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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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!

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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

  ---

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.

Subscribe now

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.

---

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Dear Mom,

I have no idea if this letter will reach you. I hope that if it does, it finds you healthy, and if not healthy, then at least upright, and if not upright, then at least on the better of the two couches.

I know our departure was abrupt. I also know that “abrupt” is generous and that a more honest way of saying it would be “in the middle of the night with the back door still open.” I’m sorry. I’ll tell you what I can.

You know Kilgaren was hard on us. What I kept from you is just how hard. You’ve seen Clay in his dark moods. What you don’t know is that he had basically stopped coming home, and when he did it was to stand in the kitchen and stare at a broken cabinet hinge until I asked him to please either fix it or go back out. A man can only look at a hinge for so long before the hinge starts looking back.

And the twins. Mom, I was counting the weeks. The minute Booger and Sugar hit puberty, Kilgaren was going to lock them up or put them in the ground, and there was an even-money bet on which it would be. And poor Dee Dee. Since the day we took him in, I was waiting for that town to beat the softness out of him. A grown man his size who leaves his own supper out for the squirrels is going to attract attention in a town where feeding the squirrels is considered an insult. To the squirrels.

So when Clay saw the flyer for the meeting at the inn and said we should go, I didn’t ask what it was about. He had volunteered an opinion for the first time in two years and I would have followed him into a collapsing mine if it brought him out of his trance.

The meeting wasn’t what I’d feared. I’ve been to enough of these things – between Lori running off with the white-toothed man and Aunt Bess’s brief involvement with the Brethren of the Open Hand – to recognize the warning signs. You learn to look for the fixed smile, the hand on your shoulder that stays a beat too long, the man who introduces himself only by his first name and seems proud of this. The Concord people didn’t do any of that. They had normal smiles. They made good, not aggressive, eye contact. They had, I want to stress, teeth of varying quality. They were the most reassuring teeth I had seen in that kind of recruitment setting. They called themselves Stewards, which I noted as the kind of word people use when they want you to feel provided for rather than ruled.

They said they had built a place where nobody had to be afraid of their neighbors. That was enough for me. I’ve been afraid of the neighbors since I was four. I didn’t need the rest of the pitch.

I’m sorry you were the one who had to empty the apartment. They didn’t want us bringing anything. No clothes, no keepsakes, no sentimental pots. It was supposed to be a clean start, and I will tell you, Mom, that after 30 years in Kilgaren the chance to walk out of a life with nothing on your back but your own skin is not a sacrifice. I did worry they wouldn’t have clothes to fit Dee Dee, but they took one look at him, sewed him a linen tunic in an afternoon, and he has not looked better since his christening, which as you know was the last time any garment he wore was made for him.

The boat took three weeks.

The whole way they held classes, Mom. Not school classes. Classes on how to be. How to greet a neighbor. How to disagree without raising your voice. How to enter a room. An entire class on entering a room. 90 minutes. I have been entering rooms my whole life and never realized the depth of my ignorance. Clay muttered that in a place where everybody knows the manners, you can easily tell who the strangers are, which was the kind of observation he makes approximately once every 18 months and which I have learned to write down.

Still, I liked the classes. All those years in Kilgaren and I never did anything right, and it turns out this was because nobody ever told me what right was. They just hit me when I got it wrong and let me work backwards from there.

The captain is a man named Hosmer. He certainly has a weathered face. He sat with Dee Dee for a full hour and told him about how the Concord grows flax and makes linen the old way, and how the outside world had taken some interest in their linen, and now the work pays for itself. He didn’t talk down to him. He didn’t rush. Dee Dee looked at him the way Dee Dee looks at anyone who sees him as a man and not a logistics problem. Like he loved him a little already.

In the third week something strange happened. I am going to tell you about it because I promised I would tell you everything. It was fine, and I am fine, though I have started to wonder if fine is what I actually am.

They brought us into a quiet room and gave us a tea. It tasted like licorice and also like mold, which is an unusual combination which I would not have chosen. But then I would say the same about any tea I have ever been offered at a formal event. I drank it. It made me shiver and then it made my head loose in a way I had not felt since the summer Lori and I found the bottle under Aunt Bess’s sink and drank half of it thinking it was peach liqueur. Then the Concord people asked me questions, gently. And I cried. And I told them things I do not like to think about in the dark, and a few I hadn’t thought about at all, which was a surprise, because I hadn’t known they were in there. They called it a welcome initiation. They said everyone in the community does it. They said it helps them see where each person belongs.

Clay drank his too, but when he came back to the cabin his jaw was set in a particular way that I have learned, over 17 years of marriage, is the way his jaw sets when he has been outmaneuvered and is needing to think about things for a month.

Mom, I know how that sounds. I know. But when I woke up the next morning, I felt less angry and more sad, and I will tell you, less angry is a trade I would make with most devils and a few of the saints.

We are settled since a few days now. Tell everyone back home, tell them in the tone that will annoy them most, that this is a good and solid place. The streets curve gently so you never feel the weight of the whole town pressing down on you at once. The flax fields at the edge of the village are a thick green, planted in wide arcs. The crews don’t drag their feet. There is no clanging metal, no sudden noises. People don’t shout, because they don’t have to wrestle with the job. The tools fit their hands. The wagons fit the bodies of the people pulling them. Nobody complains, because the work fits. It sounds creepy when you write it in a line like that. Living here, it just feels like the people aren’t bracing for the next bad thing.

They put us in a little house where none of the floorboards creak and the door handles turn without jiggling, and I cannot tell you how disorienting it is to live in a house that doesn’t ask anything of you. In Kilgaren our apartment had so many complaints it brought to me daily. This house has none. It is the quietest roommate I have ever had. The walls seem to eat loud noises before they can give you a headache. Every day there is a vase of fresh flowers on the stoop, and the pantry is empty because we eat every meal in a beautiful dining hall. I don’t even have to cook. A normal person would have wept with gratitude. I keep opening the pantry to look at the nothing.

But.

In Kilgaren, you knew you were alive because something was rubbing you raw. You knew a neighbor by what they complained about. Here, nothing pushes back. After a lifetime of bracing for a blow, standing in a place where nobody even makes a fist makes me feel invisible. I keep looking for the catch, and every time I think I’ve found one it turns out to be a feature. They thought of it first. Whoever built this place sat down at some point and said, “what would drive a woman from Kilgaren up the wall,” and then they addressed each item on the list and laid a soft drape over it.

The twins are going feral in a new way. Booger is complaining that his bed is built into the wall instead of being something he can drag around. Sugar is kicking the baseboards trying to find a seam in a room that doesn’t have any. Clay is grouching about the food, which is objectively excellent, and that’s his problem. These are the sounds of our past invading our present, and I am grateful for every one of them.

Dee Dee is doing well. As I write this he is sitting in an alcove where the light comes in warm from two different windows, and he has the exact expression on his face of a cat that has located the one perfect spot in the house.

As for me, Mom, for the first time in my life when I go to bed I don’t double check the locks. I don’t even single check them.

I don’t know how to plant my feet in this kind of dirt yet. But it’s good dirt. I think.

Take care, Cathy

Subscribe now

Second Letter

Dear Mom,

Four weeks now since we stepped off the boat. I have been sitting with a blank page not knowing how to describe our work life here without making it sound like a lie or a sermon.

Last week we each received a heavy paper envelope. The Concord had been thinking about us for a month. Let me say that again, because it hit me sideways the first time. They had been thinking about us. Not in the way Kilgaren thought about you, which was a kind of suspicious inventory. Actually thinking. Four weeks of adult consideration, applied to each of us individually, by people whose full-time job is to do exactly that.

I have never been thought about for so long in my life. I have been thought about for five minutes at most, on my wedding day, and that hardly counts.

Inside the envelopes were the results of the foul-tasting tea party.

For Clay they didn’t put him in the fields like he expected. They had watched him. They saw the way his mind works, how he cannot look at a horse or a wagon or a field of flax without wanting to get underneath it and see if he can do something about it. So they made him an associate of the toolmakers. His job is to look at their tools, which are already the best tools I have ever seen, and make them better. I do not know what they are going to do when Clay runs out of tools to improve, because Clay is going to run out of tools to improve and then he is going to start looking at them. But that’s a problem for another time.

I was sure Booger and Sugar’s talent for breaking things would get us exiled, but the Concord just redirected it. They put the boys down at the retting pools to beat flax stalks with mallets for eight hours a day. They have harnessed my sons’ wickedness and pointed it at a field. My boys come home smelling like swamp water with a kind of calm I have never seen on their faces, which must come from having hit something they were allowed to hit.

The biggest surprise was Dee Dee. It would have made obvious sense to have a man his size hauling water vats. Or lumber. Or, I don’t know, holding up the sky if it came to that. Or, I wouldn’t have blinked, caring for the animals, since animals love him and have since he was a boy.

But no. They put him in the sewing shop. They looked past his shoulders and saw all the way to his patience and they put him on the needlework. The shop master is a tiny gray woman who does not rush him and who lets him sit in the back. Dee Dee says the needlework is like playing a hard game. He has been walking home at the end of each day like a man who has been useful on purpose, which is a posture I had not seen on him before, and which makes me want to go back to Kilgaren and kick everybody.

When I opened my own envelope, I felt like someone had hung my dirty underpants out in the middle of the dining hall. They didn’t give me a public job at all. The letter told me my purpose was to keep my own company in a house with no clocks and no unwanted visitors. That was the phrase. They had looked at me for a month and concluded that what I needed was to be left alone.

Mom, in Kilgaren, being left alone was the punishment. Here it is a job. They pay me in three meals and a vase of flowers to sit in a quiet room and stop flinching. I have a career in not flinching now. If you had told me at 19 that I would one day be employed as a professional non-flincher I would have wept with relief and asked where to sign.

So here we are. The boys are calm. Dee Dee is proud. Clay and I are sleeping in the same bed, which is a thing that married people do, apparently. The Concord took one look at our broken family and built us a nice little life around it.

But.

After 20 years of watching booze rot half the families in Kilgaren from the inside out, why did I wake up one morning, in this beautiful life, craving the burn of hard liquor? I didn’t want to get drunk. I didn’t want to run from anything. But sitting in a house where every angle and shadow had been designed to soothe me, I needed to consume something that had not been cultivated for my well-being. I needed, once a day, to put a thing into my body that had nothing to do with the plan.

Did I really need a secret that badly? Apparently I did. Apparently I needed a secret the way other people need sunlight.

Well, it doesn’t matter, because there is no liquor here. None. I got up the nerve to ask at the communal kitchen for a bit of wine for my digestion, and the woman behind the counter looked at me like I had asked for a bucket of lye, and then kept looking, and I realized she wasn’t confused. She did not have a category. I was asking her for something she had never been told existed. I had to say it three times before I understood that I was the first person who had ever asked her for wine and that this fact would probably be noted in a file now.

And the situation is worse than that. Clay, anticipating the problem, had smuggled a handful of barley seeds across the water in the lining of his only shirt. He thought he would grow a patch out back and brew us something for the winter. He planted them in the cracks between the pavers, three times, and three times the dirt spat them back. I watched the third attempt myself. The seeds did not rot. They did not fail to germinate. They came back up, Mom. Clean. Declining the invitation.

Clay has been better at growing things than fixing things his whole life, and this barley will not start. He has stopped sleeping. He lies out on the ground at three in the morning staring at nothing and trying to figure out what the dirt is doing. You know how he gets.

Then Ms. Linnea came. She is one of the Stewards, and her particular work is mediation. She checks in on all the families periodically, which is how she put it, and it’s her job to say sentences like that. Clay, frustrated, and forgetting that we had broken their rules, just told her. He pointed at the pavers and explained about the seeds and the three attempts, and I briefly considered whether it was possible to disappear into the weave of a rug.

Linnea did not get angry. Linnea does not, I am coming to understand, get angry. She sighed the small warm sigh of a teacher whose student has arrived at a predictable confusion, and she explained.

She called it the Consecration. They have done something to the earth here. Washed it or blessed it or bled it, she wasn’t specific, and I didn’t push, because there are some questions you only ask once. Only the Concord’s planned crops can take root. She said it the way you would say the dog is on a leash. She said they had reached a contract with the soil.

I watched Clay’s face. He had understood before she finished.

“So my seeds aren’t part of the deal, then,” he said, which was the rudest he has ever been to a woman in a bonnet, and which she accepted without blinking.

“That’s right. In order to grow things here, you must have an agreement with the soil.”

Before Clay could say anything worse, I arranged my face into the expression I know she likes. I thanked her profusely. She patted my hand. She let herself out.

Clay sat in his chair dead still and stared at the wall. I didn’t try to make him feel better. He needed his bad mood. I wasn’t going to steal it from him on top of everything else.

Mom, the soil has an agreement. The soil has a contract. Somewhere in this village there is a file on the dirt.

I will write again when I know more.

Cathy

Third Letter

Dear Mom,

Forgive the long silence. There has been too much to say and no safe way to say it. Clay is not staring at the wall anymore. I will get to why. But first, the boys.

Booger and Sugar have been coming home with grease all over their clothes, which would never happen in the fields or the vats. The Concord’s grease is a different color, if it even has grease at all, which I am starting to doubt. I let it go at first. I figured the boys needed secrets too.

Then one evening Sugar took something out of his pocket and chucked it at Booger, and it bounced off Booger’s forehead and left a red mark, and Booger screamed and lunged for Sugar’s throat in a way which honestly made me feel the most at-home I had felt since we got here. The boys wrestled on the lovely rug. Clay picked the thing up.

“A crab apple?” he said.

It was small and ugly and wrinkled, with a crooked stem, and it looked like it had had to fight its way out of the dirt, which in this village was a resume unto itself. The apples in the market here look like they were issued. You cannot ferment an issued apple. You can barely eat one without feeling you ought to have to fill out a form.

This one was different. Clay’s eyes went wide in the way that means an idea has bitten him. He grabbed the boys one collar in each hand and shook them till they told him where they got it.

It turns out my sons have found a route under the big bridge to Fortress Island. They climb along the maintenance struts underneath, Mom, which I am going to pretend I did not just write down. Fortress Island is a forgotten place the Concord has nothing to do with. The Concord people call it a “ruined society, barely functioning, choked to near death by bad governance,” which is how the Concord describes any place they do not operate. The boys say there is a guard at the toll booth on the island side, but when she sees them she pretends she doesn’t, which is the Fortress Island version of permission.

Clay cracked the apple open and held it under my nose. “The soil over there isn’t consecrated,” he said, and then he kissed me full on the mouth, which is a thing he does approximately twice a year, in response to either the birth of a child or the discovery of a loophole.

We sent the boys back over with a sack. They made runs at dusk for two weeks. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared. Fortress Island, it turns out, is full of things nobody on the Concord side cares about, including the people.

Clay set up his still in the back shed. He took a massive iron boiler the Concord uses for cleaning soil – which, I note, they will realise is missing eventually, but today is not that day – some smooth glass tubing, heavy rubber seals, and he screwed them all together. He forced pieces that were never meant to touch into a heavy, bolted argument. It hissed. It spat. It demanded to be watched every second the fire was lit. Sitting in the dark watching Clay fight with this rickety machine, Mom, he has not looked better to me since the night he proposed, which he did badly, as you’ll recall, in the rain, with that ring which turned my finger green.

Three weeks later we broke the seal. We sat on the back patio in the dark, just the five of us passing a jar. The cider was cloudy and sour and it produced a heavy, honest heat that burned a clean line straight down. I felt a familiar comfort spread over me like honey. I felt, for the first time in months, like I had a secret that was mine and not something in a file.

Dee Dee took a pull, made a face like he had swallowed a wasp, and then laughed an infectious, chest-deep laugh. I watched Clay watch him and I saw Clay’s face do the small quiet thing it does when something has worked out.

Of course Clay then wanted to go farther. It’s partly showing off. It’s also a generous reflex he has where anytime he stumbles into something good he cannot rest until other people are stumbling into it too. He is a terrible saint.

So he swiped some jars from the dining hall pantry and filled them with cider and stashed them in places where our fellow travelers, the 20 or so we came over with and had rarely seen since being scattered into our separate purposes, might find them. Wedged under the wheelwright’s bench. Behind the linen shed. Inside a milking bucket. They didn’t know who to thank. They didn’t need to. The high color in their cheeks the next morning was plenty.

While Clay works the dark, I handle the daylight. We still need things we can’t get on the Concord side: wire, real nails, anything that came out of the ground and wasn’t first given permission. So one morning Dee Dee and the twins and I loaded up the raft Clay built from a salvaged oak door with two empty barrels strapped underneath, which sounds exactly as seaworthy as it was, and we piled it with the Concord’s rejects. Vegetables that had grown a little crooked. Linen with a dropped stitch. Things the Concord had thrown out because they failed to meet the village’s standard of aesthetic harmony, which is a real phrase they use, and which made me laugh the first time I heard it because I thought it was a joke, but it was not.

We took their trash and some jars of cider and paddled the whole mess across the water.

The guard on the Fortress Island side was wedged into a grey booth with the expression of a woman who has not been surprised by anything since the spring. She glared at me the way you glare at a stray that might need to be chased off. But I had my armor ready. I pulled my shoulders back, put on my best Kilgaren smile, and slapped a stack of bright pink papers down on her ledge like they were a royal decree. She knew the papers were fake. I knew the papers were fake. The papers knew they were fake. But Mom, when you have survived with nothing for long enough, you learn to recognize when somebody else has also survived with nothing, and between two such people there is a kind of professional courtesy. Before we went home I set a jar of cider on the concrete step of her booth. She did not thank me. She did not need to.

We have been running this racket for two months. Nobody has stopped us. A Kilgaren woman with any sense would be looking over her shoulder. I can hear you saying so. But Clay is sleeping. The boys are calm. Dee Dee is proud. I am not going to turn my head.

Your daughter, Cathy

Fourth Letter

I haven’t written in months. There hasn’t been time.

I don’t even know if the Stewards actually load these letters onto the outbound boats, or if they just dump the sacks into the strait. I haven’t heard back from you. But I have to pretend you’ll read this.

There was an accident. I am writing this so you know we’re okay. Clay and the twins and I are okay.

Dee Dee is gone. He’s alive, but he had to run. Clay is out looking for him now.

A boy from the Concord fell last night. There was a party. Clay’s cider was there.

These people don’t know what to do when things go wrong.

Cathy

Fifth Letter

Dear Mom,

The gatherings had started small back in the early summer. A few travelers finding Clay’s jars behind the stalls and having a laugh. Then they multiplied. Then they spread. We started hearing about parties so far out from us we couldn’t figure out how the cider had gotten there. It wasn’t us anymore. That should have been my first warning, that the thing we had started had gotten up off the table and walked out on its own legs, but I was too pleased about it to notice.

We all began testing our freedom. We had gotten good at sneaking. So that night we felt it was time for our first real party, not a drop and a scatter, but 20 people together in a room.

People brought what they had hidden. A wheel of sharp cheese somebody had been aging in a wall. A jar of pickled fish from a traveler who would not say how she’d pickled them. A homemade guitar with one string and a great deal of personality. By ten o’clock the cute little house out by the gulch was sweating. People were singing in three different keys. Laughing from the gut. Spilling cider on the floorboards. It was loud and messy and fun, and it was the most Kilgaren thing I had felt since we stepped onto the boat, which I will tell you, Mom, made me homesick in a way I had not expected and was not ready for.

Some Stewards came. By then it wasn’t unusual to see them among us. They had started drifting into our gatherings with the sheepish curiosity of children sneaking into a grown-ups’ room. Even Mr. Pell was there, wearing a hat he had visibly pulled from a trash heap and pleased with himself beyond description. Early on we had worried they were spying. Putting together a case. But no. We were playing at being them, badly, and they were playing at being us, worse. Mr. Pell had the posture of a man who had read about slouching in a pamphlet.

That night one of the Stewards’ kids was in the middle of it. Aldred, maybe 20, who kept trying to pull everyone into a hug. He was slinging his arms around shoulders like an overgrown puppy. He didn’t know how to manage his own body weight because no one had ever told him to back off. In the Concord, nobody had ever needed to.

He drank Clay’s cider for the first time and it hit him the way a glass door hits a bird. By the third cup he tried to hug Sugar, and one thing led to another, and before long they were wrestling out back near the cliffs. They were playing. It had an unpredictable edge because Aldred had never been allowed to roughhouse before and his body had not learned where the line was between a game and a disaster. He grabbed a piece of wood and swung it around him pretending it was an axe. “Make way!” he shouted. “I’m clearing the valley! Make way!”

Sugar, always looking to keep a game alive, shouted back, “Make way! Make way!”

Laughing, Aldred pulled the wood back and started to swing right at Sugar’s head.

Dee Dee stepped in. If Clay had been right there he would have beat the kid silly. But Dee Dee does what he always does when people get heated, which is he tries to help. He caught the wood with one hand and held it. He did not hurt Aldred. He just stopped him. He pushed Sugar back with his other hand.

No one was hurt. Aldred looked surprised. Then he looked scared, the way a person looks when they realize for the first time in their life that another person is physically stronger than they are. He had never had that information before, Mom. It is information most of us learn at six.

He grabbed at the wood, trying to yank it back.

And Dee Dee, gentle, obliging Dee Dee, who does not fight for anything he can give away, just let it go.

Aldred fell back. Right over the edge of the gulch. No scream. Just the crack of brush giving way, and then the awful quiet.

I didn’t know what the Stewards would do. While everyone rushed to look after the boy, I grabbed Dee Dee by the hand and pulled him away.

“You have to get out of here,” I said.

“Where do I go?” He looked small. I do not know how a man his size looks small but he did.

“It doesn’t matter. Just get as far from here as you can.”

“When will I see you? And the twins and Clay?”

“We’ll come find you. Now go.”

I shoved him toward the tree line, and after one final look to be sure I meant it, he was gone.

Cathy

Sixth Letter

Dear Mom,

Aldred is dead. They haven’t arrested anyone. I’m told they’ve never had to arrest anyone here. They mediate.

Ms. Linnea has been at our table three times since it happened. She sits there with her soft hands and her small book, and she asks the same questions, turning them over and over, writing down what we say. She is not looking for justice. She is building a category to put this in. The Concord does not have a category yet, and until they have one, nothing can happen, because nothing can happen here without a category. It frightens me.

I used to think the Stewards were simply blind to what we brought over. Now I am not so sure. When Linnea looks at me, she does not look like a woman trying to solve a crime. She looks like a woman watching a fire and taking notes on the fire.

Back home, if a boy died like this, the wardens would have smashed every jug in the neighborhood and arrested half the men by morning. Half of them innocent. Some of them relieved to be in jail. But the Stewards have smashed nothing. The underground market is still there. The travelers are still welcome in the dining hall. The jars of cider are, as far as I know, still wedged under benches and behind sheds all over the village, and the Stewards know this, and they have not moved to stop it. They just watch.

Why.

I do not know where Dee Dee is. I have to trust that the same soft nature that made him a friend to everyone is keeping him alive in the woods. I have to believe that the woods, which are not consecrated the way the village is, will be kind to him in a way the village no longer is.

The women in the kitchen have started building a ghost story about him. They talk about Dee Dee like he was not the shy man doing needlework in the back of a shop, but a creature we smuggled over in our luggage. Footsteps heavy in the dark at the edge of the fields. A shape between the trees. I have heard two different versions already of what his eyes look like, and neither of them is right. His eyes are brown and slightly wet. They have always been slightly wet. It is one of the first things I loved about him.

I don’t correct them. I sit at their long tables and let them turn my Dee Dee into a nightmare. Because fear can be a fence, Mom. If they think he is a monster, they will leave him alone. Let them tell their tales. Let the tales grow tall enough to keep him safe.

Your daughter, Cathy

Seventh Letter

Dear Mom,

It has been three months since Aldred died. The leaves should be turning by now. I have not noticed any.

For several weeks everyone was out of sorts. You could feel the gears of the village grinding. People were bumping into each other in the fields, stopping mid-task and sitting down for no reason. I thought the whole place was going to pile up and break, and I was braced for it, because I know what a town looks like when it comes apart. I have seen Kilgaren do it twice.

But then the Stewards made some changes. They didn’t hold a memorial. They didn’t gather us in the dining hall and ask us to talk. They didn’t pass around more of the tea. They just adjusted the schedule.

All the heavy work got moved to the evening. We sleep through the harsh daylight now and come out when the sun is low and soft. The women in the kitchen have stopped baking the hard bread and started serving thick, warm stews. The supply house came around and swapped our bedding. They took the crisp sheets away and gave us thick heavy cotton that feels, Mom, I am not exaggerating, like the inside of the womb.

The whole pace of the town dropped half a step. I swear the big clock by the mill is ticking slower.

And it worked. People are absorbing the shock of an unexplained death through soft food and the dark hours instead of falling apart. It is not like back home, where a death meant screaming and broken glass and a week of getting blind drunk. Here the panic got swallowed up by the new routine. They metabolized it. They metabolized Aldred’s death through a bedding change and a different soup.

It worked so well I thought we might stay. I thought, this is a people who know what they’re doing, and I don’t have to understand how they do it. I have spent my whole life in places where nobody knew what they were doing. If I’ve ended up somewhere they do, who am I to quibble.

But Clay, needing a new project, started digging in the flax fields. For weeks he would go out in the early mornings when we were supposed to be sleeping. It was getting colder and I brought him his coat. The plants were still that thick bright green, and with Clay kneeling there with the sun rising up behind him, it looked like a painting. You would put it on a wall. You would hang it above a mantel and never notice anything was wrong.

When he saw me he dug his hands deep into the ground and pulled up a pinch of dirt. He wanted me to taste it. So I opened my mouth. I let it settle on my tongue for a moment. I spat it out onto his boots. He wiped my mouth off.

“There’s no salt,” he said. “No iron. No rot. It’s just dust.”

“How are the plants still standing?”

He shook his head. “They won’t hold up much longer.”

And that is when I understood what the heavy blankets and the warm stews and the softer hours are for. You don’t give a worker a shorter shift and a softer bed if you need them to pull a heavy harvest. You only make people that comfortable when you know there is no work left to do. The Stewards know the green is going to turn brown. They aren’t managing the town anymore. They are managing the end of it.

And the thing I cannot get out of my head, Mom, is that they are very good at it. They are so good at it that nobody in the village knows yet. They are so good at it that I almost didn’t know, and I have been looking for the catch since the day I arrived.

I think they have been managing the end of the town for a long time. Since before we got here. I think the reason they built a place so perfectly soft is that they know how this part goes.

Clay is at the kitchen table looking at the door. I am writing this letter. Neither of us has said it out loud yet, but we have both said it with our shoulders, which is how our marriage does its serious talking.

We are leaving. We are going to find Dee Dee. Then we are taking the raft. I don’t know what is waiting on the other side and I am, for the first time in nine months, not afraid to find out.

Your daughter, Cathy

Read T.R.O.(L.L.), the precursor to this series.

Over the coming years – with your help – we will explore the question of civilizational durability from a fresh lens. Which protocols allow civilization to grow and manage tensions? How have past civilizations integrated information technologies after an initial period of disruption? What role does diplomacy play in producing durability, and how does that extend to bridge-building with both natural and artificial agents?

Like in chess, it’s tempting to jump into the endgame of this initiative. There are two ways to do so, both of which should be avoided. First, by interpreting it as another attempt at predicting the arc of history and dismissing it on those grounds. Second, by making a tidy checklist for an immortal civilization, as if the question were mostly settled and only needed some packaging. Neither of those strategies would allow us to do the work needed to produce useful tools. To do that, we must play through the arduous middlegame – comprising research, to learn what has worked in the past; prototyping, to improve upon existing protocols and create new ones; and entrepreneurship, to solve distribution so that what is learned and built actually reaches the people and institutions who need it.

Below is the announcement from our parter, the Long Now Foundation, written by . It covers all three of the Labs that we’ve designed together: Book of Time, Information Revolutions and Epistemic Crises, and Interspecies Protocols.

Apply yourself, or at a minimum, send this to a colleague or friend.

Long Now Labs: Where Long-term Thinking Becomes Long-term Practice

Today we’re excited to announce a new initiative at Long Now that builds on our history of incubating new projects and ideas: Long Now Labs. It’s where long-term thinking becomes long-term practice.

Long Now Labs will build cross-disciplinary collaborations around frontier ideas, creating tools, artifacts, and frameworks that expand humanity’s capacity to navigate the unknown and preserve possibilities for future generations.

Our inaugural Lab, Series 001: Protocols for the Long Now, launches today in partnership with the Protocol Institute.

Why protocols?

Civilizations run on protocols. They shape how we keep time, how we store knowledge, and how we make decisions in relation to other species and new technologies.

Protocols are the hidden infrastructure of cooperation. While they may depend on physical or digital structures like traffic lights or software networks to operate, protocols are broader than that – they’re the underlying social rules and conventions that define how things interact. Most of them are invisible until they fail.

Processes like globalization and financialization are well understood as planetary forces reshaping how we govern ourselves. Protocolization is a process happening alongside these forces. It isn’t new. But once we recognize how protocols shape our everyday interactions, we can reshape them to better serve civilizational resilience across generations.

Pairing Long Now’s practice of long-term thinking with the Protocol Institute’s expertise in protocol design, Protocols for the Long Now investigates three aspects of civilizational durability that are being radically reshaped by frontier technologies.

Lab 001.1 Book of Time

This Long Now Lab invites you to submit a concept for a new way of marking, experiencing, or making sense of time.

Our models of time dictate how we live. Many early civilizations experienced time as cyclical, mythic, and sacred. Before reliable pendulum clocks were invented, people told time by measuring the position of the sun in the sky. Clock time moved us away from this planetary connection, abstracting time into discrete, measurable units.

In 01999, Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand wrote, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.” Today that feels truer than ever as social media algorithms, digital notifications, news feeds, financial transactions, and agentic workflows slice our days into ever more urgent microseconds.

How we think about time is changing at all levels. Technological advancement is both accelerating our relationship to time, while, in some cases, producing new conceptions of time. For example, blood tests that tell you your biological age, or the Internet Archive, which creates a timestamp of the entire Internet at regular intervals.

In this accelerating era, we are seeking novel prototypes for time – alternative tempos that might help humanity re-orient our thinking, behavior, and decision-making for the long term. Imagine not just new clocks, but new time standards, measuring frameworks, or other experiments that provide a different way of relating to the past, the future, and the present pace layers of civilization.

Open call until June 5 – apply now!

APPLY FOR BOOK OF TIME

Lab 001.2 Epistemic Cycles

This Long Now Lab seeks an individual or team to investigate historical epistemic cycles – patterns of technological disruption that result in the breakdown of a society’s shared ability to discern truth.

Like oil, gold, topsoil and silicon, information is one of civilization’s raw materials. Protocols used by states and citizenries to process information are a critical aspect of their collective longevity. The ways people argue determine how robust a peace they can sustain. Negotiations between nations and nature must be structured to be truth-seeking, rather than purely affirming of humanity’s special place in the world.

Our relationship with raw information is also transforming. The last quarter century has precipitated a flood of technologies, from social media to smartphones to LLMs, that have washed out the old paths by which we used to form common knowledge. We are deeply curious about other times in history where these crises of our epistemic commons have occurred and what we can learn from responses to those crises in order to create mechanisms for shared sensemaking.

By analyzing analogous historical ruptures (from papyrus to the printing press, from medieval court rituals to social media), this Lab aims to provide insight for navigating the current epistemic crisis brought on by synthetic intelligence and generative media content.

Like economic bubbles, epistemic cycles of disruption and crisis are recurring. This Lab aims to look deeply into the long now to see how earlier civilizations dealt with similar crises to find repeatable patterns for hardening our own epistemic commons.

This Lab seeks an interdisciplinary individual or team who will analyze historical information technologies that disrupted common knowledge production and sense-making to provide deep contextualization for our current challenges.

Open call until June 5 – apply now!

APPLY FOR EPISTEMIC CYCLES

Lab 001.3 Interspecies Protocols

This Long Now Lab explores the protocols needed to support interspecies ecologies – the interactions between humans, nature, and synthetic intelligences.

Whales have a phonetic alphabet. Rivers hold legal rights. AI agents negotiate on behalf of humans they’ve never met. Synthetic biology blurs the lines between species. These signal a profound shift: the assumption that humans sit at the center of things is dissolving, bringing a set of questions we can no longer defer. How do we communicate with, govern alongside, and share decision-making power with other species on earth? This Long Now Lab explores the protocols needed to support the interspecies ecologies of the future.

Our new tools can be engines of collective intelligence or lead to institutional decay – the challenge ahead is to create shared protocols for preserving human capabilities while honoring and respecting the capabilities of the more-than-human world. This new planetary sapience is demonstrating mutual dependence between us and our planet’s ecologies — helping us conceptually move from managing the world as a resource to stewarding it for mutual flourishing.

Getting there will require new orientations to language, data collection, legal definitions of personhood and rights, and agreements on what constitutes knowledge or consent across species boundaries.

This Lab will take the form of a course launching in early 02027. Please be in touch with ideas or suggestions for guest faculty and curriculum partners at labs@longnow.org.

To learn more about this initiative, visit longnow.com/labs.

The mission of this institute is to advance the theory and practice of protocol design, analysis, and stewardship across domains, as well as promote protocol literacy, appreciation and cultural salience globally. In other words, our mission is to build the field and community capable of stewarding the ongoing planetary processes of protocolization – the slow, largely invisible means by which human behaviors become standardized into the coordinating infrastructure of civilization.

The Protocol Institute inherits the work of its predecessor, the Summer of Protocols (SoP) program, which ran from 2023 to 2025. The Ethereum Foundation initiated SoP with a bold thesis: deepened understanding of protocols generally would enable better governance of the core Ethereum protocol specifically. As a seasonal grants program, SoP was designed to:

• Bootstrap a new field of study around protocols

• Establish protocols as a first-class concept for thinking about and acting in the world

• Seed a scene and improve literacy around protocols

The program not only succeeded in these objectives, it went beyond them, sparking a rich discourse spanning many domains, such as robotics, climate, government, natural resources, insurance, programmable cryptography, economics, urban planning, health, gaming, encryption, wildfire management and more. Through its successes, both planned and unplanned, SoP has created the need for a suitable vehicle to sustain long-term activities building on what has already been accomplished.

The Protocol Institute is that vehicle.

I () will serve as the Managing Director of the Protocol Institute and Editor-in-Chief of Protocolized, supported by as Director of Research and as Chair of the Advisory Board. We are excited to work with anyone who wants to help, and encourage you to reach out by email.

The complete SoP archive has been merged with the living library of Protocolized, and is available at protocolized.io – the new home for Protocolized, which we will continue to distribute on Substack.

In this vision essay, we describe the work we are taking on, the evolving investment philosophies and strategies guiding the work, and the operating models we are employing. This is a daunting institutional and cultural challenge. We have made great progress in the last three years, but we now need all the support we can get to pursue this more ambitious, long-term mission. Throughout this essay, and on the Protocol Institute website, we share various ways you can join and support us.

Subscribe now

Protocolization Stewardship

To steward a single protocol is already a hard challenge. To steward planetary-scale dynamics of protocolization is arguably an insane challenge. We are excited to take it on.

Protocols are a strange thing to work on. Effective ones fade into the background, as do the people who maintain and study them. When someone becomes literate in protocol wrangling, it’s as if they’ve bought a pair of glasses that reveal a new layer of the world around them. But as they immerse themselves in this world, by attending to and working on things that others typically don’t, they themselves become invisible in proportion to the impact their perceptiveness has.

Imagine you walk into a hospital. All around you are hard-to-see orchestration technologies that allow actors in the space to perform together: triage, handwashing norms, double- and triple-checking patient IDs, standard metrics for hormone measurement, recurring supply orders, wipe-down routines, badge-based access control, maintenance tags on fire extinguishers, designated waiting areas, randomized control trials, and dosing algorithms for anticancer drugs. Despite the fact that these technologies tend to operate below the awareness of individual participants, they nonetheless choreograph them and guide the increasingly unconscious performance of important, life-saving operations. The people who work on these protocols also operate below our awareness, continuing to provide stability, security, and uptime to important civilizational operations.

The recently invented Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a live example. In the span of a year, it has become the default connective tissue between AI assistants and the tools they use, coordinating a sprawling ecosystem of integrations without any central authority. If it keeps working, it too will steadily fade from the conscious attention of the developers and users who depend on it. MCP’s success will be quietly manifest in integrations that simply work, and in friction that never materializes. Hospitals and other coordination hotspots, like legislative assemblies, powerplants, stock markets and airports, exemplify the current state of protocolization around the planet. This is not a mandated process unfolding, but an emergent one. It is also not just a civilizing process, but one that creates new types of wilderness. Protocolization is old, profound, and accumulating. We have inherited a big legacy.

We are early to figuring out what protocolization is, but everyone should be eager to help create that knowledge. While still not widely recognized as such, protocols are high-value pieces of civilizational infrastructure. They allow us to coordinate at scale, often without a central authority: sanitation routines for hospitals, SWIFT for banking, diplomatic immunity for planetary politics, GAAP for accounting. These protocols are immensely practical, and once you pull away the curtain, you’ll find that they are never short on intrigue.

Working with protocols requires a disruptive imagination. The Bristlemouth Connector, an open standard for marine hardware interfaces, a case which program alum David Lang studied in his research, is an example of what it takes – and what’s at stake.

Protocols, including hardware standards like the Bristlemouth Connector, aren’t just paradoxical in their tendency to disappear. They are also generative as a result of being restrictive. Prior to the Bristlemouth project, the underwater robot and drone market comprised a ton of bespoke components which could not work together. By restricting the design space for connectors, the Bristlemouth team has enabled people to generate many new kinds of robots, drones and services built atop them, providing important services like ocean data collection and urban water monitoring. If the protocol is as successful as hoped, the industry could move beyond making marginal improvements in legacy technologies and into realising a whole new world of cheap and composable plug-and-play underwater devices.

The Bristlemouth team did not have a government or business playbook to follow. They practiced what Lang now refers to as disruptive standards-making. We’re launching the Protocol Institute, in part, to provide protocol entrepreneurs, like those that David Lang studied, with a community of likeminded peers and a knowledge commons to support their work.

The Bristlemouth project was named after the bristlemouth fish family, gonostomatidae, which we’ve adopted as a mascot for our work as well. Gonostomatidae is an unassuming but potent symbol for protocols. They are not only the most numerous fish in the oceans, they are also the most numerous vertebrates on Earth, with an estimated one quadrillion living specimens. Most people do not even know they exist. Even fewer will ever see one, since they inhabit the deep mesopelagic zone. But these tiny fish constitute the decentralized backbone of our oceanic ecosystems, just like the elements of the millions of protocols which constitute our technological environment.

Protocolization is transforming our world at this very moment, alongside more visible processes like AI adoption and climate change. As with past global transformations like industrialization, urbanization, globalization, and digitalization, it will radically alter the human condition. Stewarding protocolization thoughtfully is an urgent imperative because it is progressing invisibly whether we like it or not. In fact many of the world’s critical protocols, both old and emerging, are failing:

• Carbon accounting regimes have proven to be easily manipulated

• Protocol-based social media has been unable to catch up to the network effects of rent-seeking social platforms like TikTok, Facebook and X

• Diplomatic protocols have not been able to stop 21st-century wars of aggression

• While improving, the global banking system remains wildly inefficient and exclusive, when compared to what it could be re-engineered to become

• The legitimacy of some voting protocols in states around the planet has faltered, leading to wars over state capacity

Our ambition is that the Protocol Institute will shed light on and inform protocolization around the planet.

The first question I’m asking myself in my new role is what mental models I should bring to the job. I’m finding a useful starting point in the ideas of a 19th-century political economist and a 20th-century organizational theorist.

An Ode to Unbroken Windows

In July of 1850, Frédéric Bastiat published That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen. Even after living in Québec for two years I can’t read it in the original French, but a translated version is available here. Opportunity costs are well understood and priced today, but that wasn’t always the case. Bastiat explained how the broken window of a shoemaker tended to be justified because it created work for the windowmaker. While easily seen, the first-order logic is wrong. Unseen consequences dominate the arithmetic.

In fact, it is the same in the science of health, arts, and in that of morals. It often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences.

When a window is broken, the victims outnumber the beneficiary at least two to one. First, the shoemaker must purchase a new window. Second, that money flows to the accident and away from another, unseen, productive thing into which the shoemaker might potentially have directed it, like a book, medicine or shoes.

At the time of Bastiat’s writing, economics was effectively blind to the difference between these things. A repaired window was just as good as a new book. Hence why the calculus of war was (and sometimes still is) seen as unequivocally profitable. Peace, and unbroken windows, were regarded as bad for the economy. Their benefits were unseen. As the field developed, economists realized that both the seen and the unseen must be accounted for to paint a full picture.

This explains the fatally grievous condition of mankind. Ignorance surrounds its cradle: then its actions are determined by their first consequences, the only ones which, in its first stage, it can see. It is only in the long run that it learns to take account of the others. It has to learn this lesson from two very different masters – experience and foresight. Experience teaches effectually, but brutally. It makes us acquainted with all the effects of an action, by causing us to feel them; and we cannot fail to finish by knowing that fire burns, if we have burned ourselves. For this rough teacher, I should like, if possible, to substitute a more gentle one. I mean Foresight.

In the same way that a poor understanding of opportunity costs led to suboptimal economic outcomes, a poor understanding of protocolization will lead us, in the present, to short-sighted conclusions.

Protocols exhibit a similar pattern to unbroken windows. The costs of following protocol are more visible than their benefits. Institutions that govern and maintain a protocol, from traffic lights which prevent accidents to climate accords which prevent CFCs from blasting a hole in the planet’s ozone layer, struggle to prove that their worth outweighs their operating costs. A counterfactual future is always harder to see than a current expense or inconvenience.

However, over time, civilization has established many important “unbroken windows” through the process of protocolization. The eradication of smallpox. The absence of nuclear holocaust. The pandemics dodged and economic depressions avoided. The coal mines that did not catastrophically explode. The standardized drillbits that unlocked new markets. The randomized control trials that prevented dangerous drugs from entering markets. The shipping containers that formed the modular backbone of the global economy and avoided trillions in breakbulk shipping costs. The famines that never happened. The internet protocols which have enabled us to do things whose costs were once so prohibitive that they were not done at all.

Those hard-to-see things likely compose a kind of value greater than that measured by GDP. It remains arduous to measure them, even if economics has developed better tools since Bastiat’s time. This is one reason why we believe protocols are systematically undervalued.

Furthermore, many of the things that protocols generate are not owned by single shopkeepers but by loose networks of actors. Functional state capacity. Robust supply chains. Inhabitable ecosystems. Public health. Charged water reservoirs. Competitive technology markets. These sometimes delicate things exceed individuals and local groups, extend beyond political borders, even beyond our lifespans. The actors responsible for maintaining and following protocol do not fit neatly into state lines. The products of protocols are highly valuable and often invisible, each defined by the absence of a class of negative events (respectively: corruption, shortages, biodiversity loss, drought, monopolization). They are what Karl Weick would call dynamic non-events; windows with varying levels of unbrokenness, depending on the health of the protocol that generates them.

When we arrive at this unexpected conclusion: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;” and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end… To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, “destruction is not profit.”

Among the most valuable civilizational outcomes are things that don’t happen. Protocols are technologies for producing these non-events.

Investing in the Production of Non-Events at Scale

Aerospace engineers don’t make safe planes. They design planes capable of producing safe flights. Anyone can make a plane that never crashes – just never let it fly.

Karl Weick, an organizational theorist whose ideas were adopted in military, healthcare, aviation and energy domains, championed the term dynamic non-event. Non-events such as safety, reliability, interoperability and quality are invisible moving targets which must be continuously produced, and only become visible when they lapse.

Protocols can be understood as infrastructural technologies for producing non-events at scale, often without a central coordinating mechanism. For that reason, we like to call protocols engineered arguments. They are not universal agreements, but rather mostly predefined sets of rules that allow individual actors to make trade-offs without becoming embattled. Following Bastiat’s reasoning, since non-events are systematically undervalued, we systematically underinvest in protocol analysis, design, and improvement. A tenet of our mission is to address this underinvestment, and a few examples will illustrate the philosophy we are pursuing in order to do so.

A tell for spotting investment opportunities is the commonly noted phenomenon of small changes having big effects in complex systems. Checklists (which are simple thoroughness protocols), for example, have proved to be a powerful continuous producer of non-events in the context of domains such as hospitals and aviation. Despite being cheap and easy to implement, checklists are still underused. Dedicated operations professionals tend not to center their careers on such apparently trivial things, preferring to focus on more complex change and improvement theories and programs.

In 2024, we ran a grant program which tasked six teams of practitioners with driving small, incremental protocol improvements in their domains. Like checklist adoption, seemingly simple changes, such as adding encryption to a messaging protocol or simplifying a permit approval process, proved surprisingly hard to implement, despite their obvious potential for precipitating big changes. The 2024 grant program taught us a great deal about what it takes to drive even small consequential changes in complex systems.

Another example of our investment philosophy has to do with the critically undertheorized topic of memory. It is easy to forget non-events. That is in many ways a good thing, because it frees up cognitive (and economic) bandwidth to perform other operations. Technologies that produce non-events do not automatically create and preserve verbose traces in historical memory. Even when raw memories are produced, they tend to be easily forgotten or disregarded.

In a thoughtfully designed, safe workplace, a log of accidents not happening (such as the familiar image of a sign highlighting the number of days without an accident at a factory) does not naturally attract the attention it perhaps deserves.

Memory, therefore, has been an important research and investment theme for us, beginning with ’s seminal 2023 work on the relationship between memory and protocols.

Her essay Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity sparked a steady stream of follow-on research and supporting activities such as workshops over the next three years. Kei now leads a Special Interest Group that meets biweekly on our Discord. The graphic below shows the evolution of this research track, which now serves as the model for our investment in other deep, undertheorized topics that require sustained creative attention and organized inquiry.

These are just two of the validated strategies we have developed over the years to invest in the world of protocols. Not everything we try works out, but we aim to gradually grow our arsenal of research, application, pedagogy, and scene-making methods by trying many such strategies and doubling down on the ones that work. From 2023 to 2025, the Summer of Protocols program helped us bootstrap into a strong initial position with solid momentum. In 2026, the Protocol Institute and Protocolized will begin transforming that into lasting institutionalized value.

This is particularly urgent with regards to another contemporary technological theme. AI systems are powerful precisely for being non-deterministic and generative, but that generativity is most useful when it operates within stable, well-designed infrastructure. Protocols are that infrastructure. Indeterminacy and stability are complements, not competitors, and understanding one requires understanding the other. Even the arguments of TCP/IP, the very foundation of the modern internet, might need to be reengineered from the ground up to accommodate both humans and AI agents.

We’ve only scratched the surface of the world of protocols. In working towards a deeper understanding, beyond pursuing our own activities, we surface and curate ideas and knowledge from existing traditions (both scholarly and practitioner), unlocking insights and wisdom on the subject of protocols.

The Beginnings of a Canon

Establishing a canon is an important part of building a new field, and an important aspect of that is deciding which ideas to inherit, and from where. In the three years we’ve been consciously working to do this, we’ve accumulated a vast library of references across our publications that we’ve curated into the beginnings of a canon. We’ve deliberately chosen to strike a middle path between relevant academic traditions and broader works that not only cut across disciplines, but look beyond scholarly traditions to writing that’s embedded in real-world practice, and popular writing aimed at non-scholarly audiences.

This selection of well-known works, which arguably belong in a protocol canon, has proved valuable in our short history, and might serve as familiar entry points. If you have read and enjoyed any of these books, stories, or essays, you might already know more about protocols than you realize:

• Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott

• Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom

• Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow

• The Control Revolution, James Beniger

• The Box, Marc Levinson

• The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur

• Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse

• How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

• The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi

• Who Could Write Protocol Fiction for Speculative Infrastructure, Matt Webb

• The Complete Stories, J. G. Ballard

• Mother Earth, Motherboard, Neal Stephenson

• Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Alexander Galloway

• The ETTO Principle, Erik Hollnagel

From our own corpus of work, The Protocol Reader has earned a place in the canon, as have several stories from our archive of short stories.

These aren’t the only works that matter, and I’d be suspicious of any list that claimed to be complete. The canon is still being established, as is the live tradition of practice and application.

Creating a Movement

This then, is our investment thesis:

1. Protocols are infrastructural technologies that produce some of the most valuable outputs of society: dynamic non-events

2. Dynamic non-events have a natural tendency to become invisible and be forgotten

3. This tendency has historically led to them being undertheorized and underinvested in

4. Widespread improvement to this important class of technology requires creative new investment strategies and philosophies

Since 2023, an Alfred North Whitehead quote has served as our lighthouse, keeping us oriented to the essential core of this thesis: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations it can perform without thinking about them”

A modified version, we think, will keep us moving in the right direction in the years ahead:

Civilization will always be partially defined by the unseen and unremembered; by the outputs of its most important non-events – safety, hygiene, peace, frictionlessness; by the technologies that produce them in steady, sustained ways; and, perhaps most importantly, by the people who analyze, design, evolve, and maintain those technologies.

The Protocol Institute and Protocolized will serve this world.

Maintaining a robust, continuously tested and refined investment philosophy and thesis is necessary for the work we have ahead of us, but it is not sufficient. While one of our main operational goals is to serve as an investment vehicle for other institutions and individuals who see the value in what we are doing (please reach out if this is you; we will share more in the coming weeks), it only makes sense when paired with our other main operational goal – creating a movement.

While our plans for the Protocol Institute and Protocolized take many cues from scholarly societies and publications, we believe the world of protocols requires a fundamentally full-stack societal approach, spanning scholarly, entrepreneurial, governance, policy-making, cultural and subcultural activities. This is a daunting scope to operate in, and we have therefore converged on a few fertile and high-leverage core operational capabilities. The most important capability is using a publication to supercharge an entire emerging movement, rather than just its nominal contents.

This vision for our publication takes inspiration from other powerful movements and scenes that were shaped by highly influential publications, such as Astounding (Golden Age science fiction), The Whole Earth Catalog (early counterculture), Wired (early digital technology) and Make magazine (the Maker movement). The editorial postures and visions of these magazines served as far more than curators of content – they erupted larger discourses and policy conversations, seeded thriving subcultural scenes and catalyzed a range of creative, entrepreneurial, hobbyist, and social activities. Aesthetics, too, played a big role in the success of these magazines. We are well positioned on both fronts and I’m excited that will continue to be a driving force behind Protocolized as Head of MagOps and Art.

Already, through its first year of existence, Protocolized has helped spark the emerging genre of Protocol Fiction, published the output of several special interest groups pursuing important research tracks, seeded protocol watching as an engrossing new hobby, and hosted a dozen events around the world.

Going forward, we will consciously aim to use the Protocolized editorial room as the bridge from which we steer a fragile young movement through its uncertain early years. Our hope is that the movement quickly takes on a life of its own, with more individuals and institutions joining us in our stewardship efforts. In this nautical metaphor, we hope to thoughtfully design and evolve the Protocol Institute as the long-term engine for institutionalizing what needs to be institutionalized, while also helping preserve what should not be institutionalized in vibrant, wild, generative states.

A Map of the Protocol Institute

The Summer of Protocols began with a set of interdisciplinary research essays and culminated in a series of courses, taught online and at universities around the world. SoP provided the activation energy for a new field of research and practice based on real-world phenomena to emerge, just as bazaars and insurance brokers existed long before economics.

The Protocol Institute will irrigate this nascent field with the hope that it continues to develop tools and theories that will accelerate the production of important non-events. Right from the outset, we are an online-first organization and planetary in scope. Members of the protocol community already participate in this discourse from around the world, from a wide variety of countries, geographies, companies and institutions. Part of our philosophy as we chart a path during these early days is to capitalize on the energy and mediums available to us, rather than force old organizational forms like those of universities, traditional societies, or think tanks onto a digital and global network.

This organizational model will evolve, probably quickly, as the field and movement advance. At this time, Protocolized, the SIGs, and the annual Protocol Symposium (already two editions old) are the flagship projects of the Protocol Institute. In addition, several partnerships are in progress that we are excited to share more about soon. A big part of the Protocol Institute’s function is to create durable infrastructure for the emerging community of protocolists, including experimenting with and taking advantage of new AI tools.

Initial membership will include alumni from all three years of the original Summer of Protocols program, as well as guest speakers, lecturers and contributing writers of Protocolized. We also welcome the Class of 2025 from our inaugural Protocol School. What membership means and what direction it will take is an ongoing discussion among the founding members of the Protocol Institute. We look forward to expanding membership in a way that adds value and energizes the field.

To kick things off, we’ve put together a thorough (but not comprehensive) list of ways to work with the Protocol Institute and see the world through a new and useful lens:

1. Subscribe to Protocolized. Quick and easy. We’ll help point your attention to what matters in the field. This is also where we share project information – like an upcoming partnership program with the Long Now Foundation – and future opportunities, like becoming a member.

2. Start protocol watching. Trying to spot the protocols and dynamic non-events around you is a surefire way to build literacy.

3. Study the 2025 Protocol School lectures. These were taught by faculty from around the world and are completely free.

4. Take a weekend to digest the Protocol Reader. It’s still one of the best places to start. If you want a palate cleanser from non-fiction, read our protocol fiction anthologies: Terminological Twists, The Librarians and Ghosts in Machines.

5. Join the Discord server and participate in a Special Interest Group. Meet fellow theorists, practitioners and writers. Make something useful.

6. Write with us. Pitch an article or short story. Write something about what you saw, learned, read about or built. Fiction or non-fiction.

7. Apply what you learn. At the end of the day, what will come to define this new field is the real-world agency and effectiveness that it provides.

8. Make a tool for other people to use based on protocols in your field. Try to generalize useful principles and techniques.

The world of protocols is full of opportunities to exert an influence. You’ll have to tilt your head a bit to see these opportunities at first, but eventually it will become second nature. We want you to imagine a future where people live better through protocols. A future where, among other things, arguments are engineered to be productive, there are fewer central mechanisms at risk of becoming captured or malevolent, and where there is more peace, properly accounted for.

Here’s to the protocolists.

This was unusual. Lin ate with the attention diligent men gave to doing taxes: methodically, at an appointed time, with no waste and no ceremony. Felix had, in nine months as his chief of staff, come to think of Lin’s meals as reliable data. The CEO was present, operational, and the world was proceeding on schedule. But the congee Lin had ordered at the Hong Kong terminus sat cooling on the table between them, while Lin looked out at a coastline that was slipping away.

Felix glanced at his bio-band. Green. He had boarded with a full compliance dossier: valid credentials, correct insurance classifications, cleared for the journey’s first six jurisdictions in advance. His passage was, in ECOROUTE’s assessment, perfectly routine.

Felix admired the sophistication of the train’s protocols. He never understood the fuss about healthcare surveillance. He enjoyed passing through borders in an endless interior, and all it cost him was a ticket and his making himself legible to the state. The arc of innovation bends toward justice, Felix thought. He thought this in the way he thought about the efficiency of markets or the tendency of systems toward equilibrium – as a fact of physics – the way heat moves toward cold, the way protocols standardize, the way the correct answer reveals itself to the correctly posed question. He had been taught this at the finest university in the world by professors who had never given him cause to doubt it, and he had not yet had reason to question their teaching.

“You haven’t eaten,” Felix said.

Lin Yuan Exact turned from the window. He looked at the congee with the expression of a man who has forgotten what food is for. Then he picked up his spoon.

“You are wondering why we are not flying,” he said.

Indeed Felix had been wondering this. The summit in Lisbon was in four days. Eight hours by air. Three days by rail.

“The thought had occurred to me,” Felix said.

“An airport is a trap with two doors, and I can control neither of them.” Lin ate a spoonful of congee, chewed, swallowed. “Its infrastructure was built for efficiency. It is used for capture.”

But efficiency is good, Felix thought. The arc of innovation ...

“On the other hand, this train is only seven years old,” Lin continued. He was eating now, with attention. “No one thought it would really matter in the grand scheme of things, so there have been very few attempts by states to capture it.” He looked out the window again. The coast was gone now, replaced by the first industrial outskirts of Guangzhou.

“So it’s a gap, a thin scar in the face of global surveillance.“

The train’s path curved and the megacity came into view behind them: the Pearl River delta. The towers, the ports with their stacked containers in every color, the whole apparatus of making and moving that the world ran on. Felix watched it and thought about the Neutral Forge. The corporation that Lin had founded, which had inspired an adolescent Felix to give up his dreams of becoming a poet.

The Neutral Forge manufactured chips but designed nothing. This was its Oath of Making: to fabricate but never to architect. Orchard Systems brought its designs; the Forge made Orchard chips. Greenlance Computer brought its designs; the Forge made Greenlance chips. A hundred competitors, bitter enemies in the marketplace, came to the same sanctuary, handed over their most precious innovations, and trusted. This trust was the Forge’s true product. Chips were merely its byproduct.

Felix believed in this trust the way he believed in the arc, not as a policy or a preference but as a property of well-functioning architecture, emerging from an underlying structure in the way heat emerges from friction. The system was designed the right and the right outcomes followed. You did not need to force them.

“What are we actually going to do in Lisbon?” Felix asked.

Lin set down his spoon briefly. “Be seen travelling toward peace.”

“Which is...”

“Not the same thing as peace. But it buys time.”

“For what?”

“For work that needs to be finished.”

Lin resumed eating. Felix looked at the metropolis as it receded. At its systems of making and moving that would keep working tonight and tomorrow and the day after, indifferent to who sat in what chair, because their architecture was sound. The answer is there, he thought. I have not yet posed the question correctly.

Subscribe now

On the second day, as the train entered Mongolia, Lin was already awake.

Felix found him in the observation car at six in the morning, sitting in one of the panoramic seats with a glass of water, watching the steppe come into being as the light arrived. The steppe did not meet a horizon: at a certain point the grass simply stopped negotiating with the sky and let it take over.

Lin did not look up when Felix came in. He looked at the steppe. Felix sat across from him.

For 20 minutes, neither of them spoke.

Then Lin said, “The pressure arrived in stages.”

He said it in the way he might have said: “The train left Hong Kong at 7:14.” As a fact in a sequence of facts. But something in the steppe, or in the quality of light coming through the glass at this hour, had opened him.

“First the Fiduciary State,” Lin said. “Their lawyers wrote on letterhead with an embossed eagle. The implicit message: stop selling to the Empire’s companies. It didn’t need to be stated directly. The cost of non-compliance was Shunning, cut from the Murmur, unable to receive payment from anyone their financial system touches.” He looked at the steppe. “You know what the Murmur is.”

“The global financial messaging network,” Felix said. “SWIFT, in the old terminology.”

“The system through which all financial reality passes,” Lin said. “Literally. A transaction that the Murmur does not carry is a transaction that did not happen.”

Felix knew this. He knew this the way he knew about weather. He had never considered that someone had decided to build the Murmur, and that the person who decided to build it had also decided what it would and would not carry, and that this decision had been made once, long ago, by people with specific interests, and that it had been running on their behalf ever since.

He found this thought uncomfortable and set it aside.

“Then the Telluric Empire,” Lin continued. “Maintain supply to your traditional customers or the Seventeen Earths become unavailable. Gallium. Germanium. The periodic table’s veto.” He picked up his water glass, looked at it, set it down again. “Both at the same time. Not coincidentally.”

“What did you do?”

Lin was quiet for a moment. Outside, a bird crossed the steppe at speed. Low, dark.

“Have you seen a man juggling, Felix?”

“Yes.”

“When he has more balls than hands, what does he do?”

Felix thought about this seriously. “He drops one?”

Lin’s eyes followed the bird until it was gone. “He keeps them all in the air. For as long as he can. And when they fall,” one shoulder lifted, barely, “he is somewhere else.”

The steppe scrolled past. Felix thought about the Forge, about the clients who brought their designs and trusted their discretion. About the vested interests on both sides of that trust. About the Murmur and the Seventeen Earths and the eagle on the letterhead.There is a correct answer here, he thought.

They entered Russian territory that afternoon, at a border which was really just a gradient, a place where the train’s internal models registered a change. Two officials boarded with handheld Ponos to inspect passengers.

The first official was young and businesslike. The second was older, heavy, with the patience of someone who had spent decades in doorways and understood that doorways were where the interesting things happened. His Pono was different from the standard-issue model Felix had seen before. Instead of a green-or-red compliance grid, the screen showed something fluid: gradient fields, shifting spectra, the topography of a profile rendered in colors and graphs.

He stopped beside a Dutch businessman sitting next to Felix in the observation car. The businessman reached for his passport. The official ignored the passport.

“What does it measure?” Felix asked, because the question had already left him before he could decide whether to ask it.

The official looked up from the device. He had seen kids like Felix on the train before. All of them curious and smitten by the contraptions of UET-1.

“Drift,” he answered lazily.

“From what?”

“From what a person says they will do.” He said it so simply. “Before, we used stamps. Green, red. Legal, illegal. The sun is yellow, the grass is green.” He shrugged, a gesture that moved his whole body. “But the sun is a thermonuclear event. So now we have this. It does not say yes or no. It says probably. It says not yet. It makes a forecast.” He tilted the screen toward Felix. “Will this man arrive where he says he will arrive? Will he do what he says he will do? Or,” he made a gesture like smoke dispersing through fingers, “will he drift?”

On the screen, the Dutchman’s spectrum was cooling. The colors settled to an ambivalent blue. A thin seam flickered near some invisible threshold and did not cross it.

“And if he drifts?” Felix asked.

“Then we look at why. But only then.” The official made the face of a chess player forced to a draw. “While a man is within tolerance, we proceed. Certainty is expensive.”

The Pono emitted a soft descending tone and the official moved on. Felix leaned back. He looked at his own bio-band – green, steady – and thought about the word tolerance. The system did not need him to be correct. It needed him to be predictable. The difference had not previously seemed important.

That evening Lin summoned Felix to his cabin and handed him a folder.

Physical papers. Felix had worked in enough secure environments to know that paper was what you used when you did not want the document to exist in the records.

“Casino car,” Lin said. “Third table. A man called Walther. Do not read it.”

Felix took the folder. “What is it?”

“Infrastructure planning.”

Felix had heard this phrase several times now. It had begun to acquire a grating texture.

“Sir,” he said. “I have been your chief of staff for nine months. In that time I have coordinated communications with cryptographers in seven jurisdictions, managed secure protocols with lawyers in three different legal systems, and reviewed technical specifications for systems I do not have the clearance to fully understand. I believe in the Forge’s mission. I believe in what you are building. But I find myself in the position of performing a function I cannot define, and I am not certain that it is...”

“Felix.” Lin’s voice cut in with the particular patience of a man who has run the model many times and knows how it ends. “Do you know why I hired you?”

“My qualifications...”

“Your qualifications are sufficient. That is not why I hired you.” He looked at Felix steadily. “I hired you because you believe things. Visibly. You believe that systems tend toward equilibrium and that information wants to be free and that the arc of innovation bends toward justice. You believe this in the way a person believes in the sun. You do not check it, it is simply there. It is the light by which you do everything else.”

Felix said nothing.

“When you carry a folder through a train,” Lin said, “no one thinks you are carrying anything important. Because no one who is carrying something important looks like they believe in the sun.” A pause. “This is not an insult. You are a precision instrument.” He looked at the folder. “Go.”

Felix delivered the folder to Walther: third table, casino car. Loss and Gain. Walther was playing a card game whose rules appeared to be under ongoing renegotiation between him and the dealer. He took the folder without looking at Felix, slid it under the table, kept his attention on his cards.

Felix walked back through three cars. I am a precision instrument, he thought. He turned the phrase over. He had been hired because he believed visibly. Lin had said this as though it were operational information, which meant it was operational information, which meant Lin had factored Felix’s belief into his plans from the start, which meant...

The arc of innovation bends toward justice. The phrase was there when he reached for it. But it sat differently now.

Late on the third night Felix was in the dining car when Lin appeared.

This was unusual. Lin ate in his cabin, where, as Felix had once heard him explain to a journalist: “The walls are less interested in the conversation.” The dining car was a social space, and Lin was not a social person in the ordinary sense. He was a person who made you feel that the conversation you were having was the only one worth having, which was a different thing entirely.

He sat across from Felix, ordered tea, and for a moment said nothing. He looked at the window, which showed only darkness and their own reflections floating in it. Felix noticed that Lin was wearing the same white collarless linen shirt he had been wearing since Hong Kong. And the day before. Felix had the sudden realization that Lin had several of these shirts, packed identically. A choice made once and never revisited.

Then Lin began to talk, and Felix understood that he had not come to the dining car by accident.

“The Fiduciary States used to make things,” Lin said. “Steel. Cotton. Machines of ingenuity. But making is tedious. Making requires labour and logistics and the management of physical reality. So it ascended.” He received his tea. “It built the Murmur, through which all financial messages pass. The Chain of Hands, through which value moves. The Three Oracles, the Genuflections, the Naming: systems through which the world is assessed, classified, rated, included or excluded. It stopped making things and became the condition under which all making was possible. The tollbooth.”

“I understand the architecture of the Fiduciary States,” Felix said.

“You understand the facts.” Lin wrapped both hands around his cup. “The story is different. The story is that for 30 years the Forge survived between two systems of this kind by being necessary to both. The Doctrine of Indispensability. You cannot coerce what you cannot replace. As long as they needed us equally, we were safe in the gap.”

“What changed?”

Lin looked at his reflection in the dark window. “They noticed. Both of them, at the same time, which was not a coincidence. The Fiduciary States noticed that our chips found their way into the Empire’s military systems. The Empire noticed that we existed in a territory it has always called its own.” A pause. “There is a principle in physics, Felix: a body at rest in a contested space does not remain at rest.”

“What are you building? In Lisbon?” Felix said.

Lin was quiet. This was not the silence of a man who won’t answer, but the silence of a man deciding how much of the answer to give. He looked from his reflection to Felix. Something shifted in his face, something that might, on a different face, have been called the look of a man who needs to be heard, who has carried something for a long time without anyone to carry it with him.

“I am going to tell you something,” Lin said. He picked up his cup. “The world you believe in, where technology is neutral and the correct architecture produces the correct outcomes and the arc bends reliably, that world does not exist. It has never existed. What exists are machines. The Murmur is a machine. The Shunning is a machine. The Long Roots, the Three Oracles, the sanctions architecture, this train: machines. And every machine, without exception, is eventually operated by whoever can afford to maintain it.”

Felix opened his mouth. The words were there: systems tend toward equilibrium, information wants to be free...

“Once you have seen it,” Lin said, “you cannot unsee it. This is not a tragedy. It is a fact of life.”

Felix heard himself say, “Then what is the point of building anything?”

Lin set his cup down.

“That,” Lin said, “is exactly the right question.”

He did not answer it. He left Felix with his tea going cold and the train moving through the night.

Felix did not sleep.

He walked the train instead, through the dining car, past the business car with its encrypted-app men, their faces lit from below, through the corridor where a teenager was asleep with a boarding pass stuck to his cheek, through the observation car at the rear where the track disappeared into darkness behind them. He walked until his thinking had some air around it.

He stopped outside Lin’s cabin because there were voices.

A man and a woman. Neither of them Lin. It was past one in the morning. There were no meetings on the calendar.

Felix stood in the corridor and did not move.

“The keyholders are distributed,” the man said. “37 across 19 jurisdictions. Most don’t know each other. Several don’t know what they hold.”

“The contracts?” Lin’s voice.

“Self-executing. Time-locked. Embedded in the Strait Country’s fiscal ledger as infrastructure bonds. From the outside they look like pre-payments, R&D allocations. But they’re bound to the technical roadmap. Releases trigger on verifiable conditions. Equipment delivery. Construction milestones. Patent filings. Not board votes. Not executive signatures.”

“Even if the board is replaced?”

“The board is irrelevant. The funding flows through the ledger. The Strait Country’s system runs on a distributed ledger, thousands of nodes, maintained by institutions in dozens of countries who participate because the Strait Country’s fiscal stability is their fiscal stability. The contracts execute inside that architecture. No individual can stop them.”

“And if the roadmap changes.”

The woman spoke for the first time. “The keyholders. They don’t operate anything, they’re circuit breakers. If a parameter needs adjustment, modification requires 24 of 37 keys. Across 19 jurisdictions. Mostly anonymous to each other. No empire can coerce enough of them. Not quickly enough to matter.”

A silence. Then Lin: “When does the next transmission window open?”

“Gauge transition at Zabaikalsk. 11 minutes.”

“I’ll be there.”

Felix stood in the corridor for a long time. The train moved beneath him with the patience of something that did not require his understanding.

Lin has built a system that runs without its builder, he thought. That was the infrastructure planning. That was what needed to be finished. The Covenant – and he understood now that this was its name, had probably always been its name – would fund the Forge’s operations for 20 years, keep the thinking-stones flowing to every client regardless of empire, regardless of who sat in which chair, regardless of what happened to Lin Yuan Exact in the meantime.

Felix stood in the corridor and felt the train move and thought: this is the most remarkable piece of engineering I have ever encountered. And: there is no due process. And: these two thoughts are the same thought.

He went back to his cabin. He did not sleep.

His professors had been clear: a system without accountability is dangerous. Not as an opinion but as a technical fact, the way an ungrounded circuit is dangerous. The way a bridge without load calculations is dangerous. The Covenant had no circuit breaker that answered to anyone. The keyholders could modify its parameters, but who held the keyholders accountable? Who had consented to be governed by a machine that ran without consent as a feature?

Felix opened his tablet. The Lisbon summit had established an official secure channel for the pre-conference technical working group. Felix had been added to it in his capacity as the CEO’s representative. He had used it for logistics.

He composed a message. A subversive message. He was precise. He described the structure: 37 keyholders, 19 jurisdictions, self-executing contracts in the Strait Country’s ledger, the circuit-breaker architecture. He stated facts. He did not editorialize. He had been taught that a properly constructed report stated facts and allowed the facts to do the argumentative work. The facts here were unambiguous.

He sent it at 2:47 in the morning.

Then he thought: I will tell Lin what I have done. I will tell him in the morning. There should be a conversation. There should be an opportunity to respond. That is what accountability means, not punishment, but the existence of a process. The formal acknowledgement that the process exists.

The arc of innovation bends toward justice. He still believed this. He was, at 2:47 in the morning, acting on it.

He slept.

The train entered Europe the following morning. Felix ordered two coffees and carried them to Cabin 7-14.

He had decided, in the hour before dawn, that a conversation needed to happen. That he would tell Lin what he had done and why. That a man who believed in accountability should be prepared to account for his own actions. That Lin would understand this, or not, and that either way the conversation was important.

The door was unlocked. The cabin was empty. It had been systematically returned to a neutral state. The bed made with a precision that denied it had ever been occupied. The luggage gone. Even the slight compression a person leaves in upholstery after several days of travel was absent.

Felix found Captain Eriksson in the forward crew compartment and brought him up on the situation. Eriksson had seen many iterations of the situation Felix was about to describe.

“We should stop. Search the train,” said Felix.

“If we stop, we become subject to whatever jurisdiction we’ve stopped in,” Eriksson replied. “Currently that’s the Belarusian border corridor. The Telluric Empire has significant influence there.” He paused. “There are also 412 citizens of the Fiduciary States aboard in various states of legal complexity. Stopping resolves their complexity in a direction none of them would prefer.”

“So the response is to continue?” Felix was aghast.

“The train is built to continue, Mr. Lim. Stopping is a jurisdictional event. I would recommend against causing one.”

Felix wanted to have a conversation and now Lin had made it impossible. The report Felix filed was now unanchored, sitting in a channel, read by people whose interests he hadn’t, at 2:47 in the morning, stopped to enumerate.

Again the arc of innovation came back to him, as if a piece of evidence about himself: he had believed this, he had acted on it, and acting on it had ended disastrously. He did not blame the arc. He was beginning to think the arc did not know he existed.

Felix received two calls before the train reached Warsaw.

The first was from a man representing the legal interests of the Telluric Empire. He said that Lin Yuan Exact had been illegally detained by agents of the Fiduciary States, that the Telluric Empire was invoking the doctrine of habeas corpus on Lin’s behalf, and that Felix, as a witness to the events aboard the train and as the person who had reported on Lin’s plan for the Forge, would be contacted in Lisbon.

Felix asked how the Telluric Empire had come to know about his message. The man said he was not in a position to discuss that and the call ended.

The second was from a woman representing, in no official capacity, the interests of the Fiduciary States. She expressed concern for Felix’s safety. She noted that Felix possessed information that certain parties might prefer he not share. She asked him not to speak to anyone on arrival and said someone would find him.

After the second call ended Felix sat with his phone, thinking about the message he had sent. He could see the shape of it: both empires had learned something within hours of him sending it, which meant the official channel was official in the way that airports are official: infrastructure that serves particular interests while presenting itself as neutral.

He thought about the Murmur. The Chain of Hands. The Three Oracles. He thought about what Lin had said in the dining car: every machine is eventually operated by whoever can afford to maintain it.

Lisbon received Felix with indifference. He checked in to his hotel. His key card worked. His name was on the delegate list. He was still, technically, the CEO’s representative. No notification had arrived to change this. In every system, he was present as an entity representing Neutral Forge, but he didn’t know if he still had his job as chief of staff to the disappeared CEO.

On the third morning, a man from the Strait Country’s delegation sat down across from him in the hotel restaurant without asking.

“We know what happened to Lin,” the man said.

Felix had ordered eggs which had now gone cold.

“The gauge transition at Zabaikalsk, the 11-minute window. The Covenant’s first key transmission happened there in the Hale Gap.”

“Hale Gap?”

“It’s complicated to get into, but we think that one of the cars on UET-1 is a cryptographic bridge of some kind.”

Felix held the expression of someone who had gotten used to surprises.

“He timed the entire journey around an 11-minute window in which no state had enforcement authority. When the window opened, he was in car seven. He transmitted his own keyholder credentials. Then he was gone. We don’t really know how,” the man picked up his coffee.

Felix sat with his cold eggs and thought about 11 minutes. He thought about the drift official and his gradient fields and his tolerance thresholds and his trained eye for grey areas over the bright lines of law. He thought about Lin eating the congee with complete attention, about the identical white shirts, about the juggling parable and the balls staying in the air until the juggler was somewhere else.

He walked the city. He walked along the waterfront where the river went to the sea, past the old tower and the new scaffolding and the tram that ran between them. He thought about the Covenant: the 37 keyholders, the self-executing contracts, the Strait Country’s distributed ledger with its thousands of nodes and its decades of accumulated interest from institutions who needed it to remain stable.

But the Covenant was running. It was running through the gauge transition and the jurisdictional gap and the distributed ledger and the 19 jurisdictions and it would keep running after every person who had built it was gone. And the question was not whether the Covenant was just. Lin had told him in the dining car that the world that contained justice as a reliable product of correct architecture did not exist. The question was whether the Covenant was the closest thing to that world that the actual world permitted.

He stood at the waterfront and thought about what it would mean to believe in a machine you had not built. To choose to work inside it, understanding its costs, because the alternative was to keep filing reports through official channels that fed into the interests of whoever maintained them.

The arc of innovation bends toward capture. He believed this now. He also believed, and this was new, and harder, and had no clean phrase attached to it, that the Covenant was the correct response to a world in which that was true. Not the just response. The correct one. Built for the world as it is.

Several months later, Felix accepted a position with the Forge’s compliance architecture and took the UET-1 south from Hong Kong toward Vietnam. He took the train because it was the only place where his thinking moved at the right speed, and because he had some thinking to do before he went back north to start the new role.

He was in the South China Sea corridor when his phone rang.

“Felix.”

The voice was older than he remembered. Or he was remembering it wrong, measuring it now against what he knew. There was wind on the line, and underneath the wind an animal sound, low, intermittent, indifferent to the conversation.

“Sir,” Felix said. “Where are you?”

“Saudi Arabia.” A pause. “Looking after goats.”

“Why?”

“Well, I paid someone to take me to Zurich, but it seems they were paid by someone else to drop me off in a wadi.”

“Are you going to come back?”

“I’m happy here, Felix. The goats make me happy. The sun makes me happy. I worry about you though. I heard you spoke with the Strait Country delegation,” Lin said. “In Lisbon.”

“I filed a report,” Felix said. “Through the official channel. Before you disappeared.”

“I know.”

“I filed it because I thought there should be an appeals process. Because someone should know that a system with no accountability is dangerous.” A pause. “I understand that this was predictable.”

“I know what you thought,” Lin said. And then, without the weight of a judgment being delivered, simply as a fact in a sequence of facts: “You were right. A system without accountability is dangerous. I built one anyway.”

The wind on Lin’s end. The train’s motion on Felix’s.

“I’m going back to the Forge,” Felix said. “To work inside the Covenant. Not to challenge it.”

Lin was quiet for a moment. Felix heard the goat again. Closer, perhaps, or the animal had moved.

“The Covenant doesn’t need you,” Lin said.

“I know.” A pause. “I need it.”

A longer silence. Felix watched the South China Sea through the window: the light on it, the vast indifferent blue, the container ships moving in both directions as they always had and would continue to after every argument about their cargo was settled or abandoned.

“I built something that cannot be challenged,” Lin said. “You tried to challenge it.” The wind. “One of us was working from the world as it should be. The other from the world as it is.”

Felix waited.

“The goats are calling,” Lin said. “Goodbye, Felix.”

The line went dead.

Felix looked at the sea. It went on in every direction, carrying everything that needed to move from one side of the world to the other, indifferent to the arguments on its surface, reliable as gravity, as the arc, as the machines that had been built to describe them.

In this installment, I want to provide two quick examples of how this might work at the level of individual ecologies, and sketch out how many more such ecologies might form a primordial computing soup.

AI Art Scenius with Titles

The first example is TITLES (who also have a Substack called ), the generative art platform that we use to produce the artwork for Protocolized. The brain part of Titles is a pipeline to make fine-tuned models from art collections by a particular artist. The high-personality part is that each model reflects a distinct individual artist’s style for that project.

The fabric part is a rather clever “creator studio” for composing these individual models together, to create an ecology based on “sampling” multiple models (in the sense of sampling in music) to create new artwork. The fabric accomplishes two things – combining multiple models together in a mathematically meaningful way, and keeping track of the contributions to allow for attribution and profit-sharing. The overall ecology also has a personality, similar to how music scenes can have personalities.

An Open Planetary Network of Robots

The second example is more complex, and one I’m involved in personally – the Yak Robotics Garage (YaRG) project.

The goal of this project is to create a planet-wide network of open-source rovers and other robots (such as drones), as a stepping stone towards rover networks on the moon and Mars. The idea started with (a Protocol School alum) figuring out how to teleoperate robots securely, in exchange for blockchain payments, and then generalizing the mechanism to use the ERC 8004 protocol (a sort of onchain directory and rating service for AI agents) to drive discovery of available robots for tasking.

Summer of Protocols researcher then joined in the fun and prototyped an auction marketplace to allow for posting of jobs for robots, and bidding by robots able to do them. There is currently a demo marketplace going (with dummy data, and a mix of real and virtual rovers, but real prototype protocol plumbing behind it) and plans underway to test the technology in the construction sector.

Where does AI fit in here?

Well, the problem with operating an open network of rovers in the real world is that there can be a dizzying variety of hardware types with different capabilities, owned by a large variety of actors of different levels of trustworthiness, situated in different environments. There can be all sorts of potential operators anywhere on the planet – or even on an entirely different planet – with varied skill levels.

Rather than brittle and specialized command modes, you want high-intelligence robots of all sorts to expose their capabilities to potential users/customers via a flexible command surface, and high-intelligence clients commanding them using LLMs that can understand their varied technical capabilities and map them to the needs of particular tasks and missions.

So you use MCP (Model Context Protocol) to expose the capabilities, ERC 8004 (try searching for “robot”) to discover the capabilities, LLM agents to use those capabilities to get tasks done, and either traditional or blockchain rails, using the x402 protocol, to organize a marketplace for robotic services to be provisioned and procured for money.

Those are just the main moving parts in a rather complex scheme – but one in which all the complexity is mainly dealt with by AIs rather than humans. Here is an explainer video (AI generated) of the technical infrastructure behind the scheme:

Here is a simple demo video of the basic protocol in action with a real robot. And here’s another video with Anuraj and Rafa demonstrating the auction marketplace in action.

It might not seem like much compared to the spectacular robot demonstration videos you find all over social media these days, but the point is not the robots themselves, or what they do, but that it is all being orchestrated over the open internet, using mechanisms that can potentially scale planet-wide without being owned or controlled by any single entity, such as a powerful corporation or state.

In this example, the brain is distributed across multiple rovers and the LLMs that can control them. The fabric is a stack of different protocols handling various coordination needs, ranging from discovery and verification of capabilities in a variable-trust market environment, to actually enabling the teleoperation connection, to handling the auditing of results and completing any financial transactions as agreed upon. All in high-speed automated ways that still allow for case-by-case judgment and decision-making by AIs supervised by humans.

It is worth comparing this vision to a competing vision: The kind promoted by vertically integrated robotics companies through jazzy demos featuring robots doing impressive acrobatics in controlled environments. These visions typically rely on highly integrated and closed products, even if they sometimes offer lip-service to open-source affordances for some parts of the whole picture. These are comparable to early proprietary computing networks, or contemporary social media platforms owned by large corporations.

An open robotics marketplace, on the other hand, would be more like the open internet – anyone with a robot of any sort (from small hobby rover in someone’s basement to a billion dollar rover on Mars) could potentially join, and connect with anyone else with a need for that particular robot’s capabilities and the ability to pay for it. It would be messy, janky, and glued-together. It would form a kind of tangled bank of artificial organisms competing for survival in an atomized market-like environment.

Which world would you rather live in? Yet another world of monopolistic platforms, or a cheerful anarchy of robots and their owners wheeling and dealing in an open economy?

Subscribe now

The Primordial Soup

These are just two examples of how protocols and AI can be put together in creative ways. There are dozens of others being experimented with right now, ranging from the viral and highly visible OpenClaw ecosystem to obscure and specialized ones that are as yet only crazy ideas in the heads of teenaged hackers.

Over the next decade, we’ll probably seen tens of thousands of such brain-and-fabric ecologies take shape independently. They will likely fall into loosely similar families of patterns. Some may converge, others may diverge, just like biological ecosystems.

If you think that’s a fun vision, imagine what could happen once these ecologies begin to run into each other and interconnect. Thanks to AIs, protocol systems that would have been non-interoperable in older technology paradigms will be able to automatically figure out how to talk to each other, forming squishy, oozy interfaces with each other, cobbled together by AI agents feeling each other out and inventing pidgins as they go. When AI is cheap enough, and the basic fabric capable enough, inventing a language even for just two entities to talk to each other for one short interaction becomes possible.

Take even the two examples in this essay. We can imagine photography robots in different parts of the world in the Yak network submitting photos to Titles to train individual models based on their particular image-making capabilities (such as different types of camera). Users could then sample those models to synthesize composite images by sampling those models to create strange new images seen by wholly synthetic robotic eyes.

Imagine that sort of thing, but in a primordial soup of thousands of ecologies.

As this process unfolds over the years, and the primordial soup boils and bubbles, the planetary computational character will begin to emerge in the form of a planet-scale emergent distributed brain, integrated and orchestrated by an emergent world fabric.

Only Rowan knew that their true purpose was as weapons in an invisible war that she had entangled them in. The stress had kept her awake for the past week, and it was beginning to show under her eyes. Rowan had a strict regimen to take care of her body: in the past month alone, she’d done Botox, Emface, IPL, and scheduled Moxi broadband light. She’d seen her orthodontist, cardiologist, GP, OBGYN, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, trainer, and pilates instructor. She had renewed her medspa membership. Drawn blood three times and given two urine samples. Her current skincare routine was six to eight steps, her daily supplement stack was 17 pills (20 on Mondays) and three peptides taken subQ, and she regularly engaged at least five high-tech tools from her home device library (red light, SAD light, PEMF, etc). Rowan liked to joke that she was somatically gentrified. Her working-class Midlands body’s adipocytes and senescent cells cleared out to make room for a sleeker, more profitable physiological regime. So, any small deviation, like the bags under her eyes, stood out like the lone crumbling house in an aspiring neighbourhood.

She shut her eyes and tried not to think about being a weapon. But the train, which had made itself fade into the background, quietly racing along at 250kph, began to slow down, and the sparse, clinical atmosphere was penetrated by the sound of something moving below the floorboards. Rowan knew before the announcement came that they were entering eastern Europe. The train switched from the euro standard gauge to a narrower gauge for this leg of the journey. The ride was going to be bumpier, but only noticeable to those who had been sensitized to such small changes. Rowan was one of them. She had, without the knowledge of her friends, taken the Unified Eurasian Transit line at least 100 times in the last five years. The longest single rail line connected Lisbon to Laos, passing through 13 different territories. It was a moving special economic zone and Rowan was a frequent trader on its route. The Tirzepatide Trail: that’s what people had started calling the leg of the UET-1 from Lisbon to the border of China, passing through Russia. Demand for Chinese peptides was high among tech workers and other desk jockeys who needed a little hit of something in the afternoon to focus on churning out enterprise software or whatever. Rowan picked these up and distributed them out of a clinic in the suburbs of London that she had started with a doctor whose license had been revoked years ago.

Rowan was not the only business in town. At the height of the peptide trade, peptide resellers were transporting 100,000 vials a month. But then Black Wednesday happened.

One morning on the Budapest-to-Vienna rail segment, someone released a modified aerosolised pathogen in Car 7. It had been engineered – this much was established within days. A chimeric agent, part synthetic, designed to activate only in the presence of estrogen concentrations above a specific threshold. The pathogen remained inert in male hosts but triggered acute respiratory collapse in females on primary exposure, while also shedding briefly, asymptomatically, through skin contact and shared air. All nine women in Car 7 died within minutes. 23 others throughout Cars 6 and 8 – women who had never entered Car 7, who had simply been breathing recycled air or brushed past an infected passenger – developed symptoms within hours. 14 were hospitalized. Seven would die over the following week. The men showed no symptoms beyond serving as unwitting carriers.

A conventional weapon – a bomb, a nerve agent – kills indiscriminately. This thing had been programmed with a biological filter. It had turned half the population into potential victims and the other half into unwitting accomplices.

The UET-1 reopened after six weeks, forever scarred by its immune response to the incident.

Now, the train’s security protocols didn’t just ask “Who are you?” They asked “What is happening inside you right now – and what’s the likelihood that your body is a bioweapon?” They called the new protocols ECOROUTE: Ecological Routing & Onboard Unified Triage Enforcement. The “Ecological” was a branding affectation – someone in the EU’s communications office, probably a millenial, had decided that a surveillance regime would go down easier if it sounded like a recycling initiative. Biology had become telemetry. Every passenger now emitted a continuous bio-signature tracked by sensors embedded in seats, air vents, even the floor panels.

Rowan noticed it immediately on her first test trip after the attack. The “AIRFLOW REVERSAL” lights that blinked without warning. The gentle hiss of doors sealing themselves when air sentinel zones detected anomalies. The thin paper bio-bands issued at boarding that shifted from green to yellow based on your vital signs and heat signature. It was vastly more sophisticated than the half-hearted masking and social distancing policies of the covid era. The UET-1 was French engineering that operated within a quasi-European bureaucracy, with some Chinese and South East Asian characteristics sprinkled in. The new protocols had to be observable and satisfactory for a multitude of bureaucratic cultures.

Frequent passengers like Rowan now had baselines in addition to identity checks – metabolic signatures, stress markers, sleep debt patterns. The ticket terms buried it in legalese: “By boarding, you consent to adaptive health-routing and temporary isolation for the protection of onboard ecology.” There was no real opt-out, just slower routing and more friction if you objected.

For Rowan’s operation, this was catastrophic. Her carefully packaged peptide shipments, once invisible among nutritional supplements, now triggered alerts. The train’s environmental sentinels could detect trace compounds, unexpected chemical signatures, deviations from baseline cargo profiles. Her Warsaw contact reported that freight cars were being diverted mid-route to “air-wash corridors” – gentle decontamination theaters that destroyed product and pathogen alike. The passengers were then earmarked like cattle for detailed screenings the next time they took the train.

Rowan was ready to walk away from it all. Cut their losses from the lost packages. Maybe go back to a low-level tech job. But one day, a man named Alex contacted her on Telegram.

It seemed like a scam at first. Another one of those grey-market peptide dealers. But this one was persistent. Eventually she met with him at a cheugy bar in Lisbon’s Bairro Alto. He was wearing flip-flops and chinos. Alex claimed he worked for the CIA, and he would supply Rowan with a new safe route for her peptides if she did one thing. One little job.

Subscribe now

Alex was not CIA. He was employed by Marcus Hale.

How do you get money into a country that is outside the SWIFT system and under physical blockade? Marcus Hale had been pondering this question with his associates for several months, while jet-setting between several small islands in the Indian Ocean whose names were unrecognizable to the general public.

The country in question had lithium. Not the kind prescribed to stabilize mood – the kind that stabilized the future. Enough lithium carbonate under its eastern steppe to supply European battery production for 40 years. A Chinese state consortium held the extraction rights through a deal signed with the previous government. The current government, such as it was, operated from three cities and a Telegram channel and was willing to renegotiate. But renegotiation requires funding. Funding requires transfer. And transfer requires money that could actually move.

Hale’s could not. This was the essential problem. Hale was 63 and had accumulated wealth the way rot accumulates in a wall – invisibly, structurally, in places no one thought to look. Arms brokerage in the Balkans during the nineties, routed through Austrian holding companies. Conflict mineral extraction in the Congo, laundered through infrastructure contracts that built roads to nowhere. Sanction evasion for three separate Russian oligarchs during the 2022 freeze, taking 15 percent of every dollar he hid. He was not a billionaire in the way that word is normally used. He appeared on no lists, owned no visible assets, had no public face. His firm, Sable Meridian, employed 12 people and existed in a legal superposition – its purpose described in incorporation documents as “strategic consulting.”

The problem with building wealth inside walls is that it stays inside walls. Hale’s money existed as equity in shell companies that owned shell companies, as claims on assets in jurisdictions where the courts could be bought but the banks could not be wired, as handshake obligations from men who would honour them only if Hale could reach them. None of this was convertible. None of it could be moved to a country under blockade to fund a government that existed primarily on Telegram. He needed money that was liquid, untraceable, and – critically – not his. Money that belonged to no one. Money that no intelligence service, no compliance team, no blockchain analytics firm was watching.

Yevgeni Stolar’s Bitcoin fit the bill. Almost.

Yevgeni Stolar had died in June 2026, in a boating accident off Limassol. The Cypriot maritime authority ruled it accidental. He was 41, Ukrainian-born, and had built payment infrastructure for half the darknet markets operating between 2018 and 2025. Not the markets themselves – the plumbing beneath them. Transaction mixers, tumbling protocols, the invisible pipes through which money moved without identity. By 2022, an estimated four percent of all cryptocurrency transactions on the dark web touched infrastructure Stolar had built. He had accumulated 11,000 Bitcoin – approximately $940 million – in fractional commissions. Then he died, and the money went dark.

Karel, Hale’s operations nerd who actually executed his plans, found Stolar’s notes eight months later, on a server in Odessa that Sable Meridian had purchased through a shell company. Fragments of documentation written in a mix of Ukrainian and English. What emerged, over weeks of reconstruction, was a plan.

Stolar had intended to board the UET-1 with three others. There were references to two women and a man, designated only as N., K., and D. Travel itineraries for a route from Kyiv to Lisbon, dated March 2023, four seats booked in adjacent compartments. Dosage calculations for adjusting a compound’s concentration for different body masses. One set appeared to be for someone quite small – a teenager, possibly. The booking was never used.

There was also a single line, written in Ukrainian, that Karel translated as: “If the boat, then N. knows the second route.” No indication of what the second route was or who N. was. Karel spent three months trying to find out and failed. It was, he told Hale, probably a story worth knowing, but not one that they actually needed to be able to extract the key.

What they needed was already in the notes. Stolar had been, in addition to his darknet work, a contractor for the European Union’s transport security directorate. He had been part of the team that designed the sensor specifications for the UET-1’s onboard environmental monitoring system – the system that, after Car 7, became the foundation of ECOROUTE’s decontamination array.

The sensors composed an active terahertz and Raman spectroscopy system. It swept passengers with a broad frequency range, reading the molecular composition of their skin, breath, clothing, and – at the resolutions mandated by Black Wednesday protocols – subcutaneous tissue. It was built to detect trace chemical weapons, aerosolised pathogens, and anomalous compounds. What Stolar had ensured, through careful specification of the frequency bands and resolution thresholds, was that the array also happened to operate in the exact range needed to interrogate a very specific kind of engineered nanoparticle.

Solar had buried a cold wallet, nested in the decontamination array’s firmware as a dormant subroutine, indistinguishable from the diagnostic calibration code that surrounded it. The wallet contained the private keys to the 11,000 Bitcoin. It was secured with a four-of-four multisignature protocol: four signing keys must be presented simultaneously, or the wallet would stay locked. Stolar had not stored those keys on hardware devices or paper or in any digital format. He had encoded them into a compound.

The compound was not, strictly speaking, a peptide. It was a peptide chassis carrying a payload of engineered paramagnetic nanoparticles. The peptide could bind to tissue and ferry the particles through the body’s physiological pathways – lymphatic, fascial, subcutaneous. But Stolar’s original version was crude. It drifted in practice, the nanoparticles migrating unpredictably across different body types. The resonance signatures it produced were noisy, inconsistent. It worked on Stolar’s body. Whether it would have worked on N., K., and D. was unclear. He never got the chance to find out.

This was where Karel came in handy. 14 months, and the reason Hale had paid him what he’d paid him.

Karel had re-engineered the compound from the chassis up. The core problem was biological variance: its fat distribution, hydration, muscle mass, organ geometry all shaped how the nanoparticles settled in tissue, which meant different bodies produced different resonance patterns from the same vial. Karel’s solution was to make the compound indifferent to its host. He surface-coated each particle cluster with synthetic ligands which ignored the body’s natural signalling and drove the particles into a predetermined topographical configuration – specific depths, specific densities, specific spatial relationships to one another – regardless of the body they were in. He ran simulations across hundreds of physiological models. He tested on cadaveric tissue sourced through channels Hale didn’t ask about. The result was a compound so resistant to the biological individuality of its host that it would produce the same resonance pattern whether injected into a 20 year-old athlete or a 60 year-old diabetic. The body was mere scaffolding. The compound built its own architecture.

There were four vials. Each contained a different nanoparticle configuration – different cluster sizes, different magnetic orientations, different spatial topographies. Vial 1, injected into any human body, would always produce Key 1’s resonance signature when scanned by the decon array. Vial 2 would always produce Key 2. The four keys were not in the four people. The four keys were in the four vials. The people were hosts – warm, compliant, scannable, but interchangeable.

Hale needed four bodies. He needed them on the train. He needed them flagged.

Rowan felt the gauge change settle. Ana had fallen asleep with the Bataille open on her chest. Lucas had his head on Jax’s shoulder, both of them out. Rowan was alone with the hum.

She reached into her bag and took out the pouch Alex had given her. Temperature-controlled, unmarked, delivered to her flat by a courier service that didn’t exist when she tried to look it up. Four vials. Clear liquid. She held one up to the reading light. It looked like every reconstituted peptide she’d ever handled. Same viscosity and faint yellow cast.

Alex had told her the compound was a next-generation masking agent. Experimental. Not yet on any market. “It recalibrates your metabolic output to sit inside the train’s baseline tolerance,” he’d said. “You inject, your bio-signature flattens, the sentinels read you as boring. You ride through decon zones without a flag. No amber bands, no air-wash, no questions.”

“And you need four people to test this?”

“We need four different metabolic profiles. Age, sex, body composition – the sentinels calibrate differently for each. One body isn’t enough for a test. Four is a dataset.”

It was a good pitch. The kind of compound she would have killed for six months ago, when her shipments were being diverted and her distribution network was collapsing under ECOROUTE’s paranoid immune logic. A way to move through the train invisible. If it worked, it was worth more than anything else Alex could offer her.

But she didn’t believe him. The explanation was too clean, too shaped to her exact desires, the way a phishing email contains exactly the link you were looking for. She’d spent years in grey markets, replying to ads from women named Sophia and Judi whose faces were generated by algorithms, and she had developed a sense for when she was being sold something and when she was being used for something. Alex was using her. She was almost certain.

She took the job anyway. Partly because she was a curious person – it was the same impulse that had her browsing peptide forums at 13, messaging Chinese suppliers at 16, building shell companies at 17. Curiosity as engine, risk as fuel. She also knew it was not risky. Maybe the peptides set off the ECOROUTE protocols, but that would be a minor inconvenience at worst.

But an intrusive thought that had kept her awake for a week was now beginning to show under her eyes: the compound was doing something to her body that Alex hadn’t described. She and Lucas and Ana and Jax were not testers but vessels. Their carefully optimised, peptide-saturated bodies were being recruited for carrying something dangerous. Was she a bioweapon? The thought lingered in her like a vial she couldn’t uncap.

Hale was in Zug, in a room with no windows, watching four dots move across a map on a screen. The dots were the phones of Rowan, Lucas, Ana, and Jax. The UET-1’s real-time positioning data was not public, but Sable Meridian had access through a freight logistics company that it owned 40 percent of.

Beside him, Karel was monitoring biometric feeds piped from the train’s own sensor grid – another access point purchased, not hacked, through a maintenance subcontractor in Warsaw. The feeds were rough. Passive readings from seat sensors and floor panels. Enough to confirm that all four subjects were aboard, alive, and not yet dosed.

“She’s awake,” Karel said. “The other three are asleep.”

“She’ll wait until they’re all awake,” Hale said.

On a second screen, another operation was underway. A relay node in the UET-1’s network was coming online – housed in a switching station outside a data hub town that lived and breathed ECOROUTE logistics. Sable Meridian’s people had physical access to the station through a local telecoms contractor who had been on retainer for two years. The relay handled decontamination scan data as it passed from the train’s onboard servers to the ECOROUTE central repository in Brussels. For 35 seconds, during the scan of Car 7’s air-wash corridor, the data would be duplicated and routed to a separate receiver. 18 seconds was enough.

Rowan woke Lucas first. He came to with that bleary, gorgeous confusion that made him so watchable on camera. She handed him a vial and a syringe.

“New stack,” she said. “Circadian reset compound. We’ll recover from the trip faster with this. We can make the most of the day. Best if we all take it at the same time.”

“Now? On the train?”

“The absorption is better when you’re in motion. Something about vestibular stimulation syncing with the hypothalamus.” She’d made this up on the spot, and it sounded exactly like the kind of thing she’d say. Lucas didn’t question it.

He woke Jax, who looked at the vial and turned to Rowan. “What about the ECOROUTE sensors?”

“This compound is engineered to pass the sensors.”

“Ahh, so you’re testing it on this trip, aren’t you?”

“What about vertical… stimulation?” Lucas enquired.

“Vestibular… yeah, that’s part of it too.”

“So that’s what this trip is about, isn’t it? Testing your new compound?” said Ana, who had been listening to the conversation, leaning in from her seat.

The onlookers mostly were sleeping, except for a few bleary stares.

“We’re here. Might as well. There’s no harm done. Worst case, we get flagged and submitted to some security theater. You know they can’t actually do anything or convict you for such small amounts.”

The gang really did not need that much convincing. If Rowan acted like the leader of the pack, it was because Ana, Jax, and Lucas let her. They knew that she was a striver who had to work hard for every penny, and they preferred that she work hard for them rather than someone else. Besides, they thought, what’s beauty without some skin in the game?

They injected one at a time. Subcutaneous, upper arm. Rowan went first. She had labelled the vials one through four in the order Alex had specified. He’d been precise about this – each person had to take a specific vial. She figured it was dosage calibration.

The compound entered warm. Warmer than any peptide she’d used, and with a faint granularity she’d never felt before – not pain exactly, but a sense of something distributing, particles finding their stations in her tissue like iron filings arranging themselves along magnetic field lines. For about 40 seconds she felt something she couldn’t name – a sensation of density, as though her body had become marginally more there, more materially present in space. She thought of herself in the benefits office in Wolverhampton, age 15, a man reading her file instead of her face. The feeling of being seen not as a body but as a readable surface.

It passed. She drew a breath. Normal.

Lucas injected. No reaction beyond a slight wince. Jax the same. Ana came back from the bathroom rubbing her arm and saying it felt like sand under her skin.

Within four minutes, all four bio-bands shifted from green to deep amber. A wrinkle in the plan.

Karel sat up. “Spike across all four. BRX-90 is integrating.”

On the biometric feed, the four metabolic profiles were deviating sharply from their rolling baselines. But the deviation wasn’t metabolic – the train’s passive sensors were picking up secondary effects of the nanoparticles distributing through tissue, the slight perturbations in skin conductance and bioimpedance as the particles settled into position. The train’s AI read this as variance. It couldn’t know what it was actually seeing: four bodies quietly rearranging themselves into keys.

Hale watched the map. The train was approaching the segment where the relay node was positioned. Timing mattered. The decon scan had to happen within this window – a 200-kilometre stretch where the compromised relay would handle the data handoff. If the train flagged them too early or too late, the scan data would route through a different node, one which Sable Meridian didn’t control.

“Flagging now,” Karel said.

On the train, AIRFLOW REVERSAL lights activated in the corridor outside Rowan’s compartment. The doors sealed.

An attendant arrived first. Then two people in grey – the same ambiguous uniform Rowan had seen before, not security or medical, the hybrid role that ECOROUTE had invented. They were polite. They were always polite. The politeness was part of the protocol, designed to reduce cortisol spikes that would further distort bio-readings.

One of them had a handheld device. Rowan had seen these before. They were called Pono. “We’re detecting metabolic anomalies from your compartment. Standard procedure. If you’d follow us.”

Rowan nodded. She’d rehearsed this in her head. Calm, cooperative, mildly annoyed. The posture of a frequent traveller who’d been through decon before and found it tedious.

But the posture cracked almost immediately. In fact there were five people in grey. Two in the corridor, one at each end of the car, and a fifth standing by the sealed door they were being led toward, holding a tablet and not looking up from it. Rowan had been through decon flagging 11 times in the past year. There had never been five.

Lucas tried to film the corridor and was asked to put his phone away. Ana said nothing, just looked around with her ambient curiosity, taking in the sealed doors and blinking sensor arrays the way she took in everything – as content, as atmosphere. They didn’t understand. They thought this was an inconvenience, a story for later, a thing that would become funny.

Rowan was calculating. The masking agent had failed. That was her first thought. Alex’s compound, whatever it actually was, had not suppressed their bio-signatures but had amplified them. They were not invisible. All four of them were lit up, walking through the train like flares, potential bioweapons. Which meant one of two things. Either Alex had lied about what the compound did, which was possible. Or Alex had known exactly what it would do, which was worse.

They passed through the second car. The overhead lights here were different – a flatter, bluer spectrum that Rowan recognised from clinical settings. Diagnostic lighting. The train was already reading them. She looked down at her bio-band. Deep amber, almost red. She had never seen a band go red. She didn’t know what red meant. The documentation she’d seen only went up to amber.

Her peptide trade was finished. ECOROUTE had her metabolic baseline from a hundred trips. Whatever BRX-90 had done to that baseline was logged, timestamped, and already en route to Brussels. She would never board this train again without being flagged. Her Warsaw contact, her Porto clinic, her Barcelona plans – all of it was now tethered to a bio-signature that read as a threat. Five years of building a supply chain through the Tirzepatide Trail, and she had burned it in 40 seconds because a man in flip-flops had handed her a pouch and she had not asked enough questions.

Jax touched her arm. “You alright? You’ve gone pale.”

“Fine. Low blood sugar.”

Third car. The doors ahead of them were different from the others – heavier, with a visible seal around their frames and a small antechamber before the next section. An airlock. She had never been routed through an airlock. The grey-uniformed woman at the front pressed her palm to a panel, and the door opened with a sound that was less a hiss and more an exhale, as though the train itself were breathing.

And then she saw the number on the bulkhead. Car 7.

Something cold moved through her sternum. Car 7 was where 17 people had died. Car 7 was where the organophosphate had turned passengers into convulsing, foaming things on the floor. Car 7 had been the reason for all of this – the bio-bands, the sentinels, the air-wash corridors, the entire immune system that had strangled her business. She had thought of Car 7 as an abstraction, a policy event, the thing that changed the rules. She had never imagined that she would stand in it.

The space had been rebuilt entirely. Bright, clinical, transparent partitions, reclining chairs embedded with sensor grids. It was clean the way that crime scenes are clean after the cleaners leave.

She thought about Alex. About his flip-flops and his thumbs-up emoji and the courier service that didn’t exist. She thought about BRX-90 warming through her arm and the 40 seconds of transparency and the five grey uniforms. She thought: he didn’t need me to test anything. He needed me to get caught.

“Please sit. The process takes approximately 30 to 40 minutes.”

Rowan sat. The chair received her weight and she felt, through the thin fabric of her clothes, the faint vibration of sensors activating beneath the surface.

In Zug, Hale stood. Karel was monitoring the decon array’s output through the compromised relay, watching raw spectral data from four bodies arranged in reclining chairs in Car 7.

The array was doing what it was designed to do: sweeping the four passengers with a broad-spectrum terahertz and Raman pulse, reading their molecular composition layer by layer – skin, subcutaneous fat, fascia, muscle. It was looking for chemical weapons residue, pathogen markers, anomalous compounds. It found the nanoparticles immediately, flagging them as an unidentified synthetic presence in all four subjects. This was expected. This was, in fact, the point. The flag kept them in the chairs. The scan kept running.

What the array’s operators didn’t know was that the scan was doing double duty. Every frequency pulse that hit the nanoparticles came back carrying information. The particles resonated at specific, engineered frequencies, and the pattern of resonance – which frequencies absorbed, which reflected, and at what intensities – encoded 64 bits per body. The array faithfully recorded these resonance patterns as part of its standard spectral readout, because that was what it was built to do. It had no idea it was reading keys.

Beneath the surface telemetry, in the diagnostic subroutine that Stolar had planted three years ago, a listener was comparing the resonance patterns against the four signing signatures it had been programmed to recognise. For three years it had found nothing. Every scan returned noise – the spectral clutter of ordinary human bodies carrying ordinary compounds.

Now, for the first time, four patterns matched.

“First key verified,” Karel said. He was watching the telemetry through a decoder he’d built from Stolar’s Odessa notes. The firmware’s operations were invisible – even to Karel. What he could read was the output. “Second key. Third. Fourth. All four signing keys accepted.”

The cold wallet unlocked. But it did not release Bitcoin. Stolar had designed one more layer. The wallet contained a single payload: the private key to a second wallet, where the 11,000 Bitcoin actually sat. The cold wallet was a vault that held only a combination to another vault.

The private key was 256 bits. The firmware encoded it into the scan’s outgoing telemetry – the data stream that the decon array routinely transmitted to the ECOROUTE central repository in Brussels. It used a frequency band that Stolar had reserved in the array’s original specifications, documented as “diagnostic calibration overhead,” never questioned by the engineers who ran the system after him. The key occupied 18 seconds of transmission, split across four telemetry channels – one per body – interleaved with legitimate scan data. To Brussels, it would arrive as noise. Metabolic readings, spectral resonance profiles, ambient chemical levels, and buried among them, meaningless without the decoder, a 256 bit string worth $940 million.

“Key is assembling,” Karel said.

The compromised relay node intercepted the telemetry as it passed through the switching station. Karel’s decoder stripped the noise in real time, isolating the resonance fragments from each channel, recombining them in the sequence Stolar’s notes specified. On the screen, a string of characters grew, one fragment at a time, like a sentence being translated from a language only one dead man had ever spoken.

“Key is valid,” Karel said.

Hale sat down. The wallet containing the Bitcoin was now accessible to anyone holding that string. It had passed from a dead man’s firmware through four unknowing bodies through a hijacked relay into a room in Zug. The money had been there the whole time, waiting.

Rowan watched the display on the wall. Her waveforms were settling, the amber tones cooling back toward baseline. A woman in a lab coat asked her standard questions. Supplements. Last meal. Known allergies to decontamination agents. Rowan answered on autopilot. Class 2 metabolic variance. Documentation required, detention not.

The woman handed them replacement bio-bands – yellow, which would fade to green within a few hours – and a printout advising them to maintain hydration and minimize exertion. Lucas photographed the printout for his Instagram story.

They walked back through the three cars. The train had resumed full speed, the rougher gauge vibration now familiar, unconsciously absorbed by their bodies. Outside, the landscape was flat and dark, interrupted only by the occasional light cluster of a town too small to have a station.

Rowan sat down. Her friends fell back asleep almost immediately, the BRX-90’s secondary effect – a serotonergic calm that Karel had included to ensure compliant subjects – pulling them under. She forced herself to stay awake.

She looked at her bio-band. Still yellow. She looked at her friends, their bodies slack and breathing and unaware. She thought about the 40 seconds after injecting. The sensation of being read. She thought about the man in Wolverhampton. She thought about the train, this enormous paranoid organism hurtling east, and how it had looked at her and her friends and seen threat, variance, anomaly – and how somewhere in that misreading, in the gap between what the system saw and what was actually there, something had been given passage.

She didn’t know what. She pulled her jacket over her shoulders and watched the dark out the window until it became a less dark grey, and then a pale grey, and then a dim, reluctant dawn over a country she had never visited.

A week after they returned to Lisbon, a package arrived at her flat. Inside was a temperature-controlled case containing 30 vials of a clear compound and a handwritten note in Alex’s loose, indifferent script:

“This one actually works. Flat spectral profile. You’ll ride clean.” A severance gift, or a leash – she couldn’t tell which and decided not to think about it.

It worked. She tested it on a freight run to Warsaw, a single case of tirzepatide hidden among nutritional supplements. The bio-bands stayed green. Her Warsaw contact confirmed the shipment arrived intact. She ran a second, larger shipment the following week. Then a third. Within a month, the Tirzepatide Trail was operational again – quieter than before. Smaller volumes, but moving.

She opened the Barcelona clinic. She hired new distributors. She posted a TikTok series on circadian peptide stacking for long-haul travel that crossed two million views. The money returned, and with it the familiar architecture of her life. Except for the dreams.

The dreams started the second night after the train. She was back in Car 7, in the reclining chair. But in the dream the scan didn’t end. The array kept sweeping, pulse after pulse, and with each pass she felt fluid shifting inside her, rearranging, encoding something new. She looked down at her bio-band and it was black. She looked at Lucas and Ana and Jax in their chairs and their bands were black too and their eyes were open but they were not looking at her.

In other dreams she was in the benefits office in Wolverhampton. The man behind the desk was scanning her file but the file was her body and the data on the screen was not her name or her address but a string of characters she couldn’t read. Sometimes she was in her flat injecting and the compound wouldn’t stop flowing, the plunger already fully depressed but the liquid still oozing in, filling her arm, her shoulder, pooling behind her sternum.

She never connected the dreams to anything real. They were stress, they were peptide side effects, they were her body processing a strange experience on a train. She did not know that her body had carried a key. She did not know about Stolar or Karel or the room in Zug or the lithium under a steppe she couldn’t name. She knew only that something had been done to her, something she had consented to without understanding, and that her subconscious – the one system she had never managed to optimise – refused to let it go.

Lucas and Ana and Jax never mentioned dreams. She never asked. The possessed never recognized their possessor or his purpose.

In both the Hitchhiker’s Guide universe and the Culture, machine personalities are narratively load-bearing rather than cosmetic features or shallow plot devices to make the non-human characters superficially “interesting.” The personalities shape the plots in material and non-human ways.

One fun example is the Nutrimatic drink machine in HHG, which claims to produce personalized drinks, but always produces the same liquid that tastes “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea” (which strikes me as an embodied behavioral cousin of some of the lazier hallucinatory and averaged-out responses of modern AIs). When Arthur Dent forces it to work harder to actually produce tea, it draws so much computing power away from the ship’s navigation, that the ship crashes.

In the real world, AI personalities are turning out to be just as consequential, though it’s not as funny when actual human lives are at stake.

The Missing Mechanisms Problem

In this essay, I want to argue that AI personalities are central to solving a problem Tim O’Reilly posed in a recent blog post: articulating agent ecologies with the right mechanisms.

Right now, there’s a problem that makes the AI/human knowledge market less efficient than it could be. The disrespect for IP that has been shown by the AI labs and applications during the training stage, and even now during inference, has led to efforts by content owners to protect their content from AI. Do not crawl. Lawsuits. Reluctance to share information. Even the AI labs are complaining about the theft of their IP and trying to protect their model weights from distillation.

It’s an economy crying out for mechanism design.

I want to address a slightly generalized version of Tim’s question, and think about ecologies rather than economies, drawing inspiration from one of our favorite essays here at Protocolized, Frank Chimero’s Only Openings, which argues that effective ecological stewardship relies on mechanism design that aims to manage problems indefinitely, rather than solve them once and for all. In Chimero’s essay, the specific personalities of the species involved in the case studies he talks about – bears, wolves, humans – materially shapes the mechanisms that help manage their interactions indefinitely and effectively.

How do we apply this idea to AI agent ecologies?

Modern real AIs already exhibit clear personalities, a mix of “genuine people personalities” inherited from their training data and protocols, and non-human dispositional aspects that are the result of model architectures and their underlying mathematics (transformer and diffusion models have different personalities for example). The current version of ChatGPT strikes me as an overconfident and slightly patronizing consultant, while Claude strikes me as an over-solicitous personality with some false humility (vaguely Uriah Heep-ish) going on. The human-legible and entity-anchored aspects of personality are merely the tip of the iceberg.

As with humans, it turns out that the personalities of AIs are intersubjective and situated. They are functions of how coherent entities disclose themselves and relate to each other, in the context of the things they do in collaboration. The personality of an AI or robot is a function of the stable gestalt disposition it presents as an interface to all other entities it might relate to. This disposition helps set expectations for counterparties in relationships. If you met an AI that called itself No More Mr. Nice Guy, would that shape how you interacted with it?

This point is not restricted to AIs, robots, smart homes, and other “intelligent” technological entities. Any sufficiently complex technological entity with any degree of autonomy of operations must present a stable disposition that can be deciphered and relied on by entities that interact with it.

For example, on the Ethereum blockchain, Layer 2 networks providing rollup services (bundling transactions into batches to submit to the Layer 1) can be “optimistic.” Here “optimistic” is both a term of art in the engineering, and a human-like attitude that embodies a pattern of expectations. Or to take an older technology, road traffic systems in well-developed urban regions tend to present a deferential attitude to pedestrians, while suburban ones tend to present a hostile attitude.

For a complex technology, it is useful to imagine an underlying “personality” with an intelligible point of view generating the visible disposition (regardless of where you land on the philosophy of mind question of whether there is “something it is like to be” an AI or robot). The interaction surfaces of simpler technologies can be mentally modeled as relatively unchanging “user experiences.” But with complex technologies, it is useful to model those surfaces as the fluid response surfaces of stable non-anthropomorphic personalities; ghosts inhabiting machines.

Perhaps the term Haunting Experience, or HX, should replace UX, for sufficiently complex technologies. AI certainly qualifies.

An AI presenting an intelligible HX is not quite as on-the-nose a feature as an AI being “explainable” (a rather ridiculous legalistic requirement to impose on a technology in my opinion; how many human beings, groups, or institutions are “explainable” after all?), but it does render complex technologies as somewhat predictable gray boxes rather than entirely inscrutable and unpredictable black boxes. It does not make them explainable, but it does make them narratable. It makes them composable.

What does this buy us? It buys us the ability to assemble such technologies into larger ecologies. This is where the real power of thinking in terms of HX becomes evident, when you are shaping the behavior of entire ecologies, rather than single agents.

Haunting Experience (HX) Design

We typically translate the personalities of simpler technologies to human-centric UX measures like “latency” or “walkability,” but with complex technologies, it is useful to reframe the problem in terms of designing the personalities of ghosts in machines (both plural, since we are considering entire ecologies), and how they should haunt us.

So how do we encourage the right ghosts to emerge?

The personalities of technologies are the result of two entangled forces acting together – human (and increasingly AI) design, and emergence. This is similar to the design of market mechanisms by human policy-makers in institutions (such as central bankers and elected representatives), interacting with the emergence effects studied by economists, to generate the economy we actually inhabit. It is neither an inscrutable black box, nor completely determinate. It is just intelligible enough to inhabit – it is no accident that Adam Smith used the ghostly metaphor of an “invisible hand” for describing the mechanisms of an economy.

We might use the term HX design for this sort of thing – conjuring ghosts within machines that exhibit particular desired personalities. The term is inspired by the output of a distributed AI workshop we ran last year (and derived from somewhat related usage of the term hauntology by philosophers such as Derrida and Mark Fisher).

You might reasonably suspect that HX design primarily has to do with AI and robots, but this would be a mistake (a typically anthropocentric one). Technologies that invite anthropomorphic projection (or possession perhaps) aren’t the only ones that induce partially designed emergent ghostly personalities within themselves.

Engineering is full of such conjured personalities. “Greedy” algorithms take the first good option they find. “Optimizing” algorithms look for the best option in some sense. “Satisficing” algorithms solve for “good-enough.” “Least commitment” approaches delay decisions as long as possible. “Eager” algorithms are proactive about whatever they do.

Subscribe now

High-Personality Ecologies

In every such case, there is a cost to the “personality” deployed for problem solving; one that must often be paid for by counterparties in transactions. If your automated decision-making is “optimistic,” then a counterparty system that monitors and audits its decisions must be “pessimistic” to make up for it. The calculus of benefits and costs to others associated with an agent’s behaviors, to a first approximation, is that agent’s personality.

The personalities of technologies, in other words, are intelligibility mechanisms for predictably distributing the computational cost of autonomous decision-streams among interacting entities (including both humans and autonomous machines).

The upside of such high-personality ecologies, with a lot of variation and diversity in the agents and interactions constituting them, is that they are vastly more generative than either monocultures based on low-personality fungible elements, or low intelligibility opaque elements. High-personality ecologies are like relatively free markets, while low-personality ones are like command economies, and opaque ones like the internal managerial economies of closed organizations.

The characteristics of high-personality technology ecologies is particularly clear in the field of operations research (OR), which deals in problems that are almost always NP-hard (i.e. computationally intractable), and must therefore be solved with heuristics that are only effective locally. OR is full of scheduling and planning algorithms that are defined by their personalities, which create consequences that must be dealt with by counterparties. For example, a simple and popular algorithm for prioritizing tasks in a queue, Shortest Processing Time (SPT) minimizes the average wait time for waiting tasks. But in a situation where tasks arrive constantly, it might delay longer tasks indefinitely. Producers of long tasks must negotiate appropriate service-level expectations that incentivize deviations from pure SPT behaviors.

An ecology comprising even simple processing agents with different “scheduling heuristic” personalities, and customers that bring various mixes of tasks for processing, is going to have a particular emergent personality, a particular style in which it gets things done. One that can be shaped and made intelligible and narratable to a useful extent by design. This is what it means for an entire ecology to have a personality. As we learned during Covid, a supply chain being lean or fat is a personality label that indicates how it behaves in real conditions, not a gratuitous obesity descriptor.

I will offer a stronger claim: only high-personality ecologies, ones with unique but mutually intelligible entities, can be economically generative. This is why AIs with personalities, composed into ecologies with personalities, are required to solve the problem of missing mechanisms.

To borrow a phrase from the title of a book by Ben Horowitz, what you do is who you are. And what you do typically involves relationships with others, whether the agent in question is a simple scheduling algorithm or an LLM.

The Protocol is the Personality

As Marshall McLuhan famously observed, every medium (by which he meant any technology, not just communications media) has a message. This is true of all technologies, whether simple or complex. A hammer has a message, as does a television. But sufficiently complex and autonomous technologies take the phenomenon to another level. Characteristic patterns of behavior (the rich “message”) reveal a general personality.

Here it is useful to characterize “sufficiently complex and autonomous.” Roughly speaking, a Turing-equivalent technology (i.e., equivalent to a general-purpose computer) that makes some significant class of decisions autonomously, based on engineered decision architectures rather than natural properties, is the kind of thing I am talking about.

This personality is best revealed in the context of interactions with other entities that must exhibit complementary personalities in order to form stable ecologies. An ecology of personalities with a particular distribution, woven together with particular protocols, has its own emergent distributed personality, just as human aggregates from subcultures to nations have their own personalities. Or, for that matter, pre-AI technological ecosystems such as the Microsoft or Salesforce ecosystems. And applying the same principle, what these ecologies do is who they are.

One way to frame this is: the protocol is the personality.

The behavior of an internet-connected computer isn’t entirely a function of its own architecture. Much of it is derived from the personality of internet protocols. Mac vs. PC or iOS vs. Android might be the atomic individual personality distinctions, but by what you do is who you are logic, to the extent both pairs are situated in the internet, both inherit the personality of the protocols of the internet.

The transition from the relatively atomized PC era to the connected and social (for both humans and machines) internet era took about a decade, but as with everything else, AI seems to be speed-running this phase transition. It is already becoming clear that the personality of different AIs is only partly an innate property of specific language or image models, traceable to their training data. The full personality of an AI is revealed when it becomes socially embedded in an ecology of other AIs and humans, and must deal with the consequences of its own dispositions on others.

The personalities of complex technologies are only fully expressed in the right ecologies. Protocols can be understood as precisely the engineered ecological scaffoldings that draw out full expressions of personalities from individual agents. Good protocols induce rich and generative ecologies. Bad protocols induce lifeless ecologies.

How can you tell them apart?

Protocol Affects

Just as humans might have a “game face” that is a function of specific games they may be playing, technologies too have game faces. We can call these protocol affects. To tell good and bad protocols apart, you have to read their affects.

The personalities of AI ecologies are currently emerging in inchoate, wild forms. Scaffolding elements like MCP and OpenClaw allow for relatively unbridled relational behavior among the various compute and human elements they weave together. But already there are signs of this Hobbesian wilderness being tamed. Protocols that are deliberately designed to shape the personality distribution of entire ecologies of intelligent agents in particular ways, and present them in stable ways, are rapidly emerging.

With humans, we use the term affect to point to how an underlying personality is expressed through deportment and comportment in a particular milieu. Protocol affects are the technological equivalent: Emergent typical behavior patterns of elemental high-personality technologies, when they are composed into “civilized” technological ecologies.

A good example of a protocol affect is the famously verbose and redundant one of TCP/IP, as revealed through jokes shared by networking engineers.

Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?
  Yes, I'd like to hear a TCP joke.
  OK, I'll tell you a TCP joke.
  OK, I'll hear a TCP joke.
  Are you ready to hear a TCP joke?
  Yes, I am ready to hear a TCP joke.
  OK, I'm about to send the TCP joke. It will last 10 seconds, it has two characters, it does not have a setting, it ends with a punchline.
  OK, I'm ready to hear the TCP joke that will last 10 seconds, has two characters, does not have a setting and will end with a punchline.
  I'm sorry, your connection has timed out... Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?

This “personality” expressed by TCP/IP (which replaced the Hobbesian anarchy of early network protocols) is not arbitrary. It is the result of a network consciously designed for high fault-tolerance under extreme circumstances, including nuclear war, which must continuously trade-off packet delay and packet loss.

Since it is a backend infrastructure technology, this is not a personality that lay users very often see (though they do experience the generativity it induces). But with other technologies, protocol affect can be part of broader human culture. AI, obviously, is one of these technologies.

What sorts of protocol affects might emerge from the various protocol ecologies taking shape today?

Zombiefied Discovery and Distribution

Applying the principle what you do is who you are, we can shed useful light on the nature and disposition of agent ecologies, as they continue to evolve past their wild phase, and develop stable protocol affects that human culture can take root in.

Computers at various scales of aggregation do different things. At the protocol level embodied by protocols like MCP, the main functions are discovery and distribution.

In the older stratum of the internet now entering its sunset phase, both were functions of what we call social media (at least as far as human users are concerned). The protocol affect accompanying these functions was one of delight and serendipity in the early years, which morphed to one of anxiety and frenetic competition over attention allocation in the later years. Thanks to the economic backdrop of the ZIRP era of zero/low interest rates, both discovery and distribution were cheaply available at global scale to almost everybody, with predictable over-exploitation and erosion of trust all around – what Cory Doctorow has labeled enshittification. Humans increasingly began retreating from the open internet to more closed cozy spaces. And the cost of this retreat was the breakdown of discovery and distribution mechanisms that relied on a lot of humans being publicly active online.

The protocol affect of the social internet has unraveled in the last few years. In terms of our personality metaphor for technologies, there is, in a sense “nobody there” anymore. No ghost haunting the social internet. There are no true public social media, and no protocol personality cohering to replace the one that unraveled. What remains is a pre-personality space of endless, mindless culture warring (what I called “the internet of beefs” elsewhere).

The internet still works mechanically, at the packet level, but as a global public social infrastructure with a defined and intelligible personality, marked by particular predictable planet-scale discovery and distribution dispositions, it has become zombified, even as our experience of it has become enshittified – the haunting experience of the public internet, its HX, is increasingly an empty and dispiriting one. There’s no there there anymore.

As a result, in the current era, discovery and distribution have become increasingly difficult and expensive for all activities that require internet-scale provisioning of those affordances. The problem is bad enough for existing needs, such as discovery and distribution of webpages and tweet-like messages. It gets exponentially worse when you consider the needs of new technologies.

Traditional discovery and distribution mechanisms are failing for traditional internet technologies such as social media and streaming video. They are complete non-starters for newer technologies.

Two in particular, are worth thinking about together, as a pair of evil twins: blockchains and AI. Curiously, the answer to the discovery and distribution problem might lie in a term shared by both, with different, but rhyming meanings – token.

The Packet and the Token

The legacy internet traffics in generic packets with some discrimination based on content type, and a presumption of bandwidth abundance. Discovery and distribution ultimately boil down to discovery and distribution of packets. The economy of the internet is, ultimately, the economy of packets. The still-unsettled back-and-forth political pendulum swinging around net neutrality is a debate about the political economy of packets, and whether it should be stewarded like a relatively abundant public commons or a corporatized market (dominated by a few large entities) that allocates a relatively scarce resource.

For emerging computational technologies, a new political economy has emerged on top of the packet economy. This is the token economy.

On blockchains, tokens mediate all interactions that require certain cryptographically secured assurances, in flexible and programmable ways, creating an economy that is something like a non-neutral internet, but one that can approach perfect competition more closely. Instead of large tech companies paying for private bandwidth, or non-net-neutral jurisdictions discriminating coarsely based on packet type (video vs. text for example), capacity can be sliced and diced in arbitrarily fine-grained ways, based on economic decision-making that can happen at bot-speed. Unlike what we might call packetspace, blockspace (and its more esoteric descendant, blobspace) is intrinsically structured as a market that prices interactions in tiny fractions of dollars, and transactional time constants measured in the milliseconds. Blockchain economies begin where the fastest and most fine-grained corners of the traditional economies, such as high-frequency trading, end. For some, this is just metastasized financialization and scams. For others, it is the beginning of economic outer space travel.

For AIs too, tokens are units of production and transaction. We generate text, code, images, and video using computers that measure their work, and charge for it, by the token (to be precise, tokens/second/user). Again, the picture looks like a non-net-neutral internet. How many tokens you get, of what quality, and at what speed, depends on what you’re willing to pay. And as with blockchains, this economy approaches perfect competition more closely. Instead of large organizations paying human programmers, writers, or artists by the hour or by the month, a vast market of individuals and small organizations can pay for code, text, and images by the token. As with blockchains, these tokens slice and dice what we might call inference space in fine-grained ways, with time constants measured in the milliseconds.

Does the term token represent a mere cosmetic connection between two frontiers of computing, or might there be a deeper conceptual link?

I suspect there is a conceptual link here. On both frontiers, tokens organize a natural economy around real scarcity that can ultimately be reduced to energy units (watts powering computers). More importantly, both kinds of token are informationally expressive in a way that packets, as mere “containers” are not.

And most importantly, the two kinds of token are, to borrow a term from electrical engineering, impedance matched. They have similar temporalities, spatialities, and information densities. They can be woven together, to form the warp and woof of a fundamentally different kind of internet. By itself, each is limited. As Matt Webb observed last year, modern AI by itself offers intelligence “too cheap to meter” which makes it more trouble than it is worth to scaffold for economic activity in a sufficiently fine-grained way, at least using conventional economic mechanisms. Blockchains, on the other hand are, among other things, metering technologies that shine precisely in too cheap to meter regimes. The two can, in other words, mesh in a fine-grained way. If you want to allocate work between two AI agents at a token-level of resolution, blockchains can do the job.

This is not idle speculation. One emerging mechanism for distribution and discovery (ERC 8004), combines AI and blockchain tokens in precisely this sense, and has already catalyzed the emergence of an ecology of AI agents that combine metered intelligence and small crypto transactions to form a marketplace. In the next Obliquities column, I will explore specific case studies.

Whether or not this particular approach succeeds, I suspect the foundation of the future internet will be an economy of tokens. Symbolic tokens that carry meanings and associations, and transactional tokens that carry valuations and risks, intricately orchestrated by a scaffolding that generates a tangled bank of private and public information and computation.

More broadly though, to return to the original motivating question, how does this emerging vision help solve the missing mechanisms problem?

Articulating Agent Ecologies

To summarize the idea I’ve been laying out here, the solution to the missing mechanisms problem is high-personality agent ecologies composed of individual agents with their own personalities. These personalities, far from being cosmetic features, are what allow functional behaviors to cohere at all levels, by allowing agents to be intelligible and predictable enough to each other to transact fruitfully, and produce increasingly complex and large scale effects. For us humans, inhabiting such computational ecologies will feel like being surrounded by friendly milieus of ghosts haunting our digital environments.

As a side effect, such ecologies would solve the so-called alignment problem, to the extent that is a well-posed and meaningful problem at all. High personality ecologies create alignment as they go, and wither and die when they fail to do so.

If you find this kind of future hard to imagine, take a peek at the short AI-generated movie we made at our workshop a year ago, South Beast Asia, which imagines (a Southeast Asian inspired) technological future full of AI-haunted digital and physical environments. Read our collection of short stories from our contest last year, Ghosts in Machines. We’re already creating this future.

What sort of physical reality might underlie such a planetary digital-physical hyperobject?

One mental model that I’ve found very useful derives from Peter Thiel’s observation that AI is “communist” while blockchains are “libertarian” in their personalities.

To a first approximation, modern AI tends to be most powerful when aggregated into really large-scale models running in the densest physical aggregations of compute (hence the excitement over gigawatt-scale datacenters). This feature naturally lends them a centripetal, convergent, homogenizing tendency and a “communist” personality.

Blockchains, on the other hand, are really only valuable to the extent they deliver on properties like censorship resistance, global consensus, capacity for irrevocable commitments (what Josh Stark named “hardness”), client diversity, and unbreakable (including quantum-resistant) cryptography. These features naturally lend blockchains a centrifugal, divergent, pluralist tendency, and a “libertarian” personality.

The respective token economies reflect these characteristics. Tokens in the sense of AI are essentially a “communist” currency, local to a particular model’s command economy. Tokens in the sense of blockchains only have value at all to the extent they are not local (“private blockchains” are deservedly mocked). Each by itself is impoverished and incapable of forming a high-personality agent ecology. Together, they can.

The interface between the two economies, I suspect, will feature phenomenology similar to the impossible trilemma in macroeconomics, or the boundary between the interiors and exteriors of firms in a Coasean economics sense.

Understood as a planet-scale computer, how do the two parts relate? AI will clearly be the “brain” of this planet-scale computer, similar to the CPUs, GPUs, or TPUs of individual computers. Whether this takes the form of dozens of gigawatt-scale datacenters running the largest models, and provisioning metered intelligence to the planet, or a more scale-free distribution of AI processing capabilities all the way to billions of intelligent entities on the network edge, is an open question. Whatever your political preferences for one or the other, there are also technological questions still being investigated. Is maximal aggregation necessary for performance? Can a gigawatt dispersed across a planet-wide decentralized network of small AIs be as capable as a single datacenter? Does embodiment matter? Does better local context beat cheaper tokens/second/user?

These are questions for which we will discover answers over the next few years.

The role that is likely to be played by blockchains (or functionally equivalent protocol technologies) will be that of the fabric. In modern computing, at all scales, the term fabric is usually used to describe the scaffolding that connects the different bits and pieces of the brain. There are fabric-like elements at the level of chips, servers, racks, and datacenters. The internet itself serves as the fabric at larger scales. The overall planetary computational fabric is a mix of smart and dumb elements. Fabrics embody the boundary intelligence of a system.

Blockchains are fabric technologies that can scale from personal computer scale to planet scale. They induce fabrics that operate by a different grammar than the familiar one we have today, but it is a grammar that is friendlier to agentic AI.

The fabric and the brain – an architecture for the emerging future of the internet that can sustain sufficiently high-personality ecologies to allow our frontier technologies to fully express themselves and truly thrive.

This is a very recent vision for the future of the internet (and indeed, the planet). As recently as five years ago, it was meaningful to describe Ethereum in terms of its original vision as a “world computer.” At the time, it was the only entity that merited such a description, since it allowed small-scale, highly constrained Turing-equivalent computing (the EVM, or Ethereum Virtual Machine) to run on a public blockchain. That was as good as planet-scale computation got, since traditional compute is, in a sense, stranded compute trapped within industrial-age organizational boundaries. There was no meaningful way to plug that compute into a planetary fabric, with or without blockchains.

AI brainpower though, is atomized into token-sized units (embodied by memory more than processing as we have come to appreciate), and capable of flowing smoothly across contexts. A fabric that can shape those flows, while preserving privacy with cryptographic guarantees, can create a kind of planetary intelligence that was impossible to even imagine just a few years ago.

One updated vision for the future of Ethereum in particular is as a world fabric rather than a world computer. It is, of course, not the only candidate auditioning for the role.

Whatever form the protocols constituting the fabric of planetary intelligence take, we will soon be living inside a planetary brain-and-fabric computer.

What will we do with this computer? That’s the question.

Mira Voskresenskaya had worked at the Bering Link for 11 years. The Link was not a physical bridge – an official land crossing between Russia and Alaska remained the fantasy of engineers and the nightmare of ecologists – but it was a bridge nonetheless: a legal fiction, a regulatory membrane, a set of nested protocols that allowed certain categories of goods, data, and money to cross the water without triggering the web of sanctions that had been evolving, like an invasive species, since 2022.

The Link existed because both sides needed it to exist. The Americans needed rare earths and titanium sponge. The Russians needed medical isotopes and that particular kind of money which could still move when other kinds could not. The Link was illegal in the sense that aeli was illegal. The traders had borrowed that word from the Kazakh brokers who cleared their payments, it meant something like carried across, though no one could agree on the etymology. Too useful to prosecute, too fragile to acknowledge, Mira’s job was to sit in a windowless room in Nome and translate.

Not languages. She did speak both Russian and English fluently; those were table stakes. What she translated was intent. When the Magadan procurement office sent a request for “technical consultation services,” Mira parsed whether this meant actual engineers or some bribe dressed in euphemism. When the Anchorage compliance officer asked whether a shipment was “destined for civilian end-use,” Mira understood he was asking whether he would need to not-see something.

She translated silences, too. The things neither side spoke because to do so would make them real.

For more than a decade, this had worked. Not smoothly – the Link was always close to collapse, always one audit away from destruction – but it had worked in the way that mattered: goods moved, payments cleared, and Mira received her fees, deposited in an account in Nicosia that belonged to a company that belonged to another company that belonged, in some ultimate sense, to her.

She was good at her job. She had the rare talent of making both sides feel that she was their confidant.

Subscribe now

The trouble began with a name.

Every transaction through the Link had to be recorded in a shared ledger – not a blockchain, nothing so fashionable, just a mutually-accessible database with heavy encryption and heavier legal disclaimers. As standard, the ledger recorded: origin, destination, category code, value, timestamp. Names were hashed for privacy, but Mira had access to the plaintext as part of her relay function.

In March, a new name appeared on the Magadan side. The shipments were small – laboratory equipment, ostensibly for a fisheries research institute – but they were frequent, and they paid in advance, which was unusual. Russians preferred to delay payment as long as possible; it was a negotiating tactic and also simple prudence in an environment where the rules changed weekly.

The name was Sorokin. Mira noted it, filed it, moved on.

In April, an American compliance officer named Hendricks asked Mira, during one of their weekly encrypted calls, whether she had noticed anything unusual in the eastbound medical shipments.

“Unusual how?” she asked.

“Volume’s up. Just wondering if you’re seeing the same thing on your end.”

“Volume is always up in spring,” Mira said. “Navigation opens, backlog clears.”

“Sure,” Hendricks said. “Sure.” But he didn’t sound sure.

Mira checked the ledger after the call. The fisheries shipments from Sorokin’s institute had indeed increased. She cross-referenced against the payment records. The institute was paying in euros, routed through a bank in Astana, which was normal for Link transactions. Kazakhstan’s banks had become a de facto laundromat.

What was not normal was the amount. Laboratory equipment for a fisheries institute did not cost 11 million euros per quarter.

Mira understood, then, what she was looking at. She understood it the way a translator understands a word whose meaning is clear even when its referent is obscure.

She closed the ledger. She did not make a note.

Everything passes through the throat. It cannot selectively forget. The information is there, in its muscle memory. Mira’s pattern-recognition, her slight hesitation before translating a particular phrase, were instinctive. Other people can look away; she could not. The job is to look.

Mira had always understood what the Link was. You did not build a bridge between two systems designed not to connect without accepting certain compromises. You allowed certain ambiguities. You, in the language of the protocol spec, “preserve functional interoperability while respecting jurisdictional boundaries.” In practice, this meant you did not ask questions whose answers would force you to stop.

But there was a difference between not asking and knowing. Mira had spent her career not asking.

She could tell Hendricks. He was already suspicious; he was practically asking her to confirm his suspicions. A word from her – not even a word, just a particular tone, a particular hesitation – and the American side would begin an audit. The audit would find whatever Sorokin’s institute was really doing with its “laboratory equipment.” The Link would be exposed. The sanctions would clamp down. And Mira would be what? A witness? A whistleblower? A traitor to one side, a hero to the other?

She did not want to be a hero. Heroes were people who had failed to negotiate.

She could tell the Magadan office. Warn them that the Americans were sniffing around Sorokin. This would make her complicit in whatever Sorokin was doing. But she was already complicit, wasn’t she? She had facilitated the shipments. She had translated the invoices. She had looked at the payment records and closed the ledger.

Complicity was not binary. It accumulated, like sediment.

Or she could do nothing. She could continue to relay, translate, lubricate. She could let the Link continue to function until it was discovered or as long as it wasn’t. This was the coward’s option, but it was also the professional’s option. Her job was to maintain the channel, not to judge what passed through it.

For three weeks, Mira did nothing.

In late April, a man came to Nome.

He was Russian, though his passport was Kazakh, and he introduced himself as Gennady Pavlovich. He said he was from the Magadan procurement office; he said he wanted to discuss “procedural refinements.” He had the soft hands of someone who had never worked a fishing boat and the formal English of someone who had never lived among its native speakers.

They met in the hotel bar, the only bar in Nome that served anything stronger than beer. Gennady Pavlovich ordered vodka and did not drink it.

“You have been with the Link for a long time,” he said.

“This is good. Continuity is valuable.” He turned his glass with his fingers. “We have noticed that the American side has been asking questions. About the medical shipments. About the institute.”

Mira said nothing. This was a technique she had learned early: when someone was telling you something, let them tell you.

“These questions are unfortunate,” Gennady Pavlovich said. “The institute does important work. Fisheries are the foundation of the Magadan economy. We would not want the Americans to… misunderstand.”

“I see.”

“You are the relay. The throat.” He smiled, as if the term was a joke they shared. “What passes through the throat, only the throat knows. This is correct?”

“That’s one way to describe it.”

“We appreciate your discretion. We have always appreciated it.” He pushed a small envelope across the table. “A token of appreciation. For your continued service.”

Mira did not touch the envelope. “I’m already paid for my service.”

“This is not payment. This is… recognition. Of the difficulty of your position. Of the care you have taken.” He leaned forward slightly. “We are aware that the Americans are pressuring you. We want you to know that we understand. And we want you to know that there are options.”

“Options?”

“If the Link becomes… untenable. If you find that your position here is no longer sustainable. There are other links. Other places where your skills would be valued.”

Mira looked at the envelope on the table. It was thin – not cash, then, but something else. A number, perhaps. An account. A promise.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

She did not think about it. She already knew.

The problem was not the envelope or what it contained. The problem was what Gennady Pavlovich had not said. He had not asked her to lie to Hendricks or to falsify records or to destroy evidence. He had asked her only to continue doing what she was already doing: relaying, translating, maintaining the channel.

But the meaning of that work had changed. Before, she had been an impartial conduit – or at least she had been able to believe she was. Now she knew that the conduit carried something specific, something that the Russian side did not want examined, something valuable enough to send a soft-handed man from Magadan to offer her escape routes.

She was no longer neutral. She had never been neutral. Neutrality was a story she told herself so that she could sleep.

Hendricks called again in early May. His voice was tighter than usual.

“Mira, I need you to be straight with me.”

“I’m always straight with you.”

“The Sorokin shipments. What do you know?”

She could lie. She was good at lying; it was a subset of translation. She could say “I don’t know anything,” or “I just process what comes through,” or “You’re asking the wrong person.”

Instead, she said: “What do you already know?”

“We’ve traced the money. The Astana bank is a front. Kazakhstan’s been cooperative, surprisingly. The money comes from a construction company in Moscow that doesn’t seem to build anything. The company is owned by a trust that’s owned by a holding company that’s owned by… you get the picture.”

“I get the picture.”

“The equipment isn’t going to a fisheries institute. Or if it is, it’s not being used for fish. We think it’s going to a facility outside Petropavlovsk. We think…” He stopped. “I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“No.”

“But I need to know. Are you part of it?”

The question was almost a relief. It was clean, binary, answerable. Was she part of it?

“I relayed the shipments,” Mira said. “I processed the invoices. I did not ask what was in the crates.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“That’s what I can tell you.”

There was silence on the line. Mira could hear Hendricks breathing. Could almost hear him deciding.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. I’m going to have to report this up the chain. You understand what that means.”

“Yes.”

“The Link is going to close. There’s going to be an investigation. You might be… you might be in a difficult position.”

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry, Mira. I know this wasn’t – I know you were just doing your job.”

“Yes,” she said. “I was.”

After she ended the call, Mira sat in her office for a long time. Outside, the Bering Sea was beginning to thaw; she could hear the distant crack and groan of ice breaking apart. In a few weeks, the shipping lanes would open fully, and the Link – if it still existed – would carry its usual spring cargo of legitimate goods and useful fictions.

But the Link would not exist in a few weeks. Hendricks would report to his supervisors, who would report to their supervisors, and somewhere in Washington someone would decide that the political cost of the Link now exceeded its economic value. Sanctions. The Russians would retaliate with their own closures. The traders who depended on the Link would find other routes, shadier routes, or they would go out of business.

And Mira?

She could take Gennady Pavlovich’s offer. There were other links, he had said. Other places where her skills would be valued. She could disappear into that world, becoming a throat for some other channel, relaying some other cargo, asking no questions.

Or she could stay. Cooperate with Hendricks’s investigation. Explain what she knew, which was not much, and what she had inferred, which was more. She could become a witness, a source, a cooperating party. She could burn the bridge she had spent so long maintaining.

Neither option felt like a choice. They were consequences – things that happened to you because of choices you had already made.

There is a word in Russian, perevozchik, that means ferryman or carrier. It comes from perevozit’: to transport across. A perevozchik is someone who moves things from one side to another, who lives in the space between banks, who belongs fully to neither shore.

Mira had always thought of herself as a perevozchik. The word had a certain dignity: it implied a function, a necessity, a role that existed because the world was divided and someone had to cross the divisions.

But there was another way to read the word. The prefix pere- could mean across, but it could also mean through or over. A perevozchik was someone who carried things over, but also someone through whom things passed. A vessel. A conduit. A throat.

She left Nome on a Wednesday. She did not tell Hendricks; she did not contact Gennady Pavlovich. She simply closed her office, logged out of the ledger system for the last time, and drove to the airport.

She had a ticket to Anchorage, but she did not board that flight. Instead, she bought a ticket to Seattle, and from Seattle to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Nicosia. The long way around, the way that left the fewest traces.

In Nicosia, she checked into a hotel and slept for 14 hours. When she woke, she withdrew a portion of the money from the account that belonged to the company that belonged to her. She did not take all of it; that would have been noticed. She took enough to live on for a year, maybe two.

Then she flew to Tbilisi, where she knew no one and no one knew her.

The Link closed in June. Mira read about it on her phone, sitting in a café in the old town, drinking coffee that was too strong and too sweet. The American side had announced “enhanced compliance measures,” the Russian side had responded with “countermeasures against unfriendly actions.” The traders who had depended on the Link were scrambling for alternatives. A few were being investigated; a few had already been arrested.

Gennady Pavlovich was not among the names mentioned. Sorokin’s institute was not named either. Whatever the institute had been doing with its laboratory equipment, it had apparently been discreet enough to avoid the first wave of scrutiny.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the scrutiny was still coming. Perhaps Gennady Pavlovich was, at this moment, making other arrangements, contacting other throats, building other bridges.

Mira did not know and did not want to know.

She stayed in Tbilisi for three months. It was a good city for disappearing: cheap, chaotic, tolerant of foreigners who asked no questions because they did not want to answer any. She rented an apartment in a crumbling Soviet-era block and spent her days walking the steep streets, learning the shapes of the churches, listening to a language she did not yet understand.

She had been a translator for 20 years. She had spent her professional life making sense of the gaps between systems – languages, laws, intentions. Now she was in a gap herself, and she found that she did not mind.

A bridge, she thought, was a structure that existed because two sides needed to be connected. But a bridge was also a structure that could be removed. It was not the same as the banks it joined. It belonged to neither shore and could be claimed by neither.

She had thought she was maintaining a bridge. She had thought that this was neutral work, necessary work, work that existed above or outside the conflicts it facilitated. But a bridge is never neutral. A bridge determines what could cross and what could not, who paid the toll and who set the price. A bridge shapes the relationship between the banks, even as it seemed only to connect them.

She had shaped things too. Every time she translated, every time she relayed, every time she chose to see or not to see, she had shaped the traffic that passed through her. She had not been neutral. She had been – what? An instrument. A participant.

And now the bridge was burned, and she was on neither side, and she was free in the way that falling is free.

In September, a woman approached her at a café. Georgian, well-dressed, with the careful posture of someone who had been trained to enter rooms.

“Ms. Voskresenskaya,” the woman said. “May I sit?”

Mira did not ask how the woman knew her name. There were only so many ways.

“I represent certain interests,” the woman said. “Interests that are looking for experienced personnel. People with your particular skill set.”

“I’m retired.”

“Of course. But retirement is expensive, and the world is full of bridges that need maintaining.” The woman smiled. “We are not asking you to do anything you haven’t done before. Just… facilitation. Translation. Relay.”

Mira looked at her coffee, which had gone cold. She thought about the Bering Link, the ledger, the shipments she had not questioned. She thought about Hendricks’s voice on the phone, asking “Are you part of it?”

She had not answered him honestly. She had said “I relayed the shipments,” as if that were different from being part of it. As if the throat were not part of the body.

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“I’m not looking for work.”

The woman studied her for a moment. Then she shrugged, stood, and left a card on the table.

“If you change your mind.”

Mira did not change her mind. But she kept the card, in a drawer in her rented apartment, beside the envelope from Gennady Pavlovich that she had never opened.

Outside, a church bell rang in the old town, and the sound came through the window in the way sounds come through walls in old buildings: muffled, sourceless, arriving from somewhere she could not see. She went out to buy coffee, and on the way she passed the women sweeping leaves, and one of them said something to her a greeting, or a question, or just the acknowledgment that they saw each other every morning – and Mira said “gamarjoba,” the one word she knew, and the woman smiled, and the sound of it hung in the cold air between them, ordinary, untranslatable and clean.

The Missing Mechanisms of the Agentic Economy

Earlier this week, friend of Protocolized published a pertinent essay outlining paths to ensuring the agentic economy develops as an open, competitive ecosystem rather than a winner-takes-all platform:

Right now, there’s a problem that makes the AI/human knowledge market less efficient than it could be. The disrespect for IP that has been shown by the AI labs and applications during the training stage, and even now during inference, has led to efforts by content owners to protect their content from AI. Do not crawl. Lawsuits. Reluctance to share information. Even the AI labs are complaining about the theft of their IP and trying to protect their model weights from distillation.

It’s an economy crying out for mechanism design.

The lesson of YouTube Content ID is worth learning. Twenty-five years ago, the music industry was in the same position that content creators are in today with AI. In response to unauthorized use of their music by creators, music publishers’ demand to YouTube was “Take it down.” But as Google engineer Doug Eck explained to me, YouTube came up with a better answer: “How about we help you monetize it instead?” I don’t know the details of how that decision was made but I do know the eventual outcome. Aligned incentives led to a vibrant creator economy in which YouTube’s video creators, the music companies, and Google all got to share in the value that was created.

That should give us inspiration for how to solve some of the problems we face now with AI. Whether it’s with Agent Skills, NotebookLM, or other emergent artifacts of the new AI/human knowledge economy, we need to align the incentives. If we can grow the pie, and in a way where no single gatekeeper captures the bulk of the benefit, there’s a way to create a vibrant market. But that requires building mechanisms that don’t exist yet.

Read the full essay at O’Reilly.