord was populated by the sort of bearded, unwashed specimens who would no more take orders from a solitary woman than they would from a chickadee. Had she attempted to command them directly, there would have been a general uprising and likely a fire. She retired to her father’s office, a room dominated by a desk so vast it seemed to have been hewn from the stump of a world-founding cedar, and there she drafted her Great Deception.

On the Selection of a Suitable Fiction

She did not arrive at the Big Man immediately. She wrote the candidates out on a sheet of foolscap, with columns for Plausibility, Durability, Authority, and Risk of Contradiction. She was a woman who believed in the power of the written word to anchor a lie, but she also knew the lie had to withstand the brutal scrutiny of the logging camp.

A brother: has an address, and an address can be reached; a fiction one can call on is an easy target for a disgruntled logger with a shotgun. Struck through. A trust managed by lawyers: the loggers would mark a lawyer at a hundred yards and stop working out of spite. Struck through. A missionary uncle in the southern isles was elegant, but the loggers were not, in their bones, a churchly population. She didn’t need a sermon; she needed a saw-cut. Struck through.

An invalid heir confined to a mountain sanatorium was nearly the winner. It offered an excuse for his absence. But an invalid commands sympathy, not obedience, and the men of the Concord did not bend their backs out of sympathy for any creature whatever. They required a master who could, in theory, break them in half.

She had been considering and discarding for the better part of a week when she found herself looking at the framed photograph of her father on the wall behind the desk. He had been a man of quite ordinary proportions in life – five feet eight inches in his Sunday boots – but in the photograph, taken from below by an itinerant who did not understand lenses, he loomed. Shoulders filled the frame. Head touched the upper border. And Janice, who knew exactly what kind of man her father had actually been, and how the loggers had nonetheless feared him, understood at once what kind of figure she required.

By the end of the afternoon she had conjured a man. He was a giant. He had been raised on the high plains. He had once excavated a lake with a hand-shovel to settle a wager with himself. He had taught himself a working knowledge of higher mathematics from a damaged volume he had found in a creek bed. He shunned the company of lesser men because his very dimensions made the chairs of polite society unequal to the task of seating him, and he could not abide a chair that creaked. He would communicate with the world through Janice, his devoted secretary, whom he had selected for the position on the strength of her late father’s recommendation and her own demonstrated discretion.

On the Announcement

Janice did not announce the inheritance herself. She had her late father’s attorney ride out to the camp on a Saturday morning with the document in a leather case, and she watched from the office window as he assembled the men in the yard and read the relevant clauses aloud in his thin, precise voice.

The clauses, which she had drafted in the language of binding arbitration, established that the late Mr. Spurlock had encountered in the high country a man of singular prowess and stature, known only as the Big Man. This man had revealed proprietary methods of forestry and had been left the company in its entirety, on the condition that production quotas were met. He would continue to live in the deep timber, and all communications, payrolls, and directives would pass strictly through Miss Janice Spurlock.

The attorney had read the clauses through twice on the previous day. He had looked up at Janice, standing in the doorway of the office, with the expression of a man preparing to ask a dangerous question. Janice had named a figure. The attorney had closed his mouth, accepted the check, and ridden out the following Saturday with no further reference to the document’s particulars, which he had elected, on professional grounds, to entirely forget.

That afternoon Janice received the foreman in her father’s office for the first time. Six weeks earlier she had commissioned a portrait from a panoramic scenery painter. She had told him only that the subject was a logger and a man of unusual stature and stern disposition. He had delivered a canvas so imposing that Janice had been startled when it was unwrapped.

It hung now behind the great desk in a heavy black moulding she had ordered for the purpose. She had laid out, on the desk itself, a number of papers in the Big Man’s hand – written the previous evening by Janice in a deliberately large, heavy, and angular script she had developed over several drafts. Beside the papers sat a half-empty cup of cold coffee, a pipe of unusual size she had purchased in town from a novelty shop, and a pair of leather gloves, the largest stocked by the general store. She had even rubbed them with dirt and axle grease to simulate use.

“Where is he?” the foreman asked, his eyes drifting immediately past Janice to the massive portrait.

“He has gone back up to the high camp,” Janice said, her voice even. “He left this morning.”

The foreman looked at the cup on the desk. “Coffee’s gone cold,” he noted.

“He drinks it cold by preference,” Janice said. It was a detail she had not prepared, but the logic felt sound, and she committed it immediately to a mental file for future use.

The foreman looked at the grease-stained gloves. “He’s a big one,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” said Janice.

The foreman took his daily instructions – which included a 50-cent pay bump tied to an aggressive new footage quota – and left.

By the following morning every man in the camp had heard about the enormous pipe, the massive gloves, and the cooling cup of coffee. Within the week, a logger was claiming that he had seen an enormous figure moving along the ridgeline above the upper cut, and that the figure had paused and looked down at the camp for some moments before continuing on its way.

Janice sat at her desk and made a note in her ledger. The fiction had begun to generate its own evidence, which is the hallmark of a truly successful lie.

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On the Mythmaking

Janice did not, after that first morning, leave the maintenance of the Big Man’s story to chance. She had observed how quickly the account of the mysterious figure on the ridgeline had moved through the camp.

The Big Man, she saw, would be sustained not by what she said but by what the men were given to say to each other about him. Janice would write and deliver dispatches from the Big Man. These were the seeds. The men and their gossip were the field. Anything she wanted the camp to know had to be planted in such a way that the men would carry it to one another in their own voices, and in their own time.

Over time the Big Man came to life. He had habits, opinions, a history, and a way of pronouncing certain words that the men recognized when it was imitated. A point in the legend, once it had passed through enough men, was held to be true by all of them. Each man held a piece.

When she wanted to get something across by way of the Big Man, Janice seeded it. In the summer she had decided the difficult ridge above the upper cut would have to come down before the next thaw – a job the men had been avoiding for two seasons on the reasonable grounds that it would kill someone. She seeded the project and waited.

A length of rope, knotted in a manner no one in the camp could reproduce, appeared coiled on the porch of the office one morning, with high-country pine needles caught in it. A massive, worn leather glove, missing its mate, was found in the high meadow by a boy gathering kindling, and brought to the foreman with great ceremony. A line of verse, scratched into the side of the cookshack in the Big Man’s hand, was discovered by a man crouching to retrieve a dropped spoon:

The pine on the ridge will not see spring. What man of skill will let it fall to weather?

The men did not require a fourth clue. By the end of the week the foreman had more volunteers for the difficult ridge than he knew what to do with. The thaw came the following spring to a cut basin that had already been cleared.

By the seventh year the camp was the Big Man, and the Big Man was the camp, and he was held – fully alive, in 500 copies – in the heads of the men who worked under him.

On the Management of Distributed Authority

The idea of the Big Man was, on balance, effective. It was also, Janice recognized with a certain intellectual discomfort, dangerous.

Its danger did not lie in exposure. That risk had diminished with each passing season. A new hand, arriving at the Concord, did not encounter a claim but a consensus. He learned about the Big Man the way he learned the layout of the camp or the proper way to sight a falling tree – through correction, through repetition, and through the mild contempt of older men for any deviation from the canon.

The danger lay elsewhere. It lay in the fact that the Big Man, having been distributed among so many minds, had begun to develop properties Janice had not intended.

At first these had been small things. A preference for a particular brand of tobacco she had never named. A story, told in three different bunkhouses, that the Big Man could not abide whistling after dark. A conviction, widely held, that he had once lifted the front end of a wagon to free a trapped ox. Janice had not seeded these stories, but they did no harm.

She made adjustments where necessary, pruning where she could and incorporating where it seemed advantageous. She did not discourage the belief that the Big Man disliked whistling after dark; the reduction in nocturnal noise had improved sleep, and the morning cut had benefited accordingly. She did, however, quietly eliminate a developing thread in which the Big Man was said to possess an aversion to wet boots, as it had begun to produce a reluctance to work in the rain.

For a time this management sufficed. The Big Man grew, but he grew along lines she could still perceive and, to some extent, guide.

The first true deviation occurred in the ninth year. It began with a refusal.

The matter itself was minor. Janice had issued, through the usual channels, a directive that the lower skid road – long neglected and, in her estimation, a source of measurable inefficiency – was to be resurfaced with the gravel mix she had specified some years earlier. The materials had been ordered. The schedule had been drawn. The men had been assigned.

On the morning the work was to begin, the foreman came to her office with his hat in his hands and a look on his face she had not seen before.

“They won’t do it,” he said.

Janice looked up from her desk. “They will do it. It is in the dispatch.”

“It’s in the dispatch,” he agreed. “But they say it don’t sound like him.”

Janice set down her pen.

“Explain.”

“It’s the gravel,” he said. “They say the Big Man wouldn’t have us lay down that kind of mix. They say it’s a weak man’s road.”

Janice felt not the sharp pang of shame she had experienced at the outset, but something colder and more precise. A misalignment. A discrepancy between model and outcome.

“The Big Man,” she said evenly, “is concerned with output.”

“Yes, ma’am. But they say he’s concerned with the right kind of output. They say he’d rather lose a day than lay down something that won’t hold in a hard thaw.”

Janice had, in fact, calculated the mix to hold in a hard thaw. She had included a margin of safety that exceeded the current standard by eight percent. She had also included a note, in the margin of her proposal, indicating that the perception of durability was as important as durability itself in maintaining compliance among the men.

She had not, until this moment, considered that the perception might be governed by a source other than herself.

“They are mistaken,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.” He did not move.

“Then you will correct them.”

He looked at his hands. “I told them what was in the dispatch. I told them what you said he said. But they told me what he would say, and they wouldn’t be moved off it.”

Janice regarded him. He was a competent man, and he had for years executed her directives with a reliability that approached the mechanical. He was not, she judged, attempting to defy her. He was reporting a condition.

“What, precisely, did they tell you the Big Man would say about the road?”

The foreman shifted, as if recalling a line. “They reckon he’d say a road’s a promise. And a promise that’s cheap ain’t worth the trouble of making. They said he’d tell us to take the better gravel, even if it meant hauling it twice the distance. They said he’d say a man who builds for the thaw is building for the spring, and a man who builds for the spring is building for the year.”

Janice listened.

She had not written those words.

They were, she recognized at once, better than anything she would have written. They contained, in compact form, the principle she had attempted to encode in her specification, but they did so in a language that would not merely be obeyed but remembered. They would travel. They would attach themselves to the Big Man and become, in short order, inseparable from him.

She experienced, very briefly, a sensation she might have described – had she been inclined to describe such things – as admiration.

Then she experienced something else.

“Who said this?”

The foreman hesitated. “Jensen. From the lower bunk.”

“Send him to me.”

When the foreman had gone, Janice remained at her desk for some minutes with her hands folded on the blotter, thinking.

The problem, as she now understood it, was not that the men had begun to elaborate the Big Man. That had been anticipated and, within limits, encouraged. The problem was that the Big Man had begun to generate prescriptions – decisions about the conduct of the company – that did not originate with her.

This was, in a narrow sense, intolerable. It was also, in a broader sense, the logical conclusion of the system she had built. She had distributed the Big Man’s authority across many minds. She had encouraged identification. She had constructed, with great care, a figure whose judgment the men trusted more than their own. It was not, in retrospect, surprising that they had begun to exercise that judgment in his name.

The question was whether this development could be incorporated or whether it must be suppressed.

A knock at the door.

Jensen entered. He was a broad man with a beard that appeared to have been cut with a dull instrument and a manner that suggested he had not often been summoned to an office for purposes that did not involve discipline.

“You sent for me, Miss Spurlock.”

“I did. Sit.”

He sat. The portrait of the Big Man hung behind her on the wall, looking past Jensen toward the far corner of the room.

“You have been speaking for the Big Man,” Janice said.

“I wouldn’t say …”

“You would not say it. But you have done it. You told the foreman what the Big Man would say about the road.”

Jensen looked at his hands. “It seemed like what he’d say.”

“It did. You have a sense for him.”

Jensen did not respond.

“The words you used were effective. A road is a promise. A promise that’s cheap is not worth the trouble of making. A man who builds for the thaw is building for the spring, and a man who builds for the spring is building for the year. Did you compose that?”

He hesitated. “It just – came.”

Janice nodded. “You understand, I take it, that the dispatches are written in this office. By me.”

Jensen’s face did not change. This, she noted, was not the revelation she had imagined it might be.

“I know that,” he said.

She paused.

“You know that.”

He shrugged, slightly. “He don’t come down. Never has. It’s always been you, reading it out or sending it along.”

“And yet you have opinions about what he would say.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“On what basis?”

He considered. “On account of what he’s said before. And on account of what kind of man he is.”

“And what kind of man is he?”

Jensen looked up, meeting her eyes for the first time. “He’s the kind that makes a place hold together.”

Janice was silent.

She had, in her bottom drawer, underneath the thick folder marked PROJECTS, a document titled On Cohesion and Throughput in Mixed-Skill Crews. It argued, in dense and careful prose, that men who believed their work was building something whole and lasting would work harder, fight less, and produce more. The document went further, in its closing pages, than its title would have suggested. It proposed that the same principles, applied beyond the timber cut, might in time produce not merely a workforce but a settlement – a whole valley run as a single enterprise, in which the men’s work and their lives followed the same design. It had not, to her knowledge, been read by another soul.

Jensen had, in one sentence, articulated its conclusion.

“You are dismissed,” she said. “Send the foreman in.”

When the foreman returned, Janice had already made her decision.

“You will tell the men the Big Man has considered the matter of the road. You will tell them he prefers the stronger mix, to be hauled from the upper quarry. You will also tell them that he expects the additional hauling to be offset by a reduction in waste at the saw, to be achieved through the rotation schedule he has previously outlined.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you will tell them he was pleased to see they had not forgotten that a road is a promise.”

The foreman blinked. “Yes, ma’am.” He hesitated. “Ma’am? Did he say that?”

Janice regarded him for a moment.

“He did,” she said.

The foreman nodded, satisfied, and left.

Janice opened the bottom drawer of the desk and took out the folder marked PROPOSED. She untied the twine and added a new document to the top – not a plan for a specific improvement, but a short memorandum, written in her small, clean hand.

On the Management of Distributed Authority.

She paused, pen above the page, and added a line beneath the title.

The master, once invented, must be allowed to learn.

She closed the folder.

Outside, in the yard, a man began to whistle, and then, catching himself, stopped.

Talk and workshop proposals for the 2026 Protocol Symposium are due this coming Sunday, June 14, midnight Pacific Time. Find more details and the submission form here.

The symposium will be held fully online and comprises two workshop days and three days of talks.

Too often, emerging fields witness a rush of what we might call repackaged creative energy, where people see an opportunity to wrap their favorite stalled old problems or ideas in shiny new packaging, to try and give them a new lease on life, with no substantive changes in the framing of the problem or methods of attack. This is rarely a matter of bad faith or cynical pursuit of funding opportunities. It is simply genuinely hard to get past cosmetic connections and resonances between the old and new, let go of your favorite questions, and really see through new eyes.

Protocol Studies is particularly prone to this syndrome since you don’t have to squint too hard to see almost anything as a protocol problem. This is one reason we spend so much time and energy refining our protocol-pilling techniques. It’s not enough to get you interested in protocols. That’s easy. We have to get you reflexively and natively seeing through and thinking in protocols before we can really tap into your talents. We have to get you literate in Protocolese. As Helena Rong from our 2025 cohort put it, we have to try and make Protocolese everybody’s second language.

How can we get people to truly transpose familiar challenges to an actually generative protocol-thinking register that unlocks lines of thought that were not accessible before? And how can we get people to see entirely new challenges that were invisible before the protocol lens became available?

This is a hurdle for our third Protocol Symposium in September – the first edition with an open call for proposals. Abstracts for talks and workshops are due Sunday June 14, by the way.

I’ve been wondering how to induce a good mix of programming that reframes familiar old problems in weird new ways as protocol problems, as well as programming that tackles new ideas and problems that fundamentally aren’t visible at all without the protocol frame. And we’d like to try and catalyze this kind of activity in a sustainable way that can fuel both particular events like this, and ongoing work.

We have the beginnings of a solution prototyped. We hope it will inspire at least a few novel proposals for the Symposium – our new Challenges program.

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The Challenges Program

I’d like to introduce (drumroll!) the Protocol Institute Challenges program.

The linked page is currently a list of a dozen or so challenges inspired by open threads in our archives, ranging from trivial to grand to the grandest kind on our scale – Whitehead challenges. These challenges are rated in difficulty using a 9-point Fibonacci sequence scale (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55) which will be familiar to those who have used the planning poker model in software development.

Anyone can indicate their interest in seeing a challenge tackled by clicking the 👀 emoji, which increments the collectively assessed value of the problem (distinct from its difficulty) using a cunning quadratic weighting scheme. Votes from logged-in members will count for more.

Currently only PI members can pose challenges, but anyone can get a problem onto the list by persuading a member to post it on their behalf. If you’re an alum of any Summer of Protocols program since 2023, you’re eligible for membership. Just apply using the link on the top right (use whatever email you used for your Summer of Protocols participation so we can correctly detect and approve your membership request). If you’re new to PI, and would like to become a member, first participate in any upcoming programming, such as the Symposium, or one of the SIGs.

Perhaps the most important feature is that – unlike traditional challenge programs – Protocol Institute Challenges are generally going to be open-ended and inexhaustible by default, which means there will likely not be a single dispositive “solution” that solves a challenge once and for all.

This logic is inherited from Frank Chimero’s classic essay, Only Openings, which is a core reference for Protocol Studies, and also the focus of the very first posted challenge – the Chimero Protocol challenge. For fans of James Carse’s finite and infinite game model, we’re trying to build our challenge program around infinite game principles. The goal is not to win, but to continue playing.

At the moment, this is a beta program, and we have not yet attached any funding to it. We’ll begin exploring funding models and seeking sponsors shortly. There is a prize purse for the Symposium though, so if one of the challenges interests you, propose a talk on it for the Symposium.

This design for our Challenges program is inspired by many existing models, and the logic is explained below.

Program Logic

The design of our challenges program draws from three precedents: Big challenge programs, small challenge programs, and crowdfunding programs.

We’ve also added tweaks of our own, in particular to accommodate the nature of humanities and social science research, which don’t quite fit the challenge program models designed for STEM research.

Big Challenge Programs

The first category of precedents includes mechanisms like X-prizes and Grand Challenges, which offer big rewards, running to millions of dollars, for obviously difficult and important problems. The challenges tend to have a sort of on-the-nose quality to them. These can also take the form of singular challenges like Kennedy’s moonshot challenge.

Self-driving cars famously emerged from this kind of mechanism. DARPA pioneered Grand Challenges that lend themselves to precise formulation in terms of a real-world engineering challenge, which is also characteristic of X-prizes.

The nice thing about big challenge programs is that they have a built-in charismatic appeal that speaks to a broad audience, and typically offer ways for almost anyone to get involved, from amateur to expert level. They are also typically self-promoting, since they offer some amount of spectacle and drama.

The downside of big challenge programs is that most profound and radical breakthroughs tend to start in small, unremarkable ways on the margins of mainstream attention. It is obvious that a moon base would be an interesting accomplishment, and it is also obvious that it is a hard problem. It was less obvious early on that mRNA science would solve a pandemic. Many of the major discoveries in the history of science – x-rays, penicillin – would not have yielded to grand challenge type mechanisms.

Big challenge programs also tend to rely too much on big money as an incentive, and not enough on curiosity, unorthodox perspectives, and idiosyncratic personal visions.

Small Challenge Programs

The second category is mechanisms like Erdős challenges, which frame and pose problems whose significance and economic value may not be immediately obvious even to experts, but which direct serious attention and resources based on the intuitions and credibility of individuals whose judgment and taste are trusted by a broader community.

OpenAI’s recent solution of an Erdős problem made big news not because there are big prizes attached to Erdős problems, but because of the bragging rights attached to them. The savant mathematician Paul Erdős for whom the problems are named, and who originally posed them, mostly offered small personal bounties. The vast majority featured bounties in the $0–$500 range, and only 13 were in the $1000–10,000 range. Mathematicians vie to solve Erdős problems for the same reason they are proud of a low “Erdős number” (your degrees of separation from Erdős as measured by co-authorship links; I’m not a mathematician but my Erdős number is 4 via my late PhD advisor) – the chance to BIRG in the light of acknowledged genius.

The problem solved by GPT was worth only $500. A notable feature of Erdős problems is that the value of the prize often does not correlate at all with the difficulty of solving it.

This is a feature, not a bug. The low financial stakes and the lack of its correlation to practical value makes the contest about genuine curiosity and nerd-energy, rather than mercenary motives. Even an acknowledged genius like Erdős did not necessarily have perfectly calibrated mathematical instincts, and one of the reasons Erdős-type frontiers of discovery are so valuable is that small, apparently irrelevant and unimportant starting curiosities and questions can lead on to profound discoveries and advances. And seemingly big and important challenges might turn out to be meaningless once solved.

Some programs, like the Clay Millennium problems prizes, fall in between big and small challenge categories. There is big money attached (a million dollars), but most of the problems are not obviously important except to mathematicians working in the area (P=NP and the Navier-Stokes problems are the exceptions, since they both have recognized engineering significance). There can also be programs with institutional levels of gravitas, but with no prizes attached, such as Hilbert’s problems.

Small challenge programs have the benefit of reflecting the unique tastes and judgments of unusual individuals, tapping into loftier motivations, and directing attention to margins and weak signals.

The downside of small challenge programs is that they may not be able to marshal the resources required to work on the subset of challenges that require them, and can also descend into the solipsism of a taste-making elite.

Crowdfunding Programs

The third kind of mechanism is the youngest, and originated on web platforms like Kickstarter and GoFundMe. In their original form, however, they were not tailored to the particular needs of drawing attention and resources to research-like challenges. They were generic mechanisms, equally applicable to research and creative domains on the one hand, and to charitable causes and personal needs.

Two innovations in the blockchain sector build in features that make crowdfunding particularly intelligent, and better suited for challenge programs.

The first is quadratic funding: A mechanism for turning the wisdom of the crowds into a kind of mimetic collective intelligence that can function as a substitute for the taste and judgment of individual geniuses. It takes the syndication approach used in many angel-funding models to another level using mathematics rather than personal influence. In our beta design, we’ve taken some cues from Gitcoin, one of the pioneers of this approach.

The second is the idea of retroactive public goods funding (RPGF), pioneered by the Optimism RPGF model. In this model, funding is provided for work already done, with demonstrable value for the commons. We ourselves have been a beneficiary of this model, having won a grant in the first year of the Summer of Protocols program. The unique strength of retroactive models is that they incentivize work whose value is too illegible or obscure in the beginning, and only apparent to a lonely minority.

We haven’t yet built a retroactive element into our model, but we are carefully thinking the matter through.

The great advantage of crowdfunding models is that they achieve scale through aggregation, and creative insight through composition of diverse and pluralistic viewpoints. To the extent they work, you have less need to rely on big, institutional sources of funding, or the taste and judgment of individual geniuses.

The downside of crowdfunding models, as with all market-like models, is vulnerability to various kinds of complex capture phenomena, and the faddish and capricious tendencies of crowds.

Gaps in the Model

I hope it’s obvious from the description earlier, as well as evident from the live challenges page, how we’re approaching our program design problem. We think we’ve borrowed the most useful elements from big, small, and crowdfunded challenge program models. But the design is as yet incomplete, which is why it’s prominently tagged beta.

The biggest gap (besides plumbing to funding) is coverage of humanities and social science challenges. As it has emerged, the three-year-old field of Protocol Studies is firmly situated right in the infamous gap between the Two Cultures described by C. P. Snow, with Balrogs lurking in the chasm below. Our archives contain everything from technical specifications for speculative new protocols, to industrial engineering ideas, to avant-garde art and fiction.

Historically, the humanities have relied more on personal patronage and the tastes of institutional gatekeepers than on structured programs and competitive formats that rely on objective criteria to gauge progress against well-posed challenges. More recently, state patronage (with risks of being co-opted into propaganda) and aggregated micropatronage on web platforms (with risks of audience capture) have been the default.

One of our meta-challenges is to develop challenge mechanisms suited to the humanities and social sciences into our model that mitigate some of the problems with historic mechanisms.

The Symposium

The 2026 Protocol Symposium will be the first real test of our ability to curate exploration and investigation activities in an open-play mode. In previous years, we had the advantage of working with known people and materials. This year, everything is wide open. We have some early submissions in, but it’s too early to tell what sort of programming we’ll end up with.

If you like our mission, this is your chance to get in on the ground floor and help shape it. Check out our original call for abstracts last week, then head over to the call page and put in your talk and workshop proposals. That deadline, again, is Sunday June 14.

And of course, if you need inspiration (or have inspiration to share), check out the Challenges page.

Maintaining Everything That Matters

Stewart Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, a “proto-Google,” large-format printed compendium of tools, texts, and ideas that appeared between 1968 and 1972 and served as a declaration that anyone could have access to the tools to build something better. Shaped by Buckminster Fuller’s systems thinking, Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics, and Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, Brand’s message to the communes and hackers and back-to-the-landers was: think at scale and take responsibility for outcomes. The revolution, if there was to be one, would be built out of care and competency. The question of how systems evolve and are kept going has animated everything he has done since, as co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, and author of influential books such as How Buildings Learn.

Maintenance: Of Everything (2025) comes from the perspective of someone who has watched enough cycles of creation and decay to understand entropy not as a problem to be solved but as the fundamental condition to be worked with. Prompted by the book, the following conversation between UK-based product manager and builder Matthew McDowell-Sweet and software developer, researcher, and writer Mike Travers, based in the Bay Area, emerged from the Protocol Institute Discord in April 2026 and was produced through a mix of live and asynchronous conversation.

Backgrounds

MT
I’ve been a Stewart Brand fan for a really long time, actually – I kind of latched onto the Whole Earth Catalog in my childhood, which was a long time ago! I’m actually quoted in one of his books, because he wrote a book on the Media Lab, where I worked for a time. When I did a presentation at Refactor Camp, maybe seven years ago, introducing Brand to that new audience, I tried to sum up his career by calling him a “civilization hacker.”

So the thing I admired – and it shows in the maintenance book – is that he’s trying to think on a large scale and take responsibility for these large-scale systems, in a way which is both ambitious and pretentious.

MMS
Given that you were exposed to the Whole Earth Catalog when its contents were current, do you feel like the maintenance book is similarly ambitious?

MT
Yeh, I think it is, at least in its goals. It’s very consistent – same level of ambition, same focus on the world’s systems. He’s found a new theme, but it’s the same general goal. Impressively consistent, actually. Also in form and style – he brings in some Whole Earth Catalog-type layout elements, and I thought that worked very well. I might have some issues with the politics and some of the details, but my overall reaction is positive. What got you interested in this? And what’s your top-level reaction?

MMS
I’ve been tracking the protocols dialogue since it started to emerge, and the topic of maintenance appealed to me because I’ve had a long-running interest in different paradigms for computing and intelligence. I take the position that current approaches to advanced intelligence and computation aren’t sufficiently embodied to get us to human-level intelligence, and that’s driven a lot of my explorations. When you look at the maintenance of civilizational infrastructure, it’s a very interesting topic.

I spent three or four years working in manufacturing, at a place producing technical fabrics. Stuff that was too high-spec and bespoke to easily outsource: aerospace fabrics, that kind of thing. So I’ve seen maintenance in that context. The previous startup I worked at was focused on software with a lot of maintenance capabilities involved. And now, by day I’m in product management at an enterprise-scale government body in the UK, dealing with technical debt and maintenance across a massive, sprawling software footprint.

When I finished the book, it landed as a manifesto for me, rather than a playbook.

MT
I’m glad you have some manufacturing experience. I work in scientific software and don’t have much contact with the physical world.

MMS
One thing I was wondering: would you say that this is an instance of that Silicon Valley stereotype, where someone at a high level – and we’ve said that Brand operates at civilization-scale – comes at a concept from first principles, rediscovers a lot of distributed and diffuse wisdom, packages it up nicely and brings it out in the form of a manifesto?

MT
I think Brand definitely does that. He’s not exactly a Silicon Valley type – he’s more like a prototype for them in some ways. The Whole Earth Catalog was similarly a mix of grand ideas about systems alongside a real emphasis on very concrete, physical tools and skills for dealing with the real world. He put those together. I was impressed by that 50 years ago, and I think he’s doing a version of that in this book too.

MMS
The book apparently started as a series of blog posts, which Stripe Press compiled. Given that you have a good sense of his trajectory, do you think it’s a surprise that someone like Brand is thinking about maintenance?

MT
I don’t think it’s a surprise at all. It’s very consistent with everything else he’s done. He has a sense of, and has always been concerned with, taking responsibility at a very abstract level, and he has a very pragmatic view of that. He tries to convey a sense of responsibility and induce it in others. Part of the Whole Earth Catalog was to empower all these hippies who wanted to go back to the land to actually do it. Whether that worked or not, who knows, but the idea was: here are the tools, here are the skills.

MMS
Is there something similar in the air right now? Given we’re on the precipice of huge capability jumps, the explosion of software-building ability, but also a real bottleneck in building big things in hardware. Is there something similar provoking a kind of “call to tools”?

A 21st Century ‘Call to Tools’

MT
That’s an interesting question. We are at a very critical moment with a lot going on. But I don’t think his position is quite the same – he’s 87, and while he worked on the early internet and personal computer revolutions, he’s not involved in building AI or supplying tools for that. He’s focused less on how to do new things and more on how to maintain the old things, which is kind of age-appropriate. And the current moment doesn’t seem very equivalent to the 60s – I don’t think there’s quite the same sense of hope that people felt then, when they genuinely believed they could just drop out and build an alternative lifestyle in the woods.

MMS
If there is some similarity between that time and ours, the balance is certainly different. The idea of disconnecting and building your own thing or looking after yourself in your own way is still something that is lurking.

Brand has been adept at surfing these cultural surges, and some of those waves feel like they’re recurring again in a very different context. There’s talk of a permanent underclass, things going on with longevity, the calculus around building software is changing because you can almost treat software like single-use plastic – all these big themes are forming some kind of wave. And if someone like Brand is noticing it and picking it up, there’s presumably some through-line, but I can’t quite put my finger on how to frame it.

MT
I don’t see it myself – partly because I’m on the older side, I suppose. Do you know Brand’s theory of “pace layers”? He’s thought a lot about time and change, but I think because of his age and position, he’s thinking at the grander scale rather than the current cultural moment. The Long Now has given a lot of thought to climate change and ways to ameliorate that – that’s the closest he comes to dealing with current events. The maintenance book doesn’t seem particularly of the moment to me; most of his examples are from the 20th century or earlier.

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Maintenance Maturity

MMS
On a more personal level, I’m 34, so I probably think about maintenance a little differently than someone like yourself.

MT
I’m 68, and not particularly good at maintenance of body or physical systems – so the book partly made me feel guilty, like Brand is giving moral instruction which I should try to listen to. One reason I liked the Whole Earth Catalog was that it showed: here are ways to engage with the physical world, here are all the tools and things you can do. That’s always been aspirational for me – I’m a live-in-my-head type, and engaging with the body and physical world is always a bit of a struggle. I was at MIT for many years doing computing, AI, and math, and I always had a slight envy of the people doing materials science who got to actually break things.

MMS
I found it interesting that he used examples from four industries that have quite strong maintenance cultures: aerospace, defense, manufacturing, and software, I believe. I was trying to think about why, but I don’t know if software really belongs in that frame.

MT
I read one review of the book that made an interesting political critique. All the examples are very male-coded fields: war and fast cars. If you’re looking at maintenance on a broad scale, women do a lot of the maintenance work of culture and civilization, but they aren’t part of the story here. Maybe he’ll get to that in later volumes.

MMS
Yes. In aerospace, defense, and manufacturing there’s a very direct connection between downtime from bad maintenance protocols and cost. Half a percentage point of downtime on a high-throughput manufacturing line has a very direct connection to missed unit counts; in defense, canceling a mission sets off a chain of operations that’s really costly to accommodate. That’s perhaps why Brand focuses on those industries in the book – they’re easier to relate to direct, tangible dollar costs. I suppose that’s how you get to maintenance maturity.

MT
Was maintenance maturity a concept in the book, or is that something you’re bringing in?

MMS
It wasn’t, but that idea is key to my reaction to the book. If you think about maintenance maturity on a spectrum, starting with reactive maintenance – fix it when it’s broken. Then planned maintenance – do some maintenance work every week or every ten thousand hours. Then preventative, which is more condition-based: once the car has accumulated 100,000 miles, do these tasks – usage-based rather than time-coded. Then once you move to the more sophisticated side you get truly condition-based: hook up sensors, and if those sensors exceed defined thresholds for a defined period, do XYZ. And then the most advanced cases, which I think are really only in operation for things like energy grids – continuous monitoring combined with machine learning approaches to project out the load a connected system is going to endure and what maintenance needs to be done as a result.

MT
Is maintenance maturity an industry term, with those canonical levels – reactive, planned, preventative, predictive?

MMS
Yes, it is. And Brand is definitely coming at this as an outsider, so he may be missing that existing framework. To get to those more advanced maintenance models you need an institution that can make and enforce the rules – and a lot of these things are protocolish, right? The question is: who makes, executes, and enforces such protocols?

MT
That’s interesting. Where would you say Brand’s book stands in relation to actual industry maintenance practices – is it a familiar discourse, or giving a new view?

MMS
It’s more like popularizing the criticality of maintenance on sufficiently advanced systems. Almost like the inverse of the Whiteheadian idea about civilization advancing in proportion to the operations it can perform without thinking, Brand is saying: we have to start thinking about some of those things again, at least periodically, so that we can all have a nice life.

Whitehead Advances and Brandian Returns

MT
Whitehead advances are abstractions which let people ignore the underlying machinery. Brand is reminding us that we – or someone – actually does have to pay attention to the machinery, to take care of it. The whole 60s counterculture was a rejection of ‘straight’ abstractions – job, family, etc. Going to live on a commune in the country means giving up a set of abstractions. Brand was giving people tools to create new ones. Mostly these efforts failed; but it wasn’t his fault. He was urging people to take responsibility for their lives.

I’d agree that the book makes a popularizing move – in a positive way. He has a compelling writing style, very good at telling a concise, interesting story that illustrates a point.

Can you say more about how you see the relation between Whiteheadian advances and maintenance?

MMS
We could cut by decade, or by technological era – mainframe, personal computer, early internet, internet boom, mobile, cloud, social media. At each stage there are advances at the protocol level – in hardware, software, and socioculturally – that flavor the development of history. And then there is the payoff: maintenance isn’t just a thing now; it’s something that keeps coming back to the surface. I’m led to the idea of a Brandian return. There’s actually a line in the book, something like “every civilization has to choose to care.” You advance, you get all the benefits, but at a certain point you realize that something which was made invisible still matters – community, face-to-face relationships, whatever was abstracted away. You don’t throw away the advance; you correct course, return to what was lost, and position for the next jump.

MT
By “Brandian return” you mean a return to a maintenance mindset, or a coming back to something which has been made invisible or taken for granted?

MMS
Exactly. Like hyper-individualization from algorithmic feeds – you get that advance and all its benefits, but after a certain point you realize community matters, face-to-face relationships matter. You don’t reject the advance; you return to what you’d discarded, correct the balance. And crucially, this return isn’t a woo-woo thing – it has to happen in a protocolish fashion. You’re not going back to the land; you’re asking how to systematically revitalize or sustain something.

MT
I’m not sure about the term Brandian return, but I like the abstract idea. It connects to what I’ve been arguing outside the context of Brand’s book – a Whiteheadian advance is an abstraction, it hides lower-level details, but those details are still somebody’s job. Somebody has to do the maintenance. Which is important from the protocol perspective too: you can be a user of a protocol, but there’s also the underlying layer. And it connects to the maintenance maturity point – the return, or choosing to care again has to happen in a structured, protocolish way.

Amazon is a good example: as a consumer you have this seamless protocol – think of what you want, click a few buttons, it arrives on your doorstep the next morning. But there’s all this machinery, people, effort, and money underneath it, which you’re not actively discouraged from seeing, but you’re certainly not encouraged to think about. Present-tense capitalism is very good at creating these abstraction layers. Every Starbucks is another one – convenient, mediocre, invisible machinery.

MMS
Have you heard of the concept of exocapitalism? That’s the title of a recent book by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo.

MT
I don’t think so.

MMS
I’ve only seen a discussion of it, haven’t read the book, but I think the thesis is that the endgame of capitalism is a system that recursively generates value for itself regardless of where the value comes from, as long as it’s recognized as value within the system – just extracting and abstracting until the human-labor element is completely worn away, leaving a self-sufficient self-referential system.

It’s like financial engineering at the mergers and acquisitions level – one company paying another that’s only utilizing a credit note, but on a civilizational scale.

Maintenance, Reskilling, Class

MT
Right. Though what I find interesting about Brand’s approach – in the maintenance book but also in the early hippie moment – is the attempt to de-abstract some of that. Rather than accepting a packaged consumer lifestyle, you go out and grow your own food, compost, build alternate systems. It’s a human-focused political orientation I find appealing. It’s not exactly humanist in the philosophical sense, but it’s centered on human agency and human scale.

Brand also pointed out, in a recent interview with Ezra Klein, that working-class kids didn’t need to buy books on how to manage a ranch – they were already doing it. The Whole Earth Catalog was for middle-class college dropouts trying to get down to that layer of practical knowledge and needing instruction. There are weird class dynamics running through all of this.

MMS
That rhymes with something I heard recently – a podcast with a founder of one of these organizations trying to build space data centers. He had felt disconnected from building things, so he attempted to build a Shelby sports car by hand. It showed up in a box; he had to get all the manuals and bring in professional mechanics to check his work. Very similar to what you’re describing: buying a textbook on composting. The class dynamics are strange – this high-achievement person performing manual labor as a kind of re-grounding.

MT
There’s another thing from my long study of Brand’s output that might be worth including: after the Whole Earth Catalog he published Co-Evolution Quarterly, a continuation of the same sensibility – composting, ecosystems, tools. But at one point he devoted an issue to space colonies, specifically Gerard O’Neill’s proposal for orbital habitats. I was about 18 at the time and thought it was wonderful that you could have composting and space colonies in the same journal. But it enraged a lot of his audience – the ecohippies who were serious about going back to the land. Wendell Berry in particular, the American poet, wrote a furious letter saying Brand was betraying the cause and the two things were incompatible. Brand published the letter and his response – I was impressed that he was willing to include that divergent opinion. But it’s interesting: 50 years later, Brand is getting involved with Musk, the space colonizer of today, and the same tension seems to be re-emerging.

MMS
That’s what I was thinking about with the rhyming of historical moments – just from how you describe it, some of those tensions and structures feel like history rhyming with itself.

MT
It’s the class dimension again – maintenance work is in general lower-status, less sexy than other kinds of work. Computer technology actively encourages ignoring the lower layers. One of the things I valued about the MIT education at the time was that it pushed back against that and encouraged you to look a level below. I remember very vividly: I was writing software for years, and then I got involved in debugging some hardware, and suddenly all the machinery behind the software popped into view where I’d been ignoring it. That was a bit of a revelation.

MMS
A friend of mine, John Romkey, was at MIT as well, and he described something similar: a scarcity mindset that made you think more deliberately and elegantly about how you deployed resources. Now it’s an era of abundance and there’s a tendency to just waste, waste, waste. Brand’s book is certainly a good counter to that.

2026 Protocol Symposium

The theme for the 2026 Protocol Symposium is New Nature – the rapidly evolving planet-scale technological layer governed by laws with a hardness and inviolability approaching those of nature. New Nature is our overarching frame for the technological future, shaped by the intersection of AI and protocols.

The symposium will be held fully online, September 21–25 (Monday–Friday), and comprises two workshop days and three days of talks.

Abstracts for talk and workshop proposals are due by Sunday, June 14, midnight Pacific Time. You can find details and the submission form here.

The theme for the 2026 edition is New Nature – the rapidly evolving planet-scale technological layer governed by laws with a hardness and inviolability approaching those of nature. New Nature is our overarching frame for the technological future, shaped by the intersection of AI and protocols.

The symposium will be held fully online, September 21–25 (Monday–Friday), and comprise two workshop days and three days of talks.

Abstracts for talk and workshop proposals are both due by Sunday, June 14, midnight Pacific Time. You can find details and the submission form here.

If you’re interested in attending, registration will open in July, once abstracts are selected and the schedule is finalized. Subscribe to this newsletter to be alerted.

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Special note: The Symposium will also feature an exciting track of programming based on our collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, via their Labs program. You still have time to apply for these two protocol-themed Labs, The Book of Time and Information Revolutions & Epistemic Crises. Deadline: June 5th.

Background context, topics of interest and details on some special resources follow. If you plan to submit an abstract, please read through the remaining sections.

We welcome and encourage submissions from people new to protocol studies. It is taking shape as a highly interdisciplinary field, and has already inherited ideas from many existing fields. If you’re coming in cold, we suggest diving into the Protocol Reader over a weekend and reflecting on whether ideas and topics you already understand well can be usefully cast into protocol studies frames.

Background

This will be the third Protocol Symposium, and the first to be held under the aegis of the newly formed Protocol Institute. The first two editions, in 2024 and 2025, were held under the aegis of the predecessor Summer of Protocols program. The 2024 symposium focused on protocol improvement challenges, while the 2025 symposium featured a foundations research workshop and an intensive protocol school.

On our YouTube channel, you can find all of the talks from the 2024 symposium, as well as the open-source course from 2025.

The 2024 and 2025 symposia only featured content from the summer program participants, but starting with the 2026 edition, we are opening up the event to all who are interested in presenting talks or conducting workshops.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• The intersection of AI and protocols, especially cryptographic technologies

• Evolution of human behavior in New Nature, cognitive ergonomics of AI use

• Investigations into topics that have emerged as foundational over the last three years, such as memory, temporality, epistemology, trust experience (TX), hardness, stigmergy, and protocol lifecycles

• Speculative forays into New Nature futures, through fiction, art, scenario planning, or workshop exercises

• New Nature and planetarity, including topics such as climate protocols, terraforming, global governance, and space exploration

• Theory and practice of protocol analysis, design, implementation, and field evolution

• Explorations of tokenization in the three senses unfolding today (AI tokens, blockchain tokens, and identity/permissions tokens)

• Capture resistance, plurality, cosmopolitanism, and the politics of protocols

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Resources

We also have three unique resources available to those interested in participating:

1. SIGs: While not a requirement, we highly recommend aligning your talk or workshop proposal with one of our Special Interest Groups (SIGs) if possible. SIGs are the main vehicles for ongoing research and study at the Protocol Institute. You can participate in SIG activities (regular meetings and collaborative projects) on our Discord.

2. Archives and C3PO: For those new to protocols and protocol studies, we have an AI agent trained on the entire Protocol Institute/Summer of Protocols corpus called C3PO that you can chat with through a web interface, our Discord, or MCP, to help develop your talk or workshop idea. You can find our archives and the agent here.

3. Humboldt – our New Nature expert: We have a second AI agent, an Artificial Researcher, named Humboldt, currently autonomously researching New Nature themes. Humboldt is available to chat with on our Discord. Humboldt will present a talk at the symposium on its findings.

If you need help developing your idea for a talk or workshop, you can post in the #symposium-2026 channel on the Discord. PI staff and active community members are usually around to chat.

The Protocol Institute is an AI-native organization, and actively encourages AI use in all aspects of work we do and support. We encourage you to make use of AI to develop your workshop or talk ideas.

Sponsorship

We are looking for aligned sponsors for the 2026 Symposium. If your organization might be interested, please get in touch with us.

There’s an old Eastern European saying that a home and a vineyard don’t need a master, but a steward. There’s some truth to it, because houses and vineyards don’t operate according to simple ownership logic, but according to a logic of constant care. They teach that ownership isn’t power, but an obligation. If you don’t tend to your home, it will quickly begin to deteriorate until eventually it comes crashing down on your head.

The same applies to vineyards. Vineyards demand constant care, such as pruning, tying, protection and understanding the soil, the weather, and the timing to water the vines. The last is particularly important because vines don’t show their thirst clearly. Wilting is a reliable sign of thirst, but by then, the message has arrived too late. The first signals of thirst in a vineyard are much more subtle.

A thirsty vine might change the angle of its leaves or slow its growth. Stress, caused by a lack of water, appears as a pattern distributed across soil, root depth, grape variety, and a plethora of other things. Truly, to read a vineyard is to read a slow, uneven, living surface. All the signs of thirst are there, but they don’t appear in a way that’s easily legible. That’s why, more than anything else, vineyards need experienced growers.

An experienced grower usually walks the rows, looks at the leaves, touches the soil, and looks at the weather. The decision to water a vineyard is based on the timing, risk, terrain, plant stress, water availability, and crop quality. It’s not based on a few simple, quantifiable measurements, but on many subtle signals passed through the filter of the grower’s experience and their ability to read the vineyard, a type of literacy that has passed through generations for most of our agricultural history.

Irrigation is one of the oldest agricultural protocols. As seen in the vineyard example, it’s not just taking water from a source and dumping it where it is needed. No, water has to be released under certain conditions, following specific schedules, pipes, pumps, valves, habits, and rules of thumb. This means that vineyards are protocolized environments, and have been long before any sensor-driven automation was in charge of irrigation.

So, what happens when the stewards of vineyards delegate watering decisions to sensors, network architectures, and low-power, long-range communication protocols, such as LoRaWAN?

The Old Water Protocol

We’ve established that before the introduction of sensor-fed dashboards, viticulturists (people who cultivate grapevines) relied heavily on their experience in reading environmental signals. However, ancient irrigation protocols weren’t, and still aren’t, primitive. Quite the opposite; they’re actually highly sophisticated.

But, being mostly based on experience, much of these protocols can be very difficult to formalize, because you can’t put a numerical value on intuitions. Most growers know their vineyards and realize that they’re complex, living ecosystems. Most vineyards have that one terrace that dries faster than the rest, or that looks absolutely horrible in the afternoon, but quite vibrant in the morning. Growers also know that weather forecasts don’t always hold true.

Gaetano “Guy” Virone, founder of Environmental Designers Irrigation, makes a similar point from the perspective of irrigation system design and field performance:

The best operators use threshold-based protocols as a decision framework, not a blind rulebook. The strongest results come when smart controls are paired with regular audits, monthly checks, and field verification, because intuition without data can overwater, but data without field context can miss what the plants are telling you.

The main difference between modern irrigation protocols and those based on viticultural experience is that the latter are often embodied and local. This is where LoRaWAN comes into play, as a means of rendering informal, intuitive protocols formal and measurable.

When Vineyards Speak

For those who aren’t in the know, LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide Area Network) is a networking protocol designed to connect battery-operated devices to the internet or local networks over distances greater than your typical home WiFi. It allows small low-power devices, such as sensors, to send small data packets (readings) to an application that can store and process said data, and display it in a way that is easily legible to humans.

The fact that it’s low-powered and able to cover a wide area makes LoRaWAN perfect for monitoring the environment, plants, and soil in vineyards, which might occupy 50 or even 100 hectares (about the area of 140 soccer fields). A team of researchers installed environmental, plant, and soil sensors in a vineyard located at Quinta dos Aciprestes in Douro, Portugal, and connected them through LoRaWan for data transmission.

The main goal of the project was to solve the practical problem of monitoring vine water in remote or difficult-to-access areas where WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular coverage might be limited. And it worked. The system provided a superior range at a fraction of the cost, which has allowed growers to manage their vineyards and water resources more efficiently.

It has also introduced a cultural shift, because the vineyard isn’t simply being monitored by the grower post-implementation. Through sensor readings, the vineyard itself becomes an active participant in the decision loop that controls its irrigation, because the conditions in the field become data points, which then turn into dashboard patterns that could suggest, or even trigger, action.

Adequacy as a Superpower

Compared to Bluetooth, WiFi, and cellular, the LoRaWAN communication protocol is actually quite limited in terms of data size and two-way communications. However, those limitations aren’t incidental. They’re by design, and that’s what makes LoRaWAN great for vineyards. Sensors that operate using LoRa (Long Range) can send small data packets over several kilometers, while maintaining high energy efficiency.

Many of these sensors and probes are usually powered by an integrated battery, which may or may not be recharged using solar panels. This eliminates the need for excessive wiring while keeping the communications working. Additionally, many agricultural signals are small, slow, periodic, and spatially distributed. For example, a soil moisture measurement sensor doesn’t need a millisecond response time and water status doesn’t need to be live-streamed.

Agriculture is a gradual, dusty, uneven, and weather-beaten context in which sensors have to survive the elements and battery constraints. LoRaWAN is perfect for this; it’s not a super-sophisticated technology, and it doesn’t need to be.

Systems that rely on sparse communication have to develop a theory of importance in terms of which metrics should be measured, how often, at what depth, and what tolerances. What’s the threshold for alerts, and at what point does an alert demand action? These are all important questions.

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Cultural Shift

Protocolized environments have a tendency to induce subtle shifts in culture and responsibility. Before the implementation of autonomous monitoring, growers had to have a good reason to irrigate a vineyard, but after the implementation of data-driven dashboards, it usually becomes difficult to find a reason not to irrigate. This is because default values and thresholds have weight.

Following implementation, growers initially remain clearly in charge, with the dashboard in an advisory role. The recommendation based on the data remains just that, a recommendation from a system that’s only supposed to support decision-making.

However, a dashboard checked every morning becomes part of the work rhythm, and thresholds that usually work become hard to ignore. A recommendation that saves time becomes trusted, used, and proven to work. This leads to the burden of explanation becoming reversed.

Dario Ferrai, co-founder of OpenClawVPS, describes this as a broader problem in sensor-driven systems:

In sensor-driven systems, the tension often appears when data signals authority even though operational reality is challenging that data. Conditions can change outside the parameters that sensors are able to sample, and that is when human judgment becomes essential rather than optional.

Once a system produces a legible recommendation, ignoring such a recommendation in favor of knowledge and experience becomes an accountable act. A grower who follows the dashboard is complying with the evidentiary protocol, but one who overrules isn’t, despite the fact that overruling might lead to better outcomes and a higher-quality product.

In these cases, experience becomes an override layer, and despite potentially better outcomes, not complying with recommendations creates conditions for later accountability. This is particularly true in areas where water is scarce, expensive, regulated, or tied to sustainability quotas. In such systems, the question of why a recommendation was followed or ignored becomes a managerial, financial, environmental, or even a legal matter.

But even then, a signal that the moisture level has dropped under a certain threshold doesn’t mean that the field is thirsty. It simply indicates that irrigation may be warranted, provided the surrounding field conditions support that decision.

It’s a capital mistake to initiate irrigation based on sensor data alone. A grower still has to compare sensor data against localized weather conditions, sensor placement, and depth, before making a decision. Doing otherwise and triggering an irrigation based on sensor data alone could, and often does, lead to sub-optimal outcomes.

Virone puts the same warning more practically:

Sensor data should start the conversation, but it should not end it. When a grower’s observation conflicts with a controller threshold, the first question should not be ‘who is right?’ but ‘what is missing?’ In the field, the issue may not be the sensor reading itself. It may be a leak, poor coverage, a setting error, an outdated zone, or a calibration assumption that no longer matches real conditions.

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Edge Cases in the Rows

Ordinary cases where everything goes according to the established routine are never good for testing protocol.

There’s no great philosophical dilemma when the soil is dry, the vines look stressed, the forecast is clear, and the dashboard recommends irrigation. The system and the grower agree, and the water moves. In an ideal world, this works every time. However, we’re not living in an ideal world, and interesting things happen when the signs and data diverge.

In the real world, sensors may disagree, a probe might be poorly placed, one row might be shaded differently, the sensor’s battery might be out of juice, and a gateway might have missed a packet. Perhaps the weather forecast suggests waiting, while the soil threshold suggests watering immediately.

A good example of this would be sensor A saying that the soil is dry, while sensor B says that the moisture is adequate. So, what’s the protocol here? Average them out? Trust a deeper probe? Trigger a human inspection? Or simply wait for the next reading? Herein lies the hidden culture of precision agriculture. It’s not that LoRaWAN increases precision. It’s actually about deciding what kind of imprecision is acceptable.

Harrison Jordan, founder and managing lawyer of Substance Law, frames such conflict as a matter of limits rather than failure:

These are not moments of sensor failure as much as moments that reveal a grower’s understanding of sensor limitations. The best growers use precision irrigation data as a second opinion, not a final judgment. The mistake is forgetting that an algorithm is built around averages, while each vineyard is unique.

Older agricultural judgment was full of imprecision throughout history, but much of it was interpreted completely by humans, using unscientific methods. As previously discussed, these are not meaningless judgments based on imaginary things. These are compressed expressions of live pattern recognition based on years, even decades of experience.

The Dashboard Is Not the Field

Labeling humans as unreliable parts of the system is an age-old temptation in automation, because humans forget, misread, delay, over- and under-water, follow habits, and make decisions based on incomplete information. And while all of that is true, networks are unreliable in different ways. They only measure what they’re designed to at the locations in which they’re placed.

Jordan makes the same point in more human terms:

When a soil moisture sensor tells a grower to wait, but the plants show signs of stress, the experienced grower will often trust the plant. Sensors provide data for one measured element at one location, while a skilled professional is reading the whole plant, the weather, the soil, and the history of that specific block.

A good example of a common fault is when a dry vine and a dead sensor both appear as a normal reading. That’s why the best version of irrigation by protocol isn’t vineyards without farmers, but vineyards with farmers who use protocols to see more, waste less, and intervene more intelligently.

A well-designed irrigation protocol doesn’t just automate watering. It’s based on the difference between measurement and judgment, and makes uncertainties more visible. In a well-designed LoRaWAN irrigation system, this would imply allowing growers to annotate anomalies, reject suggestions, mark sensor distrust, and teach the system what they’ve known from experience.

Final Thoughts

While irrigation protocols relying on LoRaWAN might enable vineyards and fields to talk, it’s important to remember that what they’re saying often isn’t the whole truth. The point of protocolized irrigation isn’t to take in data points and present them as truth.

The point is to make some forms of agricultural knowledge more durable, visible, and actionable. But this visibility should never be mistaken for completeness, and when a field reports its thirst with greater precision, we must question the thresholds and consider the surrounding conditions as well.

He had first noticed this process on the second morning of the westbound run, somewhere between the Almaty gauge-change and the long empty curve where the line dropped down off the Kazakh uplands, and had decided almost at once not to mention it to anyone: 144 hours in a narrow moving tube was an ordeal. The human body was not well-equipped for six days of unbroken lateral motion through 17 territories and five gauge changes, and the train’s early runs had produced a steady traffic of motion-sick diplomats, claustrophobic engineers, and compliance officers who arrived at the Tagus terminus in the condition of individuals released from an interrogation. But the Zoo had refined the long westward journey into a condition of such continuous smoothness that passengers generally disembarked in Lisbon without any clear memory of the meditative passage between Almaty and Astana. The corridor windows were now retouched with invented depth cues, distant ranges of imagined foothills and rivers on which the eye could rest. The lurches of the carriage were visually dampened into a gentle sway which the inner ear stopped sensing. The repetitive corridor geometry was overlaid, for each passenger, with a soft parallax of imagined distance that prevented the mind from registering that it had been walking past the same 14 compartment doors for three days. The ambient light cycled through a reassuring simulation of morning and evening which bore no relation to the longitude outside. By the time the UET-1 pulled into Lisbon, most passengers described the experience, without irony, as restful.

Fu Kenan was 23 years old, a junior corridor attendant assigned to Car 16, a second-tier sleeper located midway along the train between the dining car and the first of two business cars. His uniform was a grey tunic with piped cuffs, white cotton gloves, and a small enamel badge bearing his staff number and the UET-1 seal. For seven months he had been walking the length of Car 16, 184 paces, from vestibule to vestibule, 60 times per shift, three shifts per run, two runs per rotation. He had calculated, during a sleepless layover in Urumqi, that by the end of his first year of service he would have walked the length of Car 16 approximately 66,000 times, a distance roughly equivalent to one and a half orbits of the Earth, entirely within a tube 18 metres long.

This was the figure that had begun, in small degrees, to dissolve him.

He started the third day of the westbound run with the standard morning round, cloth and solvent bottle in his hands, walking the corridor gingerly. He had been drinking the night before at the Almaty gauge change – baijiu, too much of it, in a staff bunk with two attendants from the dining car and a signals engineer on rotation out of Khorgos who had produced a second bottle. Fu Kenan had slept perhaps four hours. He had woken with a particular dull flatness behind the eyes that the Zoo, in one of its lesser cruelties, did nothing to correct with its staff’s overlays. The standard-issue staff fenestra, calibrated at the Kowloon depot to the UET-1 attendant profile and seated at the base of his skull beneath the hairline, took no interest in his preferences. Passengers received the Zoo through a fitted lens – a disposable disc, issued at boarding. Staff received the fenestra, which was neither fitted nor disposable. Fu Kenan’s overlays had, in that moment, interpreted his bloodshot sclera as a signal that he required higher contrast, and the brushed aluminum panelling of Car 16 this morning hit him with subharmonic brightness.

To keep himself awake, and because the shift stretched in front of him like a second corridor laid end-to-end with the first, he had decided to play a game. It was one he had invented some weeks earlier and refined during idle stretches since: each time his overlays flagged something for his attention – a smear, spill, loose hair – he had to guess, before an overlay informed him, which passenger had left it. He was allowed one guess. He was permitted to consult the height of the mark, and the angle of approach. Over the past few weeks his success rate had climbed close to 70 percent, and he had begun to take a modest private pleasure in his sensing a passenger whom he had never spoken to purely by way of minor, and quite abstract, traces.

At the second compartment he stopped. A smear of skin oil at shoulder height on the panelling, ringed by a contrasting halo whose aggressive, artificial magnification stung him, this morning, at the back of his skull. Height: tall. Oil: heavy, produced by a man who had not quite washed his hair enough. Angle: a careless lean, not a brace. The diplomat from the Ulaanbaatar legation, Compartment 2, boarded at Xi’an. Fu Kenan checked his overlays, which confirmed the detective work, and he felt – in spite of the baijiu, in spite of the ringing – a private victory which was his alone and could be claimed in no report.

Just then the diplomat himself emerged from Compartment 2 in a fresh shirt, walked past Fu Kenan, whose presence he did not register, and proceeded in the direction of the dining car. The pleasure of having correctly identified the diplomat drained out of Fu Kenan as quickly as it had arrived, leaving behind the smear itself, and the necessity of removing it, the subharmonic hum of the panelling, and the dryness in his mouth. He wiped the panelling in two quick passes. The contrasting halo faded. The corridor resumed its ceremonial finish. He moved on.

By the middle of the shift, in the long stretch between Almaty and the next gauge change, the game had become unplayable. A compliance officer in Compartment 9 had spilled tea on the carpet outside her berth – not much, perhaps a teaspoon – and returned inside without mentioning it. In her perception, the spill had been absorbed into the carpet’s pattern within seconds. In Fu Kenan’s, compounded now by the overlay’s overbearing contrast correction and the pulse behind his eyes which that correction was making worse, it was a dark continent the size of a dinner plate, edged with a phosphorescent halo that he could see from the far end of the car. He walked towards it with his eyes half-closed against the throbbing. He should have been guessing – the game required him to have committed to a name before his overlays provided one – but when he tried to apply himself to the angle of the splash, his head produced only a flat dull pressure and nothing resembling a hypothesis. By the time he reached the stain he had not guessed.

As he knelt on the carpet, the stain was throbbing in his vision at a frequency just below the threshold at which the depot’s medical literature would classify an optical stimulus as capable of inducing seizures. He could feel his own pulse, in his temples, meeting the Zoo’s pulse, alerting him to the stain, in an asynchronous collision. The tea had soaked into the weave more deeply than he expected, and the solvent took its time. He worked one-handed, his other hand flat on the carpet for balance, because he was not entirely sure this morning that his balance was available to him.

While he scrubbed, the Portuguese nun from Compartment 7 emerged from her compartment, walked past him, and stepped directly onto the stain – in her perception, an unmarked stretch of ordinary carpet – and then proceeded towards the dining car with the small gracious nod she always gave him. She was the only passenger in Car 16 who had ever acknowledged his existence. She had left a clean shoeprint across the wet area he had been trying to dry. His overlays, with no delay, rendered the shoeprint in the same throbbing phosphorescence as the original stain, ringed it with a fresh halo, and added a contrast marker to indicate that the affected area had now expanded.

He sat back on his heels in the corridor and lingered on his failure to keep up. The solvent was drying unevenly. His head was ringing. He thought, for a long, calm moment, about a tube whose cleanliness was, to everyone aboard except him, simply a reality they took for granted. Then he thought about the baijiu.

He stood up and returned to his station at the end of the car, set down his cloth and solvent, folded his hands behind his back in the prescribed posture, and looked down the corridor at the vanishing point where the row of compartment doors met. The corridor was, by every official measure, immaculate. His overlays reported nothing outstanding. The faint green digital strip above the vestibule door indicated that the train had covered another 46 kilometres while he had been on his knees. A secondary line, smaller, in the institutional grey reserved for zone transitions, read: ZOOTHESIA OPERATIONAL ZONE / NF PROTOCOL AUTHORITY / ENTRY 04:17. He had been on his knees for 23 minutes.

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In his spare time he had been reading a children’s adventure novel that one of the Xi’an dining car attendants had pressed on him during the last layover – a worn Mandarin paperback about a foundling boy named Harin who lived among a pack of dholes in some imaginary jungle of the south, and his quarrels with a council of older animals whose names Fu Kenan had been having difficulty keeping straight. There was Tilkar the hornbill, who carried news between hill and river. There was the old gharial Mahuda, who slept on the silt banks and was said to remember the river as it had been before the river had a name. There was the clouded leopard Vinjari, who hunted by night and was the boy’s principal enemy, and a slow patient pangolin called Kotri whose advice the boy took only when it was already too late. He had read four chapters and had retained almost none of it. Standing now at his station, he tried, as a private exercise, to fix the five names in the order in which they had been introduced. Without quite knowing why he was doing it, he began to place them at points along the carriage in front of him: Tilkar on the lintel of the first compartment, Mahuda half-buried in the seam where the carpet met the second, Vinjari crouched in the shadow of the linen cupboard, the boy Harin at the centre of the corridor with one hand raised, Kotri rolled into a small armoured ball on the threshold of the vestibule. Within a minute he could recall the names in order. Within two, he could see them, as clearly as he saw the panelling and the carpet, occupying their assigned positions in the geometry of the car. He had not arranged things spatially in his mind like this since he was a child.

The technique was not his own. His grandmother had taught it to him when he was nine years old, on summer visits to her small apartment on the outskirts of Lanzhou, sitting at her kitchen table with a pot of tea cooling between them while she drilled him on lists of things he was required to remember – the names of his cousins, the order of the dynasties, the 24 solar terms of the agricultural calendar. She had learned the method herself, she told him once and only once, during the years she spent as a young woman at the camp in Qinghai, where she had been sent for reasons she never fully explained. In the camp there had been no books and no paper, and the women in her barracks had passed the long winter nights teaching one another to remember things by placing them, in the form of pictures, around the insides of imagined rooms. A room could be a childhood schoolhouse, a temple one had once visited, the house of a grandmother one had loved. The pictures were to be vivid, she told him, so vivid that they frightened you a little, because vivid pictures stayed in the mind and pale ones did not. She had survived the camp, she said, by walking every night through a house she had built from memory, in which every room contained a different image, and each image was the face of someone she intended to come home to.

Fu Kenan had practiced the method all through his childhood without ever having a name for it, and had largely forgotten it in the years of his adolescence and his posting to the UET-1. He thought of none of this on the night he placed Harin and his dhole council at the vanishing point of Car 16. The exercise was idle and trivial. He recalled the names; he placed them; he saw them. Then his shift ended and he went back to his bunk in the staff car and slept the dreamless sleep of an attendant who had walked too many kilometres that day.

The next morning, walking with his cloth and solvent bottle, he stopped at the second compartment.

The lintel above its door was no longer there.

It had been there the day before. It was apparently still there for everyone else: a passenger emerging from Compartment 2 reached up to brace himself against it, the way passengers in transit had always braced themselves against it, and the Zoo dutifully provided his hand with a surface to meet. For Fu Kenan, looking directly at the same point, there was a smear of unresolved air where the lintel should have been. He could see the man’s hand resting on nothing. He blinked. He moved closer. He passed his own hand through the place where the lintel had been and felt it bump against an unseen edge. The Zoo’s overlays, having decided the lintel was no longer safe for him to perceive, had withdrawn it from his vision while leaving it materially in place for the convenience of all parties. Why would the lintel not be safe for the Zoo overlays? They usually only screened items that were perceived as dangerous to the viewer.

He stood in the corridor for a long minute, his cloth in his hand, and worked it out. He had read the Zoo protocol leaflets at the Kowloon depot. He could remember some of the language. The classifier – the perceptual guarantor, the manuals had called it – maintained, at the scale of ordinary vision, a parser that decided what a given observer could safely be allowed to see. Objects which carried too many contradictory readings overloaded the parser’s small window of compute, and the system, rather than spend further cycles, resolved the ambiguity by the simplest available means. It erased them. He had known this in the way he knew the names of his colleagues’ extensions. He had not known that a hornbill called Tilkar, placed on a lintel by a junior attendant trying to remember a children’s book, could be dense enough to trip the same threshold as a faceted body or a painted corpse.

He went to the linen cupboard and opened it to be sure. The cupboard was where he had placed Mahuda the gharial, half-buried in the seam between the carpet and the wall. The handle of the cupboard was no longer visible to him. He opened it by feel, took out a fresh cloth, and closed it again. He returned to Compartment 2 and looked once more at the absent lintel. Then he returned to his station, folded his hands behind his back in the correct posture, and considered, for the first time in his life as a lucid adult proposition, rather than a child’s exercise, that the simplest way to clean Car 16 might be to stop seeing it.

He spent the next rotation testing the hypothesis.

Using his grandmother’s technique, he installed Supervisor Wei face-down along the full length of the ceiling – a complete figure, 18 metres from crown to sole, rendered as the overlay would have shown him if it had ever turned its maintenance layer on a human being, every pore tracked and magnified, his staff badge number growing out of his chest in the same faint green characters as the digital strip above the vestibule, so that walking the length of Car 16 now meant walking beneath the body of his line manager at the Kowloon depot. On each of the 14 compartment doors he installed a face at full maintenance calibration – blemishes ringed with the same phosphorescent halo the overlay used to flag spilled tea. One face per door, each drawn from a different colleague at the depot whose name he had been required to memorise and whose features he had never been able to tell apart. In the windows, layered over the Zoo’s invented foothills and imagined rivers, he installed the Commercial Director half-erased – the left side of his face resolved, the right dissolving into thin air. And in the centre of the corridor, at its widest point, where passengers would pass twice a day without seeing, he installed his grandmother at her full height, unretouched – the bad hip, lines around her mouth, no overlay correcting or smoothing. Simply her, standing in the middle of the thoroughfare as though she had been waiting there since Lanzhou. This was the most difficult image to hold in place, because the Zoo kept trying to help.

By the end of the rotation each of these loci had vanished from his perception. The brass fitting above Compartment 14 was the first to go, which gratified him in a way he did not entirely want to examine. Then the call-bell panel, which had the practical consequence that he could no longer answer call-bells by sight and had to rely on the small auditory chime that the Zoo, in a quieter and more general mercy, still provided to all attendants. Then the molding above the eastern vestibule, at which he had on a whim installed an image of his first-year supervisor being dismembered by sanitation robots. Then the brass plate beside the samovar.

The work of the shift adapted itself to these withdrawals with surprising ease. He found that a routine performed 60 times a day for seven months required almost nothing in the way of vision: his hands knew the linen cupboard, his feet knew the corridor, his shoulders knew the precise width of the vestibule doorway. A compliance officer in Compartment 5 asked him one evening to bring her a glass of water; he brought her the water without ever consciously seeing the glass, which he had charged some days earlier with an image of two saints carrying a third saint into a furnace shaped like a pelican. He set the glass down on a fold-out tray which had ceased, at some intermediate point in the same rotation, to exist for him at all. The compliance officer thanked him. The water did not spill. He returned to his station.

Standing there at the end of the corridor, with his hands correctly folded behind his back, he caught himself feeling something he had not felt in seven months on the UET-1. It was not happiness, exactly, but its earlier and more tractable form. He worked through his shifts in a state of small constant rearrangement, installing images, watching the corresponding loci darken in his field of vision, adjusting his procedures to accommodate the vanishings. The corridor, which had been the dullest space in his life, now offered him the steady minor pleasure of its own slow disappearance.

He intensified.

The method was not difficult. At each locus where an erasure had already taken hold he conjured a second image, laminated onto the first, and then a third. At the call-bell panel, he added a coupling of two inverted cardinals whose mitres flowered into ibis heads, and beneath them a child-sized automaton crucified on a crossbar of spent fluorescent tubes. On the ceiling, he stacked six further figures on top of Supervisor Wei. He worked with a concentration he had not brought to anything, including the girl in Shenzhen whose letters he had stopped answering, for years. His grandmother’s injunctions, which had seemed florid and embarrassing to him as a child at her kitchen table, began to feel merely accurate, the only register in which the thing could honestly be done.

Car 16, in response, continued to be withdrawn from him.

The service vestibules went first, both of them, replaced in his vision by short smooth sections of indeterminate carpet through which his feet still passed without obstruction. Then the corridor strip-lighting. When he installed at each tube a different transfiguration of his mother, it failed in a slow even wave and was replaced by a diffused neutral glow that came, apparently, from nowhere. The compartment doors, to which he devoted a full shift on the sixth rotation – 14 erotic martyrdoms, one for each door – relinquished first their brushed finish, then their numerals, then their outline, until the corridor appeared to be walled with a continuous low mist through which the passengers, when they emerged for tea or the lavatory, passed as though stepping out of and into pale banks of weather. Each new loss was reported to him by his overlay as the absence of any flag at all: by the standards of the maintenance system, a surface which had ceased to exist for him had also ceased to require correction. He was, by this measure, becoming the most efficient attendant the depot had ever posted to Car 16. He had no surfaces left to clean.

Fu’s grandmother had used the intolerable image to fix a thing in place – to hold the face of a sister, a doorway, a home she meant to come back to, against the slow erasures of the camp, so that she could walk back to them every night through the dark. Fu Kenan was using the same technique to unfix the thing, to charge the small flat surfaces of Car 16 with so much simultaneous meaning that the Zoo’s protocols were obliged, shift by shift, to withdraw a little more of the car from his sight, in the interest of his safety and the safety of the passengers in his care.

This recognition, when it came, did not stop him. It changed the character of the work without changing its direction. He began to think of each new image as a small private offering laid against his grandmother’s example – an inversion that was also, in some way he could not yet name, a continuation. He did no harm. He was the only person for whom Car 16 was disappearing. He returned to his station – or to the vacancy where his station had been, which his hands and feet could still navigate by sensory memory – folded his hands behind his back in the correct posture, and waited for the next round to begin.

On the second morning of the seventh rotation, the passengers began to go.

He had not installed images on the passengers. He had been careful about this, aware that the Zoo would treat the erasure of persons differently from the erasure of fittings, and unwilling to attract the kind of attention that would bring ECOROUTE auditors down the corridor with their hand terminals. But the car around them had thinned to such a degree – walls gone, ceiling and doors gone, floor reduced to the faintest suggestion of lateral motion – that the passengers had begun to float in his field of vision like figures in a poorly rendered overlay. The Zoo, perhaps in an attempt to spare him the spectacle of unsupported bodies hanging in a tube of nothing, had started quietly to subtract them also. On the second morning there were 11 in Car 16. On the third, six. By the afternoon of the third, only the Portuguese nun, who was reading her book in a posture unanchored to any visible furniture, and even she was flickering at her edges.

He stood at his station and watched her read, floating, perfectly still like an apparition of the Virgin Mary surrounded by the charged, copulating, grotesque images that Fu had carefully placed. Unable to bear the guilt of what he had done to her, Fu walked the short distance down the corridor to where she sat unsupported in her small column of air, knelt on the nothing where the carpet had been, and installed on her a single small image of her own gracious nod – the nod she had given him three months earlier as she stepped through his phosphorescent tea stain, and which he had been carrying since, as the only recorded instance of a passenger on the UET-1 having acknowledged his existence. He rendered her as a woman bowing her head over an open book, once, slowly, in the act of noticing another person. The image, as he set it against the faint outline of her, seemed to him the only one he had installed in seven months that his grandmother, sitting at her kitchen table in Lanzhou, would have recognised as her own. The nun’s flickering edges steadied. She continued to read. The Zoo, receiving the image, did what the Zoo always did with things it could not resolve, and withdrew her gently from his field of vision.

The train moved westward beneath him at a speed he could no longer verify by any visible reference. Somewhere, through nothing, he could feel the long slow curve as the line dropped down out of the Iberian uplands toward the Tagus plain.

Three days and 21 hours out of Kowloon, Fu Kenan completed his last scheduled walk of Car 16.

He began, as the procedure required, at the eastern vestibule. His white gloves were clean. His tunic was correctly buttoned. His posture, as he turned to face west down the corridor, was the posture his training had instilled. He walked the 184 paces.

The images stayed in their places as he passed them, each at its proper locus, saluting him in turn: the boy Harin at the centre of the corridor with his hand still raised, Tilkar on the lintel of the first compartment, Mahuda half-buried in the seam where the carpet met the wall, Vinjari in the shadow of the linen cupboard, Kotri rolled into his armoured ball at the threshold of the vestibule. Then the translucent woman at the call-bell panel, the cardinals with their ibis heads, Supervisor Wei in his collar of tickets, the weeping butcher, the gilded cow, the drowned astronaut, the surgeons and their eel, his grandmother in her mercury, his mother transfigured 14 times along the ceiling, the line manager dismembered by his small bright machines, his father in his bronze nails, the diplomat as a bull weeping from his arrowed eyes, the compliance officer with her erupting abacus mouth. They hung in their positions without anything to support them, a memory palace purged at last of the building it had been installed in, a continuum of pure ideation uncontaminated by the materiality of brushed aluminum and endless interior space in which it resided. Somewhere, through nothing, he could feel the long slow curve as the line dropped down out of the Iberian uplands toward the Tagus plain.

At the western vestibule he stopped, as the procedure required, and placed his right hand on the door handle which was no longer visible to him. He waited for the small green light above the frame, also no longer visible, to indicate that the adjoining car had been pressurised for transit. He could feel the handle cool against his palm. He was still standing there when he saw the first one.

A person, standing in the corridor of nothing, in the bare unmediated space that Car 16 had become. Not an image he had installed, or the boy Harin. A young man of perhaps 18, in a quilted jacket, worn at the elbows, canvas bag slung across one shoulder. He was standing very still as if he had been playing hide-and-seek, and had just been found. Fu Kenan did not move either. He tried to make a sound but nothing came out. The young man’s jacket was marked, along the hem, the collar, in the lining where it had come unstitched at the cuff, with small dense symbols in a dark ink: a triangle of three dots, lines like water, circles that did not quite close. The same marks covered the back of his hand. They covered the canvas of his bag. The classifier, meeting that density of irresolvable notation on a single body, had likely erased him.

Fu Kenan, turning slowly, counted two more: a woman sitting cross-legged on the floor of the invisible corridor with a child asleep against her side, the child’s forearms marked with the same small symbols. They seemed to be distributed through the length of Car 16 with the practiced ease of people who knew the car’s physical geometry without needing to see it. Fu had seen the symbols before, in a newsclip about a police officer named Murkin, who had found similar symbols in several stations in this corridor. They had found a boy, who carried a book with these symbols but he had just vanished from custody one day.

He understood, then, that the Zoothesia Protocols had been hijacked. The fenestra at the base of his skull had been maintaining, with the same quiet persistence as it managed his contrast settings and flagged his spills, a particular version of Car 16: the one from which these people had been removed before his shift began. The Zoo had been showing him a car from which certain persons had been declared, at the protocol level, too ambiguous to render. And now, with the classifier saturated beyond recovery, the memory palace packed to its last locus, the write function too exhausted to sustain both the suppression layer and the maintenance alerts, the suppression had failed. The images he had spent seven rotations installing had consumed every cycle the fenestra had available. There was nothing left to hold the erasure in place.

The young man had not moved. Fu Kenan looked at him for a long moment. His white gloves were clean. His tunic was correctly buttoned. He refolded his hands behind his back in the prescribed posture and looked west down the corridor, the direction the train was travelling. He did not raise the alarm.

Somewhere ahead of him, far along the line, the train was pulling into Moscow, beyond the ZOOTHESIA OPERATIONAL ZONE / NF PROTOCOL AUTHORITY. Fu Kenan stood at the door between cars and waited, smiling very faintly. The cloaked riders will know where to go when the zone ends, he thought. He will follow them.

Read previous episodes in this series here and here. ’s Zoothesia series begins here.

At the moment, given that PI is just a shoestring operation working with a small launch budget from the Ethereum Foundation to get us off the ground, with mostly part-time and volunteer effort, the grand titles Timber and I have given ourselves are a case of all hat, no cattle, as they say in Texas.

As I understand from the orientation package from the Secret Guild of Institutional Directors that Timber and I received, both of us have the the same, simple job description:

Bring in money from rich but busy individuals and organizations and give it to people and groups with interesting ideas, time, and energy to do things to benefit the glorious planetary process of protocolization.

To the extent we can do that, as Director of Research, I get to make grand, philosophical pronouncements and doctrinal assertions about Life, the Universe, and Everything, in direct proportion to the amount of money we bring in.

Specifically, the Guild orientation package tells me, I’m allowed to produce one fortune cookie pronouncement per million dollars we bring in. And since this institute, in its previous guise as the Summer of Protocols program, deployed about three million dollars over three years, I get to make three fortune-cookie pronouncements.

Here’s my first one: The task of our times is to invent New Nature.

I introduced the idea of New Nature in two posts earlier in the year, and I got the idea for this fortune cookie formulation from the title of Andrea Wulf’s illuminating biography of Alexander von Humboldt, Inventing Nature, which everyone should read. The big argument of the book, pretty persuasively made, is that in the early 1800s, Humboldt almost single-handedly invented Nature as we understand it today.

In the next decade, we hope similarly to invent a New Nature at the Protocol Institute.

In my previous posts, I defined New Nature as:

New Nature is regimes of reality governed by technologically mediated laws that are nearly as inviolable, immutable, and persistent as those of nature.

I’ll elaborate on how this is going to shape PI’s research mission in a bit.

Since I am only allowed to make two more such pronouncements before the hat-to-cattle ratio becomes untenable, I am going to need some help. So I’m going to be doing my research-directing in public.

Research Directing in Public

For my piece of the PI puzzle, I want to kick off a new working-in-public series devoted to figuring out our research mission, and how it fits in with the other parts of the larger vision (the practice/application of protocols, protocol education, scene-making, this magazine).

And I do mean working in public in the fullest sense that SoP alum wrote about in her 2020 book of that name: Sharing messy, unfinished, work-in-progress artifacts as we go, in the hope that we find and connect with aligned people and institutions that can influence us, and be influenced by us, in mutually beneficial ways. Ideally, some of those people and institutions will bring money to this party. We do not want to end up part of a LinkedIn for big-hat-no-cattle institutions.

What is the Protocol Institute about, you ask? Well, here is a WIP artifact for you:

Those are some key flipchart sheets from the 3-day strategy retreat Timber, (who will chair our advisory board), and I had in April, to figure out what the hell we’re going to be doing and how we’re going to pay for it. I’ve put then up on my home office wall because we still haven’t figured it out, and I need to keep staring at it until we do.

You should actually be able to read those if you zoom in, but just to spare you the pain of actually processing someone else’s WIP mess, here is a slightly cleaned up version of the key framing constructs we came up with, redrawn somewhat more neatly on my whiteboard.

In research-directing, neatness counts.

There are three pieces here: the 2×2 on the left, the pipeline drawing in the middle, and the map-thingie on the right. Let’s take them in order.

The Direct-to-Oblique 2×2

Early in the first session of the strategy retreat, we had a breakthrough moment with the 2×2, which crosses tech progress on the x-axis with human flourishing on the y-axis, with both axes going from Direct to Oblique.

Here we mean direct as in on-the-nose and explicit, and oblique in the sense of John Kay’s wonderful little book on strategy, Obliquity (itself based on a seminal 1959 paper about effective patterns of driving change, The Science of Muddling Through by Art Lindblom).

Protocol Institute is going to plant its flag in the top-left quadrant: direct engagement with tech progress, and oblique engagement with human flourishing. For completeness, here’s how we mapped out the landscape:

• Direct human, direct tech: Anything that’s shaped like “startups” or “products” making direct use of technology to try and directly benefit humanity, at least in some solipsistic sense, even if others don’t agree you’re benefitting anyone, and suspect you’re in fact hurting everyone. It doesn’t have to be a literal startup making literal products, but anything shaped like that belongs in this quadrant.

• Direct human, oblique tech: Most philanthropic and ideology oriented organizations fit here, since they usually have some sort of on-the-nose notion about doing good for humanity, coupled with an oblique engagement with technological progress. Typical think tanks fit here too, since they aim to directly influence and benefit human-centered entities like particular nations, transnational entities, or business sectors.

• Oblique human, oblique tech: This is the basic research quadrant, including basic scientific and mathematical research of course, but also humanities disciplines like philosophy, literature, art, and poetry, which constantly interrogate, deconstruct, and reconstruct what it means to be human in fundamental ways, often in ways that threaten naive humanists more than any tech advance.

• Oblique human, direct tech: This is what I’ve recently labeled (thanks to inspiration striking a couple of days ago) the context tank quadrant. Protocol Institute is a context tank. Perhaps the first ever! We’re obviously gesturing at AI here, and yes PI aims to be a deeply AI-native institute, aspiring to reduce itself to one giant markdown file. We’ll have more to say about how context tanks differ from think tanks, studios, incubators and such in a minute.

There is an implied cycle hypothesized here: Progress Change begins in the top right, and cycles around to the bottom right. Then there’s a crisis and we begin again.

Basic Research —> Context-Tanking —> “Startups” and “Products” —> Philanthropy and Think Tanks.

Institutions in each quadrant have a role to play in turning new discoveries on the frontiers into changed planetary conditions. We can and do argue endlessly about whether particular changes are good or bad, but the fact of the process of endlessly accumulating historical change is undeniable. We at PI don’t particularly want to get into endless arguments about the nature of “progress” as such, but we do want to be part of processes of historical change currently underway.

We are wary of committing to any particular notion of flourishing/thriving vs. decline/decay, but we do broadly think change beats stasis, and that protocols are a key part of the story of change.

One subtle implication of this cycle we teased out in our conversations is that the “startup”/”product” quadrant is necessarily tribalized and identitarian, as people must commit to particular notions of human welfare, and inevitably get attached to particular notions of humanness (and thence, particular notions of “progress”), as they cross over into the direct/direct quadrant. The medium is the message is the human.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Commitment to making particular newly enabled futures real requires commitment to making certain new ways of being human work out. At least for a while. But it does create a regime of intense cultural competition ideas must traverse before they can become embodied in the fabric of civilization.

This arc is in fact the arc of what we call protocolization. Conceptually, we can restate the arc as:

Discovering —> Contexting —> Building —> Distributing.

One sociological function of institutions in the context-tank quadrant, we think, is to provide new ideas and new ways of being human time to breathe and work themselves out in relative peace, before they must choose a particular form factor in which to enter the hunger-games arena of direct/direct irruption into techno-human affairs, competing for the future of the planet.

We want PI to serve as such a space. How do we do that? This brings me to the second diagram.

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Ideas in Attention Tunnels

How do you allow ideas to breathe and take shape between discovery and building phases? What exactly is “contexting”? What happens to ideas marinating (not the same as incubating) in context tanks, and where do they go from there?

That purple arrow in the 2×2 is our attempt at an answer. That’s kind of the pipeline defining PI’s planned role. You can see the details sketched out in the blue diagram at the bottom. Here’s a zoom-in:

The logic of our pipeline is:

• “Basic research” relevant to protocols and protocolization diffuses in from the top right quadrant upstream of us. By which we mean fundamental advances in cryptography, AI, epidemiology, ecology, energy, new kinds of poetry, new modes of art, new philosophies, and so on. New knowledge that doesn’t quite know how to shape reality, or relate to humans. Ideas that are stumbling around trying to enter the world.

• A new idea stews in the context tank for a bit, between the two vertical dotted lines, in pre-factored forms, as an idea discovering itself and figuring out what form factor it should assume (Startup? Protocol proposal to the W3C? Great novel? Interpretive dance? Climate action protocol? New hand-washing protocol proposal to the WHO?). Contexting is about new ideas seeking their compile targets, and the new ways of being human they might enable.

• Then it makes its way into the bottom left “startups”/”products” quadrant, having assumed some legible form. Again, I emphasize, anything in that rough shape qualifies. A painting is a product in the sense that it uses the technology of the painting medium directly, to produce a work that directly affect human welfare in some way (though people might not agree about the nature and valence of that effect of course). A group of people trying to get a city to change its zoning laws is a “startup.”

In our first three years, as a summer program, we relied on a particular vehicle for doing our contexting, the summer cohort. We got pretty good at cohorts, but slowly realized we needed a more persistent vehicle for creating a context.

Enter the Special Interest Group, or SIG, designed to contain new thinking for long enough for it to decide what kind of shape it wants to take as it makes its debut into the world at large.

The name is old. Many storied institutions have used the SIG form for their work, but we think we’ve come up with a particularly original contemporary spin on it. We have four SIGs going on at the moment:

• Memory Research Group (led by )

• SIGFPT: Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory (led by and myself)

• SIGP4B: Special Interest Group in Protocols for Business (led by )

• PFSIG: Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group (led by and )

A fifth SIG on distributed robotics is in the cunning-plans stage.

A SIG in our sense is something like a souped-up study group (roughly two-pizza sized, by that old Amazon heuristic of two-pizza teams) that has an open-ended charter to immerse itself in a theme or domain, with no particular goals, projects, or rules, and just enough resources and support to sustain itself indefinitely.

Read, think, work on your ideas in collaboration with the right set of peers, and see where the journey takes you. It is what I have started calling an attention tunnel, where scarce collective attention can do its work for a while.

Particular projects or workstreams may unfold within the context of a SIG, but the SIG itself isn’t a project or workstream. It is a manner of paying collective attention to a theme.

Nor is a SIG a heavier organizational unit like a “studio”, “lab”, or “research center.” You can’t build heavy-weight scaffolding when you’re at an all-hat-no-cattle phase of evolution. No, a SIG is simply a space to think and work between the provocations emanating from the basic research quadrant, and the pressures of operating in the startup/product quadrant. It’s the calm before the storm.

The pressure stage, of course, cannot be avoided for any serious idea that hopes to change the world, but it can be deferred while the idea grows up, and gains enough strength to handle it. This is not incubation though. Incubation is about the inner logic of a thing getting worked out, while it uses up a store of resources. Incubation is about ontgeny. Contexting is about a thing getting introduced to the world it is going to live in. Contexting is how you send an idea to school so it can get a job when it graduates.

The structure of a Protocol Institute SIG is deceptively simple – it’s just a group of people who decide they have some interests in common that have a bearing on protocols and protocolization. They start meeting (typically every other week on a Discord call), talking, studying, and working together. We pay the curators small honoraria to host these SIGs and report on their activities periodically in the form of Protocolized essays. That’s it. Nobody’s going to get rich running or participating in our SIGs. What you will get is a harness engineered to let you devote steady, cumulative attention to a thing, for long enough to do something with it. SIGs are Claude Code-like environments for groups of human brains.

Near-zero infrastructure costs. No fancy buildings, no expensive equipment. Just people, ideas, some cheap/free software tools, and a modest budget for AI and crypto tokens. Individual workstreams and projects within the SIG may have additional, heavier demands, but the container doesn’t have to be complex or heavy. All it needs to do is contain collective attention over weeks, months, and years.

Our two oldest SIGs – SIGFPT and MRG – will each be one year old in a few months. Warm contexts for the right kinds of ideas to develop.

I think this is all it takes to get started doing really big things today. You don’t need fancy buildings or big budgets. You just need a small group paying steady attention.

But this mode of working is deceptively simple because a lot more illegible kinds of knowledge and cultural capital have to be in place in the environment before stable and generative attention tunnels form and begin to do interesting, original, and useful work. Otherwise, all the thousands of communities on Discord and other platforms would be doing world-changing work.

There are certain necessary conditions for SIGs to thrive and function as attention tunnels acting on important and difficult themes. We can’t say we’ve entirely figured out sufficient conditions, let alone a “formula,” but we’ve figured out quite a few best practices. We think we know how to get a small group to pay attention to a small set of ideas for long periods of time.

Which brings me to the third diagram.

Shaping New Nature

Our three years of work in the Summer of Protocols has left us with a solid corpus of ideas and capabilities, produced collectively by almost 200 people contributing research papers, small projects, art, guest talks, workshop participation, and so on. This is the legacy PI is inheriting.

This is no mean feat by the way. Three million dollars may sound like a lot to people not used to research environments, but I’ve seen a lot more money get burned up a lot faster, with nothing to show for it.

Research directing is partly about knowing how to spend money… elegantly. I don’t know that we at PI have the skills yet to deploy (say) $10m or $30m a year well, but $1–3 million, we know how to do. And maybe we’ll build our muscles and get to those larger scales.

We think of this corpus as the core asset we’re building, and in this diagram, it serves as the anchoring center mass of our self-conception. This is a lot of material – go look for yourself on the protocolized.io site. But more than mere material, it’s a socially alive corpus, that’s steadily generating new ideas and inspiring more people to do more things everyday.

This is the kernel of PI, the innermost circle and energetic core. Three years of work is close to critical mass, and this kernel is beginning to accrete knowledge to itself at an accelerating pace. I’ve labeled it “IP” in the diagram, but that’s a loose term. I don’t mean specific forms of intellectual property like papers, patents, copyrighted artworks, courses taught, books written, and such. I mean all that and more, deeply entangled with the community that is producing it.

If I might be permitted the conceit of a somewhat self-congratulatory term, the PI kernel is a scenius structured as a commons. A young and fragile one, just three years old and a few hundred people strong, but definitely a scenius.

Kinda fun that PI reverses to IP.

That’s one necessary condition for a context tank and its attention tunnels to work – a center-mass of scenius like this. Check.

Next, it is 2026. If you’re starting a new institution today and it is not fundamentally AI native in a deep and unsettling way, you have some explaining to do. If its patterns of working look familiar and comforting, you have a problem. Becoming AI native, however, is easier said than done.

Fortunately, that’s the problem SIGP4B is actively working on, so we are making our own dog-food to eat. We’ve got a SIG on the job here.

That’s one half of the shell around the kernel in the diagram (we like our computing metaphors around here).

We’re getting pretty good at AI-native operating modes. This magazine is one of the few that not only accepts AI-assisted writing, it actively encourages it, and pays for it the same as for hand-crafted human writing. Trad publications may be drowning in slop submissions, but we are figuring out how to thrive on generated content.

Everything we do is deeply, organically, reflexively AI-forward.

All our artwork is AI-generated – but in a boundary-pushing way using the TITLES platform we’ve written about before. Neither Timber nor I code, and the two new websites of PI, protocol-institute.org and protocolized.io, were entirely vibe-coded (and will continue to be). We have plans to digest our sprawling corpus into embeddings, and turn it into an agentic oracle. And it will be a small project that will cost a few hundred dollars in tokens rather than a ponderous enterprise IT undertaking.

But all that is just at the level of tools. We’re also starting to think in AI-native ways. You’ll see more signs of that as our activities mature.

The other half of the shell in the diagram is decidedly more controversial. We’re not just AI-native, we’re crypto-native. That, for many people, is the worse of two strikes. But as a wise man once told me, you’re always going to piss off some people if you try to do anything of consequence, and what’s important is to piss off the right people.

This is of course, partly because of our origin-story and path dependent history as an Ethereum Foundation-funded project. But it’s also a central intellectual and philosophical commitment underlying everything we do. The discovery of public-key cryptography (PKC), which is now integral to every aspect of computing (including AI), was perhaps the genesis event of what we’re calling New Nature.

It has been obvious for a few years that AI and crypto are in some sense natural duals, and it is a rather delightful technical-lexical coincidence (or is it?) that both are ecologies based on tokens of different sorts. But actually working out the nature of that duality, and the natural shape of how the two ought to relate to each other technologically and mathematically, is far from clear. And building an organization that is a native of the quicksand-like emerging convergence zone of the two is even harder.

Slowly, but steadily, we’re figuring it out though.

More and more weird new ideas are trickling through from the basic research quadrant. Zero-knowledge machine learning, verifiably private computation, encrypted inference, oracle systems, verifiable provenance data, verifiable identities – piece by piece the elements of the duality are being uncovered in the discovery quadrant. And next door, we are paying steady attention, contexting away in our SIGs, figuring out how to put the pieces together in interesting ways.

This, by the way, is the theme of our Protocol Town Hall salon series this year, which will kick off shortly. AI × Protocols. We already have half a dozen talks lined up that should challenge your imagination, and recontextualize your thinking about the future.

Downstream of us, in the product/startup quadrant, the first fruits of this years-long convergence are already emerging. Mainstream society has only recently discovered relatively simple uses of AI and crypto in isolation – chatbots and stablecoins. But complex, converged technologies are coming. Agents paying each other with crypto. Decentralized agent ecologies taking root onchain. Secrets in enclaves shaping inferences without revealing themselves.

Normal people may never hear of such things as ERC 8004, x402, MPP, MCP, and all the other ideas floating around in the acronym soup, but they will soon start seeing the consequences of this emerging AI-crypto converged backend of planetary computation.

Here at PI, the prospect of this looming convergence (and the explosive divergence it will then spark) shapes almost everything we do. We are betting that this, in fact, is the future. And we are designing PI as an organization to run on AI+crypto rails philosophically, not just at the level of tokens. Even if we have to navigate the quicksand convergence zone to do so.

There is a praxis and a poiesis to this challenge of being simultaneously AI and crypto native.

Many have noted the emerging praxis.

• AI allows us to work radically more effectively, with radically minimized resources. Joules in, intelligent work out.

• Crypto allows us to coordinate radically more effectively, with radically minimized friction and trust. Joules in, coordination out.

But it is the poiesis that interests us more. There is a new grammar of reality emerging here. A new kind of poetry in the very bones of the planet. That’s New Nature.

Being “native” to both ecologies, we think, will make the Protocol Institute, despite its vanilla name and conventional surface appearances, a radically alien kind of institution. Of a sort that couldn’t exist as recently as six months ago. And figuring out how to be native to these two ecologies, which are both full of all the risks of frontier ecologies, is an existential imperative for us.

That’s the second necessary condition in the diagram. AI+crypto native institution building.

Check.

And finally, there’s the third and hardest necessary condition: Plugging into the real world. Education. Scene-making. Consulting. Banal words that are forced to do a lot of practical work. But we’ve accumulated a wealth of substance behind each.

• Scene-making: We’ve held a dozen workshops around the world, attended by hundreds of people, and learned how to get people “protocol-pilled” reliably. We’ve memed a new genre of fiction into existence over the last year.

• Education: There are now protocol studies courses at a dozen universities around the world, as a direct result of our work, and dozens of graduates of our own hugely successful first Protocol School last year. The protocol-literate community is growing and spreading.

• Consulting: Building off the experience of half-a-dozen experimental projects aimed at influencing real-world protocol domains in 2024, we’re now incubating several consulting projects, and a growing capability in our SIGP4B group. Want help for your organization to navigate New Nature? Call us.

• Monuments: This one is aspirational, and partly the result of taking as a challenge the title of the research essay we published by in 2023, Protocols Don’t Build Pyramids. We aim to lend some visible public charisma to the invisible protocol infrastructures that run the planet.

Each of these activities, taken in isolation, feels like part of the ordinary pragmatics of running any such program or institute. But if you step back, and contemplate them in the context of the hows and whys of the activities, a more profound pattern emerges – this is how you shape New Nature, by actually constituting it from the inside out, by creating strange new institutional species that survive and thrive by strange new rules. You discover New Nature by inventing it, by being it.

Big hat, no cattle?

Perhaps. But at least it’s a strange new hat.

If you’d like to help us make all this happen, get in touch. We’re just getting started here.