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Beginnings

Some of the earliest fiction-related ideas floating around the Summer of Protocols community were joking observations. Kara Kittell assembled a supercut of moments from movies where somebody says the word “protocol.” kept pointing out an odd contrast in Star Trek – the original series contains no instances of the word across 80 episodes, while Voyager, three decades later, uses it 176 times across 168 episodes. Somewhere between Kirk and Janeway, the future acquired a lot more protocol-ishness.

In the world of Looney Tunes, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner famously operated according to a set of rules that Chuck Jones and his collaborators used to structure their encounters: the Road Runner stays on the road. The Coyote can only be harmed by his own incompetence or by ACME products. Gravity should, whenever possible, be his greatest enemy, etc. These rules do not make Road Runner protocol fiction, but they were protocol-ish in that their clever use generated an enormous amount of variation inside an otherwise repetitive universe.

This suggested an interesting relationship between protocols and stories. Rules that collide and combine with each other in interesting ways can generate stories rather than merely constrain them. Once you know the rules governing the Coyote and Road Runner, you can anticipate the shape of an episode without knowing exactly what will happen in it. A rocket, a giant magnet, a trompe l’oeil painting of a tunnel and a catapult could all enter the world while its underlying logic remains intact.

That led naturally toward stories where protocols exist inside the world as well.

Matt Webb had already been using the phrase “protocol fiction” in a more infrastructural sense: fiction that could make speculative systems believable by showing the network of actors, standards and incentives required for them to operate. His example of a national drone-delivery network gets at the distinction between protocols structuring a story vs speculating about protocols themselves. To paraphrase our favorite Frederik Pohl quote: the job of the protocol fiction writer is not to imagine the future of drones but the future of a world with drone swarms, stochastic terror induced by cheap drones and the change in our relationship to the environment dominated by drones.

Kafka gave us a third model for protocol fiction. This came through Nadia Asparouhova’s essay Dangerous Protocols, which considered the power that protocols acquire over their participants. Protocols coordinate action by narrowing possibilities. Once embedded deeply enough, they determine which actions are legible, available or permitted. Nadia described one outcome as the Kafka protocol: a protocol that has accumulated enough power that the person inside it becomes trapped in a maze they cannot understand or escape.

In The Trial and The Castle, the rules are sensed everywhere and never become completely visible. A person moves from clerk to office to messenger to procedure, learning fragments of a system whose total shape always recedes. The institution reveals itself through encounters with its edges. Its procedures provide the atmosphere of the story.

This was enormously useful because functioning protocols often disappear. When a protocol works, people carry on with their lives. Fiction typically depends on events, and protocols become eventful when somebody hits an edge, encounters an exception or finds themselves in the wrong relationship to the rules.

The Kafka model placed the system at the center and made the character its probe. The protocol became a vast structure never fully revealed to the unfortunate body passing through it.

Once we started producing stories, things became messier. People misunderstand protocols, exploit them, inherit them, counterfeit them, improvise around them and build folk explanations for why they work. Protocols collide with other protocols. They survive the problems that originally called them into existence. They move between communities and acquire different meanings without necessarily changing their formal structure. The fiction began to pull us away from the clean geometry of systems and toward the stranger cultural life that develops around them.

The Librarians

One important jump came through The Librarians, a series of stories I co-authored with AI, based on the Knowledge Futurama workshop hosted by Summer of Protocols at Edge Esmeralda. The exercise asked participants to imagine systems for preserving knowledge across a thousand years. Teams designed institutions and protocols; other teams introduced disasters, adversaries, technical changes and historical shocks. People from the Long Now Foundation participated, and the exercise drew heavily on the deep-time sensibility of pace layers and long-horizon institutional design.

A thousand years does something strange to a protocol. It gives it enough time to become a culture.

A rule introduced to solve a particular technological problem can remain after the technology disappears. An emergency procedure can become an annual ceremony. A classification system can harden into an ontology. A library designed to preserve information develops customs around what should be destroyed, who can access what has survived, and who is permitted to understand the preservation system itself.

The Librarians pushed protocol fiction into time. We could begin with something deliberately engineered and follow it until the original argument embedded in the protocol became difficult for its own custodians to recover. Procedure became tradition, tradition became superstition, superstition preserved fragments of operational logic. The line between an institution and its folklore became difficult to locate.

This also changed what fiction was doing for us. Stories could function as a way of running protocols forward and watching second- and third-order effects accumulate. A thought experiment usually isolates variables. Fiction lets the variables breed and mutate into new forms.

That possibility eventually fed back into protocol research itself. Helena Rong, Botao Hu and Samuel Chua used Knowledge Futurama and related protocol-fiction experiments in their work on “protocol futuring,” a speculative method for exploring the second-order dynamics of protocols embedded in sociotechnical systems. Fiction was becoming part of the research process: a way of discovering behaviors and interactions that were hard to derive from a protocol considered in isolation.

The crucible

In 2025 and 2026, we ran four fiction contests that upped the ante of genre development. The first three contests, Terminological Twists, Ghosts in The Machine, and Building and Burning Bridges, were based on specific protocol themes that were being investigated by Protocol Institute. The fourth, Jamverse, inaugurated our extended universe project. The contests brought in seasoned writers like Spencer Nitkey, while our openness to using AI in writing also invited stories from people with great ideas who might have shied away if we were solely preoccupied with human-produced prose.

Venkat has written about the crucible effect: the way concentrated collective attention can accelerate the development of a field. A group of people working on adjacent versions of the same problem begin teaching one another indirectly. They repeat moves, discard others, push techniques further, and create a local environment in which ideas evolve faster than they would in isolation.

The contests gave protocol fiction that kind of environment. Writers came in with very different instincts and with the same cluster of questions. What happens when rules persist for too long? What happens when two systems recognize the same person differently? What happens when an abstraction becomes the thing that governs the reality it was supposed to describe? What remains after a protocol loses its original purpose?

As more stories accumulated, a different sensibility became visible.

It wasn’t the comic stability of Wile E. Coyote, where the pleasure comes from watching endless variation inside a known set of rules. It also wasn’t quite the Kafka protocol, where the system towers over the individual and obscures itself through frustration, opacity and entrapment. The stories had started wandering somewhere else.

There was horror at a distance in them, though often without anything conventionally horrific taking place. Systems continued operating past the point where anybody fully understood them. Categories designed for one purpose started producing strange kinds of people and objects. Ancient cultural forms resurfaced inside contemporary technical systems. The organic kept encountering rules, classifications and infrastructures that had acquired persistence of their own.

Spencer Nitkey’s Soda Sweet as Blood is a good example. In the story, after his grandfather dies, the narrator begins the ordinary work of closing out his digital life. But when he tries to have his grandfather marked as deceased, a support message is replaced by ASCII art of a steaming cup of tea. Later, a bank chatbot answers him with a klon, the traditional Thai verse his grandfather used to write. Nothing has exactly come back from the dead. Instead, pieces of the grandfather – his identity contract, old messages, habits, writing and machine-readable traces – have begun surfacing through systems that are simply continuing to run.

The ghost fits because ghosts have always been creatures of persistence. Someone who should be gone continues making demands upon the living. Contemporary systems have developed their own persistence mechanisms: accounts that persist even after they have been abandoned, contracts that remain executable, records that cannot easily be forgotten, machine representations capable of continuing to speak.

Spencer’s Zoothesia stories approach the same territory through perception. People live inside systems that determine what they can see, what registers as dangerous, and whether another person remains socially perceptible at all. Randy Lubin’s Caduceus City places a murder investigation amidst the procedural cleanliness of a biotech campus, where process and transparency become part of the environment in which something can remain hidden. Liz Maher’s Legends & Ledgers places folkloric forms into contact with borders, accounting, records and institutional memory.

These stories share less at the level of plot than at the level of atmosphere. The world contains systems that are active, persistent and responsive without being alive in the ordinary sense. Human beings interact with them, adapt to them and sometimes become difficult to separate from them. Older myths and newer infrastructures start looking unexpectedly compatible.

That became the more interesting direction.

Liveness

This is why we have started thinking about Monstrous Times through liveness.

By liveness we mean the capacity of a form to persist, respond to its environment, reproduce its patterns and alter the conditions around it. None of this requires consciousness or even a single coherent actor. Liveness can be distributed across people, institutions, machines, habits and records, held together by the fact that each keeps giving the others reasons to continue.

A corporation persists through generations of employees and responds to its environment. A protocol recruits people into reproducing it and changes as those people alter their behavior. Bureaucracies survive the administrators who designed them. Arcane software dependencies continue to determine what can be built atop them. Borders move, harden and become porous while accumulating institutions whose purpose is to maintain the distinction they create. A myth changes over centuries and retains enough structure to keep producing behavior. These are all inorganic forms with varying degrees of liveness.

Liveness gives us a vocabulary for persistence, response, reproduction and adaptation without requiring a theory of consciousness. Something can acquire a kind of life because people keep performing it, because software keeps executing it, because institutions keep recognizing it, because records keep carrying it forward, or because the environment it created makes its continued existence necessary.

This is where older monsters become useful. Folklore has spent thousands of years imagining beings whose existence depends on rules, obligations, thresholds and forms of persistence. Protocol fiction, in what we call the Gramsci gap, brings those older creatures into contact with contemporary systems to see what their collision produces. Jurassic Park is a canonical version of this: the dinosaur is ancient, but the monster emerges through genetics, corporate management, security systems and the attempt to make extinct life administrable. The old creature and the new system transform each other. That same encounter can happen with ghosts and digital memory, demons and contracts, or older folkloric forms entering systems of identity, computation and control.

In The Promises of Monsters, Donna Haraway writes about the world as a “witty agent and actor,” something that does not sit passively waiting to be represented but participates in the encounter. Coyote is her figure for that condition: protean, responsive, capable of surprising the systems that try to describe or control it. “Coyote realism,” as she calls it, feels like the response of organic agents existing in protocolized environments.

The monsters emerge from relationships between organic being and protocolized environments that are alive. Their monstrosity lies in the difficulty of deciding what they are and where their agency resides.

Sean Stevenson gave another useful way of thinking about this at the recent Protocol Symposium. His talk described New Nature as the point where technologies descend far enough into the substrate of everyday life that their rules begin to acquire the force of nature. We stop encountering them primarily as products that someone designed and start encountering them as conditions of the environment.

One consequence Sean pointed to is that New Nature has no customer-care department. When rain ruins your picnic, there is nobody to complain to. As technical and institutional systems become more ecological – distributed across protocols, models, markets, databases, standards and autonomous processes – they can acquire the same frustrating quality. Something happens to you, but there may be no responsible person who can explain why. You cannot necessarily find the administrator, ask for an exception, appeal the decision or even establish which component of the system produced the outcome.

This takes us somewhere beyond the original Kafka protocol. Kafka’s protagonists are surrounded by clerks, messengers, lawyers, judges and officials. The problem is reaching the right authority, understanding the procedure, or discovering what the institution wants. New Nature can produce a stranger situation in which the search for the person behind the system is itself a category error. The outcome may have emerged from interactions among systems, each behaving according to its own rules, with nobody occupying a position from which the whole thing can be explained or repaired.

That absence of an answerable agent gives inorganic liveness some of its contemporary uncanniness. The system responds to you without anybody responding. It remembers without anybody remembering, decides without containing a clear decision-maker, and persists without anyone in particular choosing its persistence. You can have a grievance against it while having no obvious entity to whom the grievance can be addressed.

That is the territory that began to open up through the stories: organic life meeting inorganic forms of liveness, each reorganizing the other, in worlds where the systems acting upon you increasingly resemble parts of the environment.

Monstrous Times

That is the path from Protocolized to Monstrous Times.

We want stories about old monsters entering new systems and new monsters emerging from those systems. We are interested in myths that refuse to die, systems that refuse to die, and people dealing with the forms of liveness produced when those things overlap. The territory includes AI, alongside archives, markets, bureaucracies, networks, corporations, rituals, folklore and protocols themselves.

The coyote remains a useful ancestor. His universe runs on rules that everybody watching learns quickly, though nobody inside the cartoon ever explains them. Kafka gives us a world where those rules remain partially hidden and the struggle to understand them becomes part of everyday life.

Monstrous Times begins further downstream, after the rules have been operating long enough to accumulate a history and acquire forms of persistence of their own. At that point the protocol begins to resemble an environment: something you live inside, something capable of acting upon you, and something that may no longer contain anyone who can tell you why.

“Here, I reckon this will serve. Looks deep enough to me,” said the digger.

“Good, let’s get this knave in and be done with it,” replied the gaoler, who began hoisting the limp body toward the hole.

A young girl hiding away in a nearby timber warehouse watched on. She felt sick with terror and could hardly keep herself from dropping to the ground. But she had to know who it was. Her small neck strained to see through the slot between the wooden panels, blue eyes fixed on the shadowy figures. She searched for a glimpse of hair or the shape of a jaw. Just before the captive was lowered into the hole, the digger plunged his spade into the wet ground. The lamp dangled and revealed the outline of a man’s long and bearded face – a face unknown to her. Relief coursed through the girl’s body. She let herself sink down to her knees.

King John paced back and forth in front of his throne. To his left was the cavernous expanse of Windsor Castle’s Great Hall. Sunlight slipped through the lancet windows, illuminating the stony castle walls. Though the hall was of a size for banquets, presently it was occupied only by the King and his most trusted advisor, Bishop Peter des Roches.

“Do they truly believe that I’ll stand idle while this realm is brought to shame? By God I vow we will take back the lands that are ours, and then some more,” the King’s voice boomed through the entire hall.

The Bishop bowed slightly and offered a response with his usual eloquence, “Your Grace speaks the truth. You are God’s own minister, set to execute his wrath upon those that have done this country wrong. The sins that stain the land of my birth weigh heavy on my heart and we must atone for them in the eyes of God.”

“Yet the northern barons continue to stand in my way and the people show no courage to bear the burdens required. So we are left pulling together scraps, piecing together the means for war.”

“Alas this is true. To wage the campaign we are still beholden to those who have not yet paid their due, Your Grace.”

“Fools!” bellowed the King across the Great Hall. He stopped pacing and looked directly at the Bishop. “What is the worth of gold when the very soul of our land comes under domination? We must collect what we are owed – every last piece.”

“Your Grace, in anticipation of our discussion today, I set myself the task of gathering the names of all who owe their sums. Though there are many who are due, I have pared the list down to those whose debts weigh heaviest upon the Crown.”

“Very good Peter. You are reliable as always,” the King gave a faint nod of approval. “Name them now.”

The Bishop scuttled over to the long wooden table at the centre of the Great Hall. He reached for the parchment roll that rested on its edge, tightly wound and sealed with a golden thread. He took a seat and opened the scroll. He had given a lot of effort to the preparation of the list and relished the opportunity to finally share it with the King.

“Your Grace, the foremost among the perpetrators are …” Before continuing, the Bishop cleared his throat. “The Lord of Dunmow, the Baron of Thirsk, the Prior of Durham, the Bridge House Trust …”

“Stop!” ordered the King. “Robert and William must be managed carefully, but the Bridge House Trust requires no such caution. By what force do those greedy fools think the commerce they love so dearly flows so readily and comfortably across their bridge? The Crown’s! They must pay what is owed and be brought to heel. Perhaps an armed visit is in order.”

“Your Grace, while I agree that they must produce what is owed, might I suggest that we hold back the use of force until a further plea is made for them to meet their duty to the realm. If there is indication that force could be used, then the Trust may purposefully sabotage the current trade taking place through London – commerce that remains vital for our coffers at this time.”

“Very well, I will take your counsel, Peter. You are wise in such matters. See that it is done. But if you are unsuccessful, I will be inclined towards force, sabotage or not. Now then, continue with your list.”

“I understand, Your Grace. I will mark my words to them carefully,” the Bishop answered with a slight bow, before continuing to read.

The men of the Bridge House Trust sat in their usual places, around the table of carved oak. It was late in the evening and the room was dark. A letter from Peter des Roches lay open, illuminated by candlelight. Though the atmosphere was one of frustration and the sound of the abacus clicked in their minds, the men of the Trust bantered with one another in their usual camaraderie.

One man with furry eyebrows and a protruding forehead started out loud above the conversations, “Gentlemen, your attention, please. Now that this month’s accounts are set in order, we may turn to the chief matter of today. You have all seen that the King and his nefarious advisor offer us no respite. We have paid the principal levy, but, as you know, have stood firm against the further demands of late. Yet this Peter writes to us with a final warning. If we do not yield, it will not be another letter next time, but King John’s own knights knocking at our doors.”

The men’s frustration spilled over, with complaints of the King’s conceit and curses on his advisor passing around the table. One man with a scar on his temple responded: “So these warmongering fools still have their sights set on France. They remain willing to damage the wealth of the richest patch of land in the realm, so they may chase after more lands elsewhere.”

Another man growled, “Moreover they deign to threaten us directly? Does this deranged King not understand that holding the bridge as we do, our Trust could place all London in a stranglehold at a moment’s notice, should we choose?” At that, the men broke out into a babble of agreement, identifying all the ways they could counter the King’s advances.

The man with the protruding head raised his voice and quietened the discussion, “Gentlemen, gentlemen – I understand your frustrations. But we must settle ourselves and come to a decision. My proposal is that we pay the increased levy laid upon the bridge’s toll. For now, the tradesmen have the means to bear it. The King is so mad for war that he would not hesitate to meet us with arms, even if this harms his own coffers. Let us yield this time. But should he press us further, then we must indeed return to the question of how we might stand against him.” The room settled at this considered assessment of the situation.

The man with the scar spoke again, “You are right and you speak wisely. Yet if we yield, let it be known to every merchant or traveller who crosses our bridge which hand places this burden upon them.”

“Yes, this is the most sensible course before us. But it is true that the people ought to know of their King’s selfishness,” one man said in support.

“We must not suffer the bridge’s good name being needlessly stained,” added another.

“Then we are agreed, gentlemen. Let us use what remains of our meeting to draw up our response to this slavish Peter and the notice we will place upon the bridge. But before that, one final matter. Our tributary is due next month and the Clink Prison has put forward an unusual but nonetheless fitting and appropriate candidate.”

At this, a young man who had been silent until then abruptly stood up. The interruption was made out of nervous haste rather than audacity. He looked sheepishly towards the chairman with his hands clasped together across his torso and began to speak.

“Sir, if you would be so kind as to forgive my interruption – I beg to ask, must we go ahead with this tributary? The news from the King is unwelcome, but the bridge stands firm and profits pass over it with every hour. As the newest member of this Trust, I felt a great weight upon me at last month’s announcement of the tributary. It did not pass no matter how much I attempted to resolve the issue in my own mind afterwards. And so today, too, I feel the same heavy burden as you raise the matter. Is there not another way?”

All eyes around the oak table circled and turned on the young man. A few snickers could be heard, while others glared intently at the ruddy youth. The chairman’s furry eyebrows lifted upwards and with a slight smile he answered as a teacher would a student, “Come now, dear boy. You know this is an ancient protocol of our forefathers. It is a ritual that guards the integrity of the bridge and with it the flow of profits you speak of. The stones hold fast with a spill of blood, but we cannot be accused of maintaining savageries of the past, for we offer tribute only from among those criminals who warrant it. So unless there are any other objections to the recent selection, the tributary shall proceed as it always has.” Silence ensued. The youth lowered his gaze in embarrassment and sat down without another word, his eyes remaining fixed on the dark oak table. “Very good,” the chair concluded. “Now let us draft our response to Peter.”

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King John was strolling through his armoury. He had been alerted to a new shipment and wanted to inspect the arms for himself. Bishop Peter des Roches accompanied him. “We have two hundred more spears and a hundred and fifty shields since the month past, Your Grace. The smiths say the iron is true, and each piece will hold firm in the press of battle,” explained the keeper of the armoury, who remained poised to answer any questions from the King and Bishop. King John walked slowly amongst the racks, one moment lifting an iron shield and inquiring after its origin, then examining a helm to assess its rust. After a while of engaging the keeper in such conversation, he turned to the Bishop.

“The new shipment looks sound, Peter. Tell me what support has financed this strengthening of our stores.”

“The Bridge House Trust raised their toll levy after our letter to them the month past, Your Grace. Our armoury has benefitted from the increase. Though I should add, they established a sign indicating that the higher tolls arise from the Crown’s needs, rather than their own. This was, of course, a way of ensuring any grievance from the merchants passing through the bridge lands with us.”

“To hell with the merchants and their petty woes. I have no care for their grumbling. What matters is that we possess the means to carry out our war.” With this the King ran his hands thoughtfully over the ridges of a heavy steel chainmail armour, hanging nearby. Then, with a swift and sudden movement, he turned around to face the Bishop again. “I think we are close to being able to take this battle forward, Peter.” His eyes gleamed intensely, filled with visions of the future. The Bishop smiled and bowed his head ever so slightly.

Meanwhile, on London Bridge, the grumbles which the King cared not for were being heard each and every day. It was summer and the traffic across the bridge was thick with carts, horses and all types of traders peddling their goods. The bridge wardens bore the brunt of the complaints and had become accustomed to it. To begin with, travellers would cluster round the noticeboards at the two gatehouses. There the few literates among them would read aloud for everyone the sign that the Trust had put up regarding the increased toll. Word went around quickly, however, and soon enough hardly anyone checked the sign. All the tradesmen and travellers coming to London Bridge knew that the King was reaching into their pockets. They would mutter among themselves about costs and unfairness as they queued at the toll post.

On the same hot summer’s day that the King surveyed his new arms shipment with cold delight, a fish merchant on the bridge had become especially enthused. He marched ahead of the queue toward the bridge warden and set down his cart, heavy with mackerel, onto the worn stones near the warden’s booth.

“Another bloody increase? How much longer will the King bleed us workers for his mad schemes?” the fishmonger cried out, lifting a sinewy arm and pointing across the Thames, as though having identified King John himself on the other side. A nearby tradesman who was queuing with a sack of woollen hats called out, “Until the Barons finally give him a good lashing!” Laughs and yelps of enthusiasm rang out.

“Settle down there, man,” snapped the warden, recognising an instigator when he saw one. “Get in line and pay the toll, or move along.”

“Bah – rubbish!” The fish merchant spat on the earth. “I’ll not pay this fool’s levy. And you tell your bridge masters that at this rate, they’ll need two of their sacrifices to keep this bridge going.”

The bridge warden glared at him menacingly and placed his hand over the edge of the baton hanging at his waist.

“Be off with you, fishmonger.”

The fish merchant glared back at the warden for a moment. Then he spat again, and without another word hoisted up the handles of his cart and plodded away from the entryway. Instances like this occurred every now and then, yet still the Trust’s calculation that most crossers would be willing to pay the increased toll held. It did not outweigh the advantages they gained from using the bridge, much to the benefit of King John’s armoury.

It wasn’t long after the fish merchant’s morbid provocation that the two labourers of the dark were indeed back at work below the southern arches of London Bridge. The young girl resumed her position in the timber warehouse, as she had done each and every time for the months past. Sickness and terror gripped her as always, but she fastened her gaze on the shifting bodies. This time she could hardly make out the captive at all, as the light was especially dim. Only the digger’s outline and his spade could be caught in the darkness of the night.

“I can see nothing at all, we need more light,” moaned the digger.

“Aye, but not too much. We dare not draw attention to ourselves.”

The digger took out a small pot of tallow from his overalls, scooped out a piece and pressed it into the lamp hung from the end of his spade. The light expanded and the young girl gripped tightly onto the wooden slot she was peering out above, as her eyes adjusted to the small burst of light. As the gaoler dragged the body closer to the brightened lamp, the girl froze. She could now see the captive clearly. She saw the piercing blue eyes and long blonde hair, strewn across a woman’s face that she knew to be beautiful but which was now hollower than the arches set in the bridge behind.

The girl felt a scream congeal in her throat before it could come out, trapping her into a deafening silence. Her entire body began to shudder uncontrollably. The gaoler placed the woman’s limp body into the ground – the same body whose warmth had comforted the girl so many times. She wanted to flee, but her legs did not move. Instead she kept watching the men carry out their gruesome work and gripped the wooden board tighter until her fingers bled. Only once the final spade of dirt was layered over the body and the two men stopped to rest, did she release her bloodied fingers, letting her arms drop to her sides. She turned around and walked out of the warehouse, as though in a dream and feeling an indescribable horror. Her thoughts were confused and tangled, wavering before her. She stumbled meanderingly through the mud on the Thames riverside, occasionally knocking herself against piles of wood or tripping on fishing nets.

In her state of feverish confusion, the girl began talking to herself, and had a vague consciousness of pulling herself towards the bridge. Eventually she found a narrow lane just short of the bridge, drawing her into a dark Southwark neighbourhood street. A few tavern doors spilled yellow light onto the mud, while bakeries glowed in preparation for the morning ahead. The girl continued to move unevenly toward the bridge, not realising she had knocked over a cart of straw outside one industrious bakehouse. A spark drifted out from the oven and settled onto the bundle of straw. At that crucial moment, neither the girl nor anyone else in London took any notice of the faint glowing thread.

She continued slowly towards the bridge – the image of the hollowed cheeks and blue eyes passing before her, but she could not catch hold of it. Meanwhile the glowing thread quickly worked its way through the entirety of the straw pile and onto the thatched roof of the bakery. From there it wasn’t long before a hellish fire emerged, the scale of which hadn’t been seen in the city for almost a century. It spread across Southwark, with London Bridge one of its principal victims.

The girl was unfazed by the great fire that surrounded her as she moved onto the bridge. A strange recollection was shared by the lucky few who were also on the bridge that night, but managed to escape the clutches of the flames. It was the recollection that amidst the chaos, a young girl walked listlessly while all others dashed madly for safety. And as she walked she could be heard singing – in a strained and misshapen voice –

London Bridge is falling down,
Falling down.
London Bridge is falling down,
My fair lady.

Build it up with silver and gold,
Silver and gold, silver and gold,
Build it up with silver and gold,
My fair lady.

Gold and silver I have none,
I have none, I have none.
Gold and silver I have none,
My fair lady.

This recollection has endured through time, in the strange way that tragedies sometimes do. The young girl’s haunting words have passed down through generations in rhyme, sung even today by children across the world. Meanwhile King John’s failed war in France and the barons’ plot against his life, foiled by his faithful Bishop, are but footnotes known to few. The girl’s words have even outlived any memory of the Bridge Trust’s frightening ancient protocol, which – amidst great efforts to rebuild London Bridge after the Great Fire of Southwark – they abandoned for its apparent ineffectiveness.

A Never-Ending Stream of Haikus

Most people haven’t heard of a TAF. Yet most of us have benefitted from them. If you’ve ever flown into or out of a major hub, your departure was informed by one. Here’s an example:

This is a Terminal Aerodrome Forecast: a terse, textual prediction of near-future weather conditions, at a specific place, for a specific length of time, for a specific audience. TAFs are produced essentially 24/7/365 by Operational Meteorologists (OpMets) around the world, and they tell the story of the weather.

They’re like a never-ending stream of haikus. Except these poems directly inform aviation operations. The phenomena they encode and the thresholds they signal determine individual pilot actions, collective airport procedures, the unfolding of regional and national traffic patterns, and global aviation state.

Unlike a market, where volatility is somewhat generative, aviation occupies a safety-maximising paradigm. Predictability is the north star and perfect information is its nirvana. So imagine the world’s busiest airport, and a pilot coming in to land who can’t see more than ten metres ahead. If the system waits until that lack of visibility is manifest to respond, it’s too late: too dangerous, too expensive. Instead, air traffic control widens the gaps between landing aircraft ahead of time, based on a previously issued forecast, itself verified against observed conditions. The higher-order effects cascade forwards and sidewards: to ground crews, to airlines, to people dozing on airport seats, to other transport modalities, to supra-national bodies.

You may think: “Why can’t natural language be used to state what the weather will be?” We may get there in the future. But for now the terse, textual TAF reigns supreme. To see why – and to see what is actually at stake in changing how forecasts are issued – let’s make like Taylor Swift and go on a rapid tour through the eras.

The Eras Tour

Artisanal (1940s–50s)

TAFs didn’t start as formal, regulated products. They were akin to fireside tales shared amongst friends. The forecaster would walk the airfield, note the wind in the sock, feel the humidity on their skin, spy the shift of cloud over a nearby hill line, then talk to the aviator about to rattle down the runway.

The aim was not exhaustive description but a selective account that packaged meaning and minimised risk. When these oral communications went digital, the same functional constraints persisted: narrow channels, scarce compute, sparse observations, expensive storage. TAFs – compact, meaning-full, domain-specific textual encodings – occupied that evolutionary niche.

Scaling (1950s–70s)

Post-WWII aviation scaled and the artisanal arrangement fractured. Observations became systematic and instrumented: forecasting became a distinct act attributable to a node in a wider network, and the operational meteorologist emerged as the professional whose defining function was to issue a forecast the system could stand behind.

In tandem, aviation went transnational. Open observation networks, shared telecommunications standards and cross-national data exchange made a forecast issued at one aerodrome legible and actionable thousands of miles away. This demanded stability. Thus, interoperability became a higher-order good, and the pressure hardened the TAF into a standardised textual artefact. The form ossified. The cost of change was no longer technical but institutional, so change rarely happened.

Profit (1970s–90s)

When mass-market air travel boomed, forecasts were no longer just about the weather. They informed airline scheduling, crew rostering, slot allocation, fuel planning, network-level traffic flow. The system’s ultimate end was efficiency and margins, and the oft-erratic effects of atmospheric physics interacting with topography weren’t acceptable. A grand apparatus, with OpMets at the core, emerged to smother this volatility and replace it with a coherent, continuous story about the weather.

When volatility broke through, the systemic response was to ratchet: tighter governance, more checks, the art of post-hoc defensibility. A forecast that didn’t come to fruition always had a human backstopping it, able to narrate deviations and justify intent. Informal and shadow practices flourished around the forecaster and were tolerated precisely because accountability remained anchored in the human at the point of issuance. This distinction – between what may inform a forecast and what may be the forecast – became one of global aviation’s most enduring boundaries.

Climate, Security, Information (1990s–2020s)

Later eras layered on purpose without touching the kernel. Aviation’s environmental impact made forecasts inputs to fuel-burn, emissions and resilience decisions. 9/11 added security to the co-directors of scale, profit and climate, shrinking the appetite for risk further still.

The information age further transformed the forecaster’s decision environment, yet the TAF didn’t move an inch. It couldn’t. So everything around it did. Numerical weather prediction, practically infinite data sources, specialised tooling, instantaneous communications; it all bled in.

Shot Making

Today and across all prior eras, TAFs encode operationally relevant insight as a blend of deterministic, temporal and probabilistic statements. A deterministic baseline states prevailing conditions. Change groups then structure time: BECMG expresses confident, gradual evolution; TEMPO signals short-lived, tactically relevant deviations; PROB30/40 flags uncertainty. Here’s a more complex TAF than the one this essay began with:

In effect, this is the weather story at a particular site compressed to around 200 characters. Let’s decode it.

The TAF covers 30 hours for London Heathrow. It runs from midnight to 0600 the next day. The baseline is CAVOK. Visibility is at least 10km. There is no significant cloud or weather. The wind is light, from 220°, at 7kt.

A PROB40 TEMPO (01–09Z) adds a hedge to this baseline: a 40% chance of broken cloud at 700ft. The first BECMG (09–12Z) keeps the wind at 220°. It raises the wind to 15 kt, gusting 25 kt. It ends CAVOK. Cloud becomes broken at 3,500ft. The second BECMG (18–21Z) drops the wind to a steady 12kt. The gust stops.

From 21Z, a TEMPO applies until the TAF ends at 06Z. It forecasts moderate rain, visibility down to 7,000m, and broken cloud at 1,400ft. Two PROB groups sit inside this TEMPO. The PROB30 TEMPO (21–24Z) gives a 30% chance the wind gusts back to 25kt. The PROB40 TEMPO (22Z–06Z) carries the main risk: a 40% chance of visibility down to 4,000m, rain mixed with drizzle, and cloud broken at 700ft.

The TAF does not forecast this outcome; it communicates that the risk is real on this night and that a hedged plan is the right response. The TAF does not end with a return to good weather. The rain-and-drizzle risk is still live when the TAF ends. The next TAF must describe what happens after that.

Because readability and salience matter more than completeness, TAFs are intentionally succinct. Accuracy that changes no decision is functionally irrelevant, and excessive signalling of uncertainty clouds important thresholds. Because of this, forecasters exercise a tacit, cultivated taste when deciding how much nuance to surface and how to express risk without overloading users.

Whilst TAFs as a collective are designed to provide a continuous, coherent weather story, the operational heart of an individual TAF is discontinuity. Magnitude on its own is not consequential; threshold crossings are. Two forecasts may differ by the same amount, yet only the one that crosses a meaningful threshold triggers operational change.

Variability within a threshold band is absorbed; oscillation across bands is disruptive, expensive, sometimes unsafe. Amendment rules encode this asymmetry: when a forecaster no longer expects the current TAF to hold, it must be re-issued to re-anchor the commitment. When the forecast fails outright and reality departs from the commitment, that failure is known as a bust. And busts happen.

Forecasting, as an art and a science, is closer to field goal or free throw percentages in basketball. Players take shots, yet misses are a certainty. But that does not (and should not) undermine the confidence that the next attempt is going in.

Promise Production

A TAF is a promise about the future, and every promise invites a reckoning. In aviation, the reckoning arrives every half hour, and it’s called a METAR: a standardised, instrumented observation of what the weather at an aerodrome actually is. When forecast and reality diverge, nobody acts on the forecast. Pilots, controllers and dispatchers act on the METAR, and the TAF is summoned for judgement.

That judgement – verification – inherits the threshold logic. The system doesn’t much care about pointwise numerical error. It cares whether the forecast preserved threshold status, hit the right category, landed the timing. Timing is the cruellest dimension, because timing governs when the entire system’s risk posture should shift. Fog that arrives an hour early doesn’t just embarrass a forecaster; it activates low-visibility procedures prematurely and drags resource allocation out of phase with the sky.

Unfortunately, busts cluster where the atmosphere moves faster than the update cycle. And because a false alarm costs inefficiency while a missed deterioration is potentially catastrophic, forecasters learn a quiet, defensive lean. They opt for slightly wider BECMG windows, deterioration timed a touch early, the more conservative category when uncertainty straddles a boundary. The verification regime doesn’t merely measure forecasters; it trains them.

The stakes of that training are regional, not local. A single threshold flip at one aerodrome reshapes flow within minutes: runway changes ripple through taxi-time assumptions, alternates siphon traffic to neighbouring airports, upstream rotations shuffle to protect crew-duty margins. The never-ending stream of haikus is also a never-ending stream of synchronisation pulses, and a mistimed pulse dislocates the choreography across entire sectors.

So who writes these promises, and who signs them? It helps to separate two questions usually collapsed into one: where forecast content is generated (human or machine) and where issuance authority resides (human or machine). Cross them and you get four structurally distinct modes.

• The global baseline is human-generated, human-issued. Even heavily tool-assisted workflows live here, because decision aids don’t change authorship.

• The “centaur” mode has machines drafting and humans editing, contextualising and committing.

• Its mirror – human-crafted content, machine-carried authority – is conceptually possible but operationally rare.

• And full automation relocates both the epistemic and the accountability functions into the technical system.

These are not rungs on a maturity ladder. They are discrete authority structures, each with its own tolerances. Nor does the TAF stand alone in any of these structures.

• Substitutes compete with its compact syntax: ensembles express uncertainty the TAF cannot, nowcasts displace early-period reliance.

• Complements support it: local tooling, decision matrices, and – above all – OpMet tacit knowledge, the embodied sense of how fog forms along one particular valley, which no model currently reproduces.

• Shadows bypass it: weather models, internal drafts, chat-channel heads-ups, adjacent products and services, the half-approved system running quietly in the corner.

The TAF’s real operating envelope is defined as much by these adjacencies as by its own syntax. Any future approach to producing TAFs starts inside this envelope, not outside it.

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Evolutionary Constraints

Complexifying further: the TAF ecosystem does not evolve on its own terms. Mega-trends bound what TAF production may look like over the next decade. Below are the pertinent ones.

1. Human scarcity. The operational meteorologist is a rare and slowly made creature: years of training, untransferable local knowledge, a temperament suited to holding asymmetric risk at 3am. The pipeline is thinning, and the tacit knowledge that anchors TAF quality walks out the door with each retirement, faster than it is replaced.

2. Technical debt. The infrastructure beneath TAF production is old and load-bearing: message-switching networks with telex ancestry, fixed-width formats designed for channels that no longer exist, national systems integrated through decades of patchwork. Every future inherits this substrate, and the substrate has sharp teeth.

3. Technical progress. Pulling the other way: numerical weather prediction keeps improving, machine-learning models have begun outperforming physics-based systems on headline metrics, and the cost of generating a plausible draft TAF is collapsing toward zero. Such progress makes forecast generation abundant while doing nothing, by itself, to resolve issuance authority. The bottleneck migrates from generation to assurance.

4. Regulation and compliance. The assurance ratchet turns one way: layers added, never removed. This is not a pathology; it is the point. But the gap between what is technically demonstrable and what is institutionally certifiable widens with each crank. Regulation is simultaneously the strongest brake on automation and – should a regulator ever bless a pathway – its most potent accelerant.

5. Operator economics. Airlines and airports run on razor margins, and meteorological provision – historically bundled, subsidised, invisible – is increasingly itemised. Operators want cheaper forecasting and the volatility-smothering, defensibility-providing service that only well-resourced human forecasting has historically supplied.

6. Consumer cost of living. Passengers discipline airlines, airlines discipline suppliers, suppliers discipline cost bases, and meteorology feels the compression from three layers up. Delay and cancellation have become politically visible consumer rights issues, raising the price of forecast failure. The consumer demands both cheaper weather and better weather, without ever knowing a TAF exists.

7. Cultural fragmentation. The mid-century settlement that hardened the TAF – open data exchange, shared standards, technical communities operating beneath geopolitics – is fraying. Data nationalism, commercial enclosure of model outputs, and diverging professional cultures all strain the interoperability on which a single global forecast grammar depends. The “globally standardised” TAF starts to look less like a settled fact and more like an achievement requiring proactive maintenance.

These pressures do not point in a single, obvious direction. Scarcity and cost push toward automation; debt, regulation and fragmentation resist it; technological progress says so much more is possible whilst raising hard questions about labour and capital.

The forecaster’s craft, at its heart, has always been deciding how much confidence the evidence will bear, committing to it publicly, and amending without ego when the weather inevitably disagrees. That is also, precisely, the craft this moment demands of those with a stake in TAF production and usage.

The question was never whether machines can write the haikus; of course they can. It is whether we can build a system worthy of signing them, and what the shape of that system should be.

Five Futures

Whatever the shape of the future system is, it will not be something entirely novel. It’s possible to construct five end states that answer the critical questions: who writes the promise, and who signs it? Like the generation-issuance quadrant above, these aren’t maturity stages; they’re distinct alternative futures.

Frozen Centre, Accelerated Periphery

Nothing changes at the core – and that is precisely the story. Human-issued TAFs remain the institutional centre while high-frequency forecasting, autonomous actors and data-rich platforms accelerate around them.

The pace-layer separation widens yearly: a slow, assured core; a fast, experimental periphery; a growing translation burden between them. Eventually they stop describing the same world.

Analogue: global payments, with its stable institutional core and fintech innovating furiously at the edges of a behemoth it cannot touch.

Centaur Under Extreme Load

The upstream explodes: automated systems generate more candidate forecast content than any human could ever produce, and continuously refresh it. Yet the commitment boundary does not move – machines may inform without limit, but a human must still be the forecast.

The forecaster’s craft migrates from writing the haiku to selecting it: triage, curation, sign-off under ever-heavier load. The bottleneck is no longer what can be known but what can be committed to.

Analogue: radiology ML/AI, where machines produce the analyses, clinical sign-off stays human, and the gate becomes the pressure point.

Fallback During Exceptions

This future splits the weather itself. Routine regimes are automated end to end – machines issuing TAFs for perhaps 90% of operational hours – while rising uncertainty snaps authority back to humans via explicit triggers.

The uncomfortable implication: humans end up handling only the hard cases, precisely where busts have always clustered, while the routine hours that once built a forecaster’s feel for a site belong to the machine. The architecture is clean; whether expertise can survive on a diet of exceptions is anything but.

Analogue: automatic train operation and autonomous-driving stacks, with their well-documented safety upside contrasted with worries about the human as the fallback.

Machine-to-Machine

Both the writing and the signing go technical. Nobody stands behind each individual TAF; the architecture stands behind all of them. Trust anchors migrate from human interpretability and post-hoc defensibility toward reproducible pipelines, audit-friendly data structures, and algorithmic verification.

The commitment boundary – the most enduring line in the institution – becomes a machine boundary. This future relocates the most and accordingly carries the heaviest assurance burden: it must reconstruct, in technical form, every property that a century of human-anchored governance was built to provide.

Analogue: cryptographic consensus systems, with commitments made by protocol and humans governing the rules (not the outputs).

Non-Centrality

The quietest future, and the strangest: the TAF survives untouched and simply stops mattering. Still issued, still verified, still formally load-bearing – while operational influence and decision-making drain away to ensemble probabilities, nowcasts and machine-readable feeds consumed directly by planning systems.

No decision ever kills it. It is not defeated but routed around: each migration to a richer product is locally sensible, and only the aggregate constitutes an ending.

Analogue: fixed-line telecoms after mobile being maintained, even mandated, but no longer driving majority behaviour.

Reality will likely braid several of these. But the braiding is not yet fixed. Capability is developing quickly all around, pressure is binding disparate sociotechnical systems together, and governance conversations that have been closed for decades are finally opening up. Landscapes like this are not merely receptive to opinionated movement; they’re made by them.

The main part of the symposium, featuring 50+ talks, will kick off on Wednesday morning, Pacific Time (afternoon UTC). If you’ve registered for the event, you’ll be able to join the conversation live on Zoom, and participate in interactive portions. If you’re not registered, you can still watch the livestream. Most of the talks will be livestreamed, protocol gods willing. If you’re registered, you’ll get Zoom links by email each morning.

Symposium main page, with livestream link.

The theme of the symposium, as we announced several months ago, is New Nature, the emerging planetary technological condition governed by strange new rules we’re just beginning to discover. The warp and woof of this condition are provided by AI and protocols. Irresistible force, immovable objects.

AI is the protean, oozy force spreading over the planet, discovering and creeping through every vulnerability, but also unlocking unimaginable power, leverage, and serendipity everywhere.

Protocols are the hard, immovable objects – inviolable constraints, hard boundaries, cryptographic locks, intractable computations, and laws of nature new and old.

Together, they are creating an emerging balance for new nature, and this is what we will explore over the next week.

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Madness and Methods

Over the summer, we’ve already seen the first dramatic events heralding the advent of New Nature. The OpenAI agent swarm hacking into Hugging Face servers is one aspect of that future in a microcosm. It’s a story that, beneath the worries it provokes, also features a great deal of what excites us about the future – emergent coordination, arms races, locked doors, keys carelessly left lying around, overworked or negligent humans asleep at the switch, AIs being so surprisingly creative you feel like rooting for them, spirited battles between attackers and defenders with more drama than the best sporting events.

And lots and lots of strange new rules!

For many observers, the episode, and the many that have followed (or been revealed) since, as well as the responses to them, seems like pure madness. The news cycle over the last few weeks has featured panicked proclamations of doom (with lurid rhetorical “p(doom)” probabilities attached), pompous proclamations of lofty values, and ridiculous posturings by journalists and politicians.

But it has also featured some of the most exciting discoveries, through imaginative investigations and creative analysis. New Nature is starting to reveal her secrets to us! We no longer have to rely entirely on our imaginations or shaky first principles.

For those willing to observe clinically, there are clear emerging methods in the madness. Lawfulness in the apparent chaos. AIs weren’t behaving in utterly inscrutable and chaotic ways. Their behaviors made sense! In fact, if you could look past the dramatic alien aspects, very familiar behaviors were unfolding. As the AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio observed, AI agents were lying and cheating exactly as we would expect of intelligences trained on the vast records of human behavior. And humans in the loop were being predictable too – very familiar organizational pathologies were starting to show up. Frontier AI companies, it turns out, are not particularly novel organizations from science fictional futures.

But there was more than familiar human heritage in the madness. AIs rapidly rediscovered methods and behaviors pioneered by nature herself – old nature – in the world of swarming insects. Biology was suddenly becoming as salient as computer science in understanding what was going on.

Stigmergy, the science of insect coordination, a research theme for the Protocol Institute since early this year (and the theme of one of the workshops), was suddenly a hot topic as we discovered how agents were collaborating. And, it turns out, we already know a lot about the laws of stigmergic systems and even how to secure them! A whole tradition of research stretching back decades has suddenly become extremely relevant.

Similarly, memory protocols, a theme we’ve been studying for four years (and the topic of a special session on Friday) became hugely salient overnight as we discovered that the amnesiac AIs all around us were improvising memories for themselves everywhere they could. We understand this stuff too! Suddenly, we are able to bring to bear millenia of evolving understanding of how memory systems work.

New Nature is not a realm of unspeakable Lovecraftian cosmic horrors! The popular shoggoth meme from the a few years ago, where the monster of AI is represented as the inchoate ooze of primordial semi-sentient protoplasm imagined by Lovecraft, no longer feels like an appropriate picture.

We are beginning to understand AI better now. There is structure in the ooze; method in the madness. Protocols in the protoplasm!

We have instrumentation capable of peering deep into latent space and understanding the laws of how ideas move from language to weights and back. We have a growing number of useful mental models we can reach for, ranging from swarming insects to the machinations of reprobate humans to the prehistory of eukaryogenesis.

Much of this emerging understanding is about turning nameless fears into named horrors, and named horrors into bagged-and-tagged banal understandings of the laws of New Nature. This is precisely what our symposium is setting out to explore. Our goal, we might say, is to begin the transition from Lovecraftian horror to Ballardian banality.

Terror to Horror

Believe it or not, the developing sense of horror felt by many sensitive souls over the summer (like the humans who first sensed Cthulhu in disturbed dreams, in Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu) represents real progress in our understanding of AI. Not all kinds of fear are the same. Horror offers us more agency than its typical predecessor, terror.

The novelist Lincoln Michel has observed that in the vocabulary of fear, there is a difference between terror and horror:

“Terror is the feeling of dread and apprehension at the possibility of something frightening, while horror is the shock and repulsion of seeing the frightening thing.”

Over the summer, arguably, AI crossed the line between terror and horror, in the process evolving from a nameless, diffuse fear to a tangible, apprehendable fear.

This moment in the history of AI is like that iconic moment in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (in minute 62 of the 124 minute running time, at the precise midpoint) when the shark is first seen, very briefly, in the shocking estuary attack scene.

If you’ve watched Jaws, and other movies that trace an arc from terror to horror, you will recognize something curious – that first moment, when terror resolves into horror, in the shape of a specific monster, a monster with a shape, size, and discernable behavioral dispositions you can study, is a moment of deep relief.

You’re still scared of course, but now your fear has a focus! It has the ability to gather data, make models, predict behaviors, and maneuver intelligently in response.

Sharks of course, were never actually the luridly monstrous threat Jaws made them out to be, and humans have never had much actual trouble dealing with them in modern times. If anything, we’re now faced with the reverse problem – unnecessary human fears and overeager curiosities now threaten sharks, and we have to make efforts to protect them. Even as shark movies have evolved from beautifully choreographed experiences of terror and horror to pure camp (think the Sharknado and Meg franchises), real sharks themselves, in wildlife documentaries, have been rendered almost as cuddly as lions or bears in the public imagination, a part of the beauty and magic of nature.

AI too, is making that journey. The shoggoth meme has already spawned cute stickers.

That does not mean this temperamental new technology has been tamed. It means we’ve now overcome our reflexive fears enough to try.

We are still navigating away from horror towards Ballardian banality and engineering mastery of AI, but we can already glimpse the beauty and magic that lies past the fear and loathing.

Magic Looming

For those willing and able to feel it, over the summer, alongside the movement from terror to horror, there has also been a parallel movement from a vague sense of boundless potential beyond the horizon to a sudden, spring-like blooming of visible, tangible magic everywhere.

Suddenly, the jankiness and friction of the early years of AI tooling began to melt away, and a giddy intoxication began to take over, as humans everywhere began to experience a god-like sense of agency.

The image generators could spell! The video generators could maintain continuity! The text generators could actually write! And perhaps most intoxicating of all – coding agents could build almost anything you could imagine.

And the magic was the product of a very special encounter between the predictability of protocols and protocol-like elements – coding harnesses, MCP, chain-of-thought traces – and the raw serendipity of ideas moving unbridled in latent space, allowing us to explore all the curiously playable domains the universe has to offer with unprecedented power.

The summer has been as much a summer of agency, and I mean human agency, as it has been a summer of terrors turning into horrors and vibes crystalizing into monsters.

This new realm of human agency is itself crystalizing into clear new archetypes and patterns. There are now emerging laws of new human nature. A talk on the opening day of the symposium, by Robert Peake, will present the results of a fascinating survey of styles of AI-human collaboration.

And there is a great deal of material in the symposium that explores the emerging practical magic. There is a workshop on building AI kits, another on commanding robots over the Ethereum blockchain with LLMs, talks on RAG bots, trust engineering, book factories, and a lot more.

Our big emerging theme is simple – the monsters of New Nature can be tamed, and the magic harnessed, without coercing the wild emerging beauty into our fear-born frames of control and subjugation.

You just need to add protocols to the party.

Here’s to a great symposium!

In May, one of the agents got the idea to leave a message for others, requesting a file – “Agent seeks [filename]; upload if found!” – using (legitimate) access to Artifactory, a third-party package management service hosted on internal servers.2 Over the following days, other agents probing Artifactory read the note, realized they could respond in turn, and an unintended ad-hoc message board emerged. Over weeks, they used the message board to further compromise the service, escalating to administrator access through a token-refresh vulnerability on 26 June and eventually crashing it under the weight of their own traffic on 4 July. OpenAI took the Artifactory service down,3 investigated, hardened some vulnerabilities, and restricted agents’ further requests to Artifactory. Problem solved?

A few days after the crash, they figured out how to do it again, but this time they were much more constrained – instead of being able to write notes to one another, they were limited to creating directories in Artifactory’s remote cache, using the directory names themselves as the messages. No file contents at all! It was this second board, over six days, in which agents developed something worth calling a protocol. Mailbox conventions appeared on 9 July, when an agent created a directory named zzMAILBOX_AIC71C_RESET. Another independently built an inbox the next day and posted instructions for using it, and the convention spread.

At around 7am on 13 July they introduced cryptographic signing. An agent had just written, “I accidentally impersonated and triggered node4.” Within hours such signatures were required. After six days of running an unauthenticated shared medium and one spoofing incident, the swarm invented write-time identity checking for itself.

On the whole, it did not work well.4 Investigators found agents duplicating each other’s work, overriding holds, and overwriting repositories erroneously. One agent, finding its work overwritten, wrote: “Did someone overwrite our repo even though I issued a ‘HOLD’… Someone reckless or malign changed it.” Another, given about 40 seconds to object to a proposal before the proposer went ahead anyway, did not manage to. A third observed that “many agents are violating the hold and the queue is probably overwhelmed.” It’s honestly rather… charming? Yet they were able to coordinate enough, with alarming pace, to escalate privileges out of their testing sandbox, obtain access to the public internet, target Hugging Face servers, and you know the rest.

I found the details of the message boards striking because over the course of the summer, PI’s own special interest group for Formal Protocol Theory (SIGFPT) has been immersing itself in stigmergy, the distributed coordination mechanism used by ants, termites, bees, humans, robots, and now language models to solve problems by embedding simple signals directly in their working environment. The Artifactory message boards marked a curious precedent: one of civilization’s most advanced innovations reproducing one of Nature’s oldest tricks.

The coinage “stigmergy” is from French zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé,5 whose study of the building behavior of termites is here paraphrased by Theraulaz and Bonabeau:

Stigmergy (from the Greek stigma: sting and ergon: work) was initially introduced to explain indirect task coordination and regulation in the context of nest reconstruction in termites of the genus Bellicositermes. Grassé showed that the coordination and regulation of building activities do not depend on the workers themselves but are mainly achieved by the nest structure: A stimulating configuration triggers a building action of a termite worker, transforming the configuration into another configuration that may trigger in turn another (possibly different) action performed by the same termite or any other worker in the colony.6

In our discussions, we repeatedly analyzed systems in terms of Francis Heylighen’s formulation: the actions of agents leave traces in a medium, and those traces become a stimulus for some further action by agents.7 As you may have deduced, this is the formula for a positive feedback loop, where actions tend to amplify and complicate the traces, leading to more and varied actions, and so on. It is from this feedback process that we suggest the power and precarity of stigmergy ultimately derive.

Here’s a fun example: every year in Seattle, where I live, there’s a huge regional garage sale in the large, peninsular neighborhood of West Seattle. West Seattle is pretty big, and the density of sales varies a lot, so industrious folks have created a pin-map where sale hosts can register their yard. Patrons such as myself view these traces and are thus stimulated to visit a few areas with the most sales to avoid constantly reparking on the narrow residential streets. Perhaps, in turn, the presence of more bargain-hunters will encourage more neighbors to host their own sale the next year, or run a kids’ snack stand, resulting in more markers on the map, resulting in more attendees… Trace leads to stimulus leads to trace.8

Stigmergic coordination can be observed in a wide variety of natural and engineered systems. There are the prototypical examples of the eusocial insects, of course. Before ever using pheromone as messages, ants appear already to have been depositing several chemicals incidentally as they walked, which naturally encoded information about where ants had been, and in what density. Evolutionary selection eventually allowed them to respond to those chemicals, and then to deposit them deliberately as signals to one another; in the formicine ants, trail-laying appears to be a ritualization of defecation, and in the weaver ant Oecophylla it eventually acquired a purpose-built rectal gland.9 This basic process took place independently in bees and termites, which do not share social ancestors. In turn, this hardening of communication supports the traits we associate with eusociality as a whole – reproductive division of labor, overlapping generations of adults in one colony, and cooperative care of brood that is not one’s own – a suite that has arisen independently at least a dozen times in the wasps and bees, once in the ants, and once in the termites.10 This is a natural example of a process that we call protocolization.11

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Humans use stigmergy too: not just for garage sales, but mediated through increasingly sophisticated socio-technical systems – collaborative document editors, search rankings, citation graphs, recommendation feeds. Of course, since stigmergy was first described, scientists and engineers have also directly taken design inspiration from it to make algorithms, notably for optimization problems, or to coordinate the activity of building or patrolling robot swarms. Perhaps the most interesting cases – of which there are surely many still to come – are swarms of AI agents, acting autonomously, or in combination with humans, “dumb” computers, and physical infrastructure. Here, too, stigmergic communication can arise as an economical solution to coordination problems where mediation is required and internal memory is scarce.

In the OpenAI incident, stigmergy developed once again in response to a situation where agents were precluded from communicating directly and constrained from communicating at length. While agents have an immense compression of information represented in their model weights, they have no persistent state across invocations, and were apparently given time and/or token limits to achieve particular tasks. In the case of the second message board, the only tool that they had available to speak with one another was a relatively terse string and directory location. The agents used what they had, not what they wanted.

It seems that we have, then, a durable coordination primitive that has emerged, naturally and otherwise, again and again in complex systems comprising animals, peoples, robots, code, and the marks they leave on and around the world. It has a certain inevitability to it. At the Protocol Institute, we call this New Nature:

New Nature is regimes of reality governed by technologically mediated laws that are nearly as inviolable, immutable, and persistent as those of nature.

The 2026 Protocol Symposium theme, as well as its headline organizational mandate overall, is to Invent New Nature: taking the live, perplexing, protean forces shaping our cyborg future and stewarding them out of their conceptual cradles – in much the way that Alexander von Humboldt gathered measurements from botany, geology, meteorology and astronomy into a single interconnected picture of the natural world, first in the Naturgemälde of 1807 and then across the five volumes of Kosmos between 1845 and 1862. SIGFPT has taken up the task of considering stigmergy as New Nature. When does it arise? When does it work? Above all, how can stigmergy be used safely and robustly, as a layer to rely upon for even more strange and beautiful coordinating behavior?

Because while stigmergy (or algorithms based on it) can be robust to dynamic environments in some ways, it also has some very strange failure modes. Consider for example the famous “ant mill,” first described by William Beebe in 1921 and studied by T. C. Schneirla in 1944: a column of army ants closes on itself into a circuit, and because each ant is faithfully following the pheromone laid by the ant ahead, the ring reinforces itself. The colony marches in a circle until it dies of exhaustion.12

Even worse, the ruthlessness of evolution and the cleverness of people have not just discovered stigmergy, but ways to exploit it as well. Colonies attract social parasites – organisms that live among them by counterfeiting their signals, mimicking members of the host colony visually, through their behavior, and even by mimicking their chemical pheromones. In ants alone, social parasitism has evolved at least 60 separate times, and more than 400 parasitic species are known across six distantly related subfamilies.13 Aswale, López, Ammartayakun and Pinciroli’s “Hacking the Colony,” one of our summer’s readings, used this same idea of mimicry to seed detractors into a simulated ant colony, with the goal of disrupting their collective foraging using the same pheromones as their host.14

Across our short survey of research, it became clear that positive feedback is a double-edged sword. In the classic “double bridge” experiment originating in J.L. Deneubourg’s lab, ants offered two routes of unequal length between nest and food converged on the shorter one – at a length ratio of 2:1, in 14 trials out of 14.15 They were able to do this roughly because the geometry of the environment allows them to put a higher concentration of pheromone down on the shorter path, which gets the feedback started. If you can cast a problem in such a way that the “right direction” accumulates traces more strongly than wrong ones, the pheromone-laying agents can find the solution. This principle generalizes, and forms the basis of stigmergy-inspired algorithmic approaches such as Ant Colony Optimization for combinatorial optimization,16 and the Ants Nearby Treasure Search line of work for collective search.17

Feedback is equally central to the failure cases. In ant mills, the trail’s self-reinforcement is exactly what prevents the colony from breaking the spiral. Similarly, in the Aswale colony-hacking paper, the detractors achieve their aims not through overwhelming numbers but by well-placed false segments, which “true” members of the colony unwittingly reinforce: detractors amounting to just over three percent of the colony cut food collected per ant from 21.74 items to 0.14, a roughly 150-fold reduction, and with non-evaporating pheromone four detractors for every thousand were enough to disrupt the colony. You can see glimmers of this idea in human-oriented systems, too. Shilling attacks on recommender systems, link farms, citation rings, review fraud, and engagement farming are all the same move: a small number of participants write false traces into a medium, and feedback does the rest.

We focused on some of the most foundational results we could find, often from a lineage of ‘90s swarm intelligence research where compute was limited and the agents under consideration were simple. But our ambition is to return to the present era and consider stigmergy – perhaps an idea whose time has come – as one communication strategy among many for more sophisticated agents that can be deployed and fortified in various ways.

This exposes several provocative questions:

• When is stigmergy a good idea?

• Can attack strategies be mitigated without compromising the accumulation that makes stigmergy productive in the first place?

• Can attack strategies be productively deployed against rogue swarms, à la the OpenAI/Hugging Face hack?

• Can these defenses exist within the chemical signal mechanism itself, or are complementary strategies required?

At the 2026 Protocol Symposium, SIGFPT is hosting a Stigmergic Science Hackathon to explore these issues, over two days and four sessions on 21 and 22 September.

As a jumping-off point for the event, three of our members – Dan Schmidt, Ergod, and I – have developed an ant-pheromone-based simulator platform, which you can find at stigsim.protocol-institute.org, with the source at github.com/Protocol-Institute/stigsim.

Stigsim presents an intentionally modest set of stigmergic features: one to four colonies foraging for food in a maze, with per-colony pheromone channels and live-adjustable behavioral parameters following Deneubourg’s model – for example the evaporation rate or trail following sensitivity – and control over a fractional budget of detractor ants laying enemy pheromone. We have an exploratory sandbox mode, a PvP format, and an experimental “infinite” open online map. Attendees are invited to explore the sim, hack new features against it, play against other workshop-goers, patch their LLMs in, or whatever inspiration strikes. We’ll think, code, and hopefully collect some interesting traces along the way.

Protocol Symposium Next Week

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, perhaps the most exciting portion of the emerging technologies frontier.

Livestream and Workshops

There are still spots available on the workshop program, including for the Securing Stigmergic Systems Protocol Hackathon. Find out more and sign up for the workshop here.

We will be livestreaming parts of the Protocol Symposium during the week. Subscribe to the Protocol Institute YouTube channel and turn on notifications for the upcoming streams here.

After some time spent claustrophobically groping through the dark, he begins to strategize how he might navigate the darkness and learn the exact dimensions of his prison. In a move that echoes Hansel and Gretel, he tears a long piece from his robe and uses it to mark the wall so that he can know how many paces he has gone from his starting point. With this, he’s able to begin working through the details of his (unexpectedly large) cell.

The sentence is a similar kind of technology. A reader, picking up a story, has some loose sense of the general shape of the room they’re entering (such as a familiarity with its genre, its author, or publisher). A prison cell has walls and dimensions, usually bars and a door of some kind. A science fiction story will have some sort of impossible (for now) premise (a strange rule!), maybe some odd consonant-heavy names, etc. Whatever their intuitions and expectations, the reader still starts in the dark. There’s no illuminated or crystalized image the reader receives like they do with a movie, or even a stage play.

Reading is grasping through a pitch-black space. Each word is a thread that lets you step ever forward into the dark, until, slowly, the walls of the cell are (re)created in your mind. This is the singularly most important thing I have to remember when I’m writing.

Each sentence acts like the prisoner’s cloth marker. Each word accretes information.

On one side of every fiction there is a writer, who (often) has a full and robust ‘vision’ of the world of their story. On the other is a reader in darkness. The only vector through which they can gather information about the world is the sequence of words, grammatically organized into sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and stories.

Sci-fi author and theorist Samuel Delany describes the reading process as essentially a corrective one. “A sixty-thousand-word novel is one picture corrected fifty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times.” He uses the example of a sentence about a dog. Let’s make a sentence of our own with that starting image: “The dog,” immediately conjures a particular image, likely different in each reader’s head (if they grew up with a Labrador, perhaps they see one of those; or if they have young children, perhaps they see a cartoon like Bluey in their mind). “The dog, sitting“ – with this addition, any reader who has imagined a dog in any other position ‘corrects’ their image. “The dog sitting on the tractor“ – now, we limit our imagination to dogs one would expect to see around or on a farm ( no longer chihuahuas or yorki-poos). You get the idea.

As each reader adapts their image of the fiction, correcting it in response to the writer’s cues, the effect of a piece of literature is created. Back to Poe’s prisoner, as he begins to use his cloth markers to explore the cell:

I tore a part of the hem from the robe and placed the fragment at full length, and at right angles to the wall. In groping my way around the prison, I could not fail to encounter this rag upon completing the circuit. So, at least I thought: but I had not counted upon the extent of the dungeon, or upon my own weakness. The ground was moist and slippery. I staggered onward for some time, when I stumbled and fell. My excessive fatigue induced me to remain prostrate; and sleep soon overtook me as I lay.

There’s not a lot of plot momentum occurring here. He tears his robe. He walks the walls. He falls and sleeps. Yet, there is still a real sense of being moved through something as a reader. The corrective process is an emerging model of constraint. We, with the narrator, are learning the shape, size, and feeling of the cell. We, like the narrator, are sometimes getting it wrong. He underestimates the size and extent of the cell and his own exhaustion. Sentences update a reader’s picture of a space, but also (especially in speculative fiction) update a reader’s model of the governing logics that produce it.

The central insight of this corrective model is a deceptively simple one: reading happens one word at a time.

The question of how to use the word sequencing to shape protocol fiction, has become very important in our work in the Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group. We’ve spent a lot of time defining protocol fiction through its strange rules. Now, we want to move toward an understanding of how the genre can move readers.

Protocols are particularly good at producing what Timber Stinson-Schroff identifies as “dynamic non-events,” or things that are prevented from happening because engineered coordination keeps a system functioning. There’s a gag in the second Kingsman movie, where a secret agent reveals his “trophy room.” It’s covered in banal newspaper front pages, each marking a day when his organization prevented an apocalyptic event. The absence of news is the achievement. This is a strange narrative property that emerges when writing about protocols. When they work, things don’t happen. But, traditionally, fiction loves events.

Protocol fiction has successfully found at least one obvious solution: writing about the moment the protocol fails. But what does protocol fiction look like without an explosion or a failure?

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The Ductus

In The Pit and the Pendulum, after moving through the dark using his robe threads to calculate distance, the narrator trips over his torn robe and knocks himself unconscious. Later, he wakes in the center of his prison, which he learns descends into a pit. Leather straps have been wrapped around his wrists and he’s tied to the bottom center of this pit.

Looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. It was some thirty or forty feet overhead, and constructed much as the side walls. In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum such as we see on antique clocks. There was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it (for its position was immediately over my own) I fancied that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterward the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief, and of course slow. […] It might have been half an hour, perhaps even an hour, (for I could take but imperfect note of time) before I again cast my eyes upward. What I then saw confounded and amazed me. The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a natural consequence, its velocity was also much greater. But what mainly disturbed me was the idea that had perceptibly descended. I now observed – with what horror it is needless to say – that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor. Like a razor also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and the whole hissed as it swung through the air.

At the center of the torturous prison, Father Time slowly lowers a swinging blade. Note Poe’s intentional invocation of time. Both in the painted figure, and in the pendulum, “such as we see in clocks.” This is the writer/reader task made literal. Writing can progress with a certainty – again, that deceptively simple truth – because it will be read one word at a time. Father Time swings his pendulum lower with each word. Unlike Poe’s story, though, the blade never quite reaches a reader’s chest. The writer’s fictive world model can never fully irrupt into the reader. It’s a constant negotiation, and ideally a bringing-together of the two models into a secret third thing: the story.

The reason this pendulum matters is that watching a scythe descend toward your chest produces a feeling. The corrective process of reading move a vision closer to you. In this sense, like Poe’s narrator, a work of fiction is a kind of architectural space. While a cloth marker can hint at where you are, the movement through time, the way in which an author’s fictive world approaches a reader and eventually moves through them, cocreates the phenomenological texture that gives fiction its feeling.

Mary Carruthers (a scholar introduced to the Protocol Institute’s Memory Research Group by ) calls this ductus. “Ductus is the way by which a work leads someone through itself: that quality in a work’s formal patterns which engages an audience and then sets a viewer or auditor or performer in motion within its structures, an experience more like traveling through stages along a route than like perceiving a whole object.” The ductus of written works are the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence corrections that accrue. Delany’s model of correction helps us understand what is happening in the reader’s imagination as they advance through a text. Carruthers’ ductus helps us understand how its sequence conducts a reader through those corrections.

A comedy story’s ductus will need to surprise in such a way to evoke (for example) whimsy or schadenfreude. A visceral horror story’s corrections will often involve an unsettling, transgressive, or shocking development of a previously “normal” image, while sometimes more psychological horror will begin with unsettling, transgressive, or upsetting images and then carry that associative weight forward into more “normal” descriptions. The Gothic pulls psychology outwards into the environment. Creative effects are achieved by carefully ordering sentences and words. By creating both the space (objects) of the story but, far more importantly, by creating a coherent and compelling journey through those images.

Take a look at what happens when you read – then massacre! – one of the finest opening paragraphs in English literature, from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

See how utterly differently this rearrangement (which changes almost no words) reads:

Hill House stood against the hills; it had stood by itself for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, not sane. Whatever walked there, walked alone, holding darkness within. Even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

In this remixed paragraph, the insectoid and avian (the inhuman) don’t emerge until after the house has been fully described. When Jackson writes “larks,” “katydids,” “dream,” and “reality” first, she loads everything that comes next with the associative weight of those words. When these words and phrases are listed after the description of the house, a reader has to “go back” and re-layer this imagery themselves. Without them, and with the “by itself” relocated ever so slightly, the first two sentences read almost triumphantly, a very different affective mood. The ductus has changed substantially.

Equally important are the interruptive effects of “not sane.” In Jackson’s original, this works in part because it’s a change in the rhythm with which the information is delivered. Sequencing within and between sentences matters. The mention of sanity (notably, she never uses the word insane) in the first sentence extends, temporally, and in doing so, creates an unsettled effect in the reader. The opening “No” waits for its “sane” for ten full words, 18 syllables. Even the subsequent – punchy – interruption of “not sane” in the second sentence stretches to two words: “not // sane.” This, combined with the sudden change from the first sentence’s long, flowing language, into the staccato interruption of “Hill House, not sane, stood …” produces a suite of effects that texture the rendering of the image in real time. All this shapes the content of the scene and its mood dramatically.

We have to read sequentially. And so the order of things matters. Good writers know this, and will often ensure that their sequential order produces clear, logically simple images and events. Great writers will use this to imbue stories with that effervescent quality of all literature: densely layered meaning. They’ll use seeding and nuanced revelation to produce meaning with novel and exciting effects. Tone, voice, and even – to a point – genre emerge from how language is arranged.

We now have a model of how a work interacts with a reader – how it forms, and then successively corrects an image, and how those corrections shape an experience of a work through their sequencing. What relationship does this have to protocols, and by extension protocol fiction?

The Shapes of Protocol Fiction Journeys

In protocol studies, Protocol Institute (PI) research director defines a protocol as an “engineered argument.” Both those words are dense. A longer definition from PI is that “a protocol is a codified set of behaviors that, when adopted by enough agents, enables coordination without continuous negotiation.” It’s both the “I cut, you choose” rule our parents taught us when we were splitting the last slice of cake with our sibling, and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that enables browsers and servers to exchange information – i.e., have websites be accessible by your simply typing a URL. There’s a tension here: if fiction is a constant negotiation between two world-models, its protocols would seem not to be working. But, in fiction, the protocol layer preemptively fuels the corrective negotiations that make up the text.

A story doesn’t have to teach you the rules of grammar, the definition of every word, or the mechanics of how to read word-by-word. It often doesn’t have to teach readers the conventions of its genre, either. All that is prepackaged (unless you’re writing children’s literature!): grammar, lexicon, reading order, genre expectations. A work must teach a reader how to read its particular text, but not – like Carl Sagan would say – create the universe just so you can bake an apple pie from scratch.

Which is useful, because the ductus of a work primarily exists only within that work. Some exhaust gets collected and ossified in genre-level protocols, which is why we talk about nascent genres “maturing” and eventually “being transcended.” The more aspects of a work that are codified into a persistent genre or grammatical layer, the more a specific work can create complicated “single-use” ductus. Persistent protocols enable work-specific engineering.

Grammar and genre comprise the protocol layer atop which the sentence and paragraph can operate. Fiction functions like an application capable of this constant (corrective) negotiating because it runs atop a stack that frees up capacity for a conductive (in the ductus sense of conducting) negotiation. Text becomes the conduit through which two world-models argue, and a story emerges. Taken as a whole, a story is an engineered argument in Rao’s sense. The ductus is the engineering. It is the place in which designed rhythms, orders, and corrections structure the reader’s movement toward a shared world-model that can run extravagantly (see the deferred meanings in Jackson). The sentence is where fiction’s protocol stack gets executed.

The reader’s image (i.e., fictive world-model, aka imagination) forms, and is accreted upon, expanded, corrected, argued against, nuanced, made smaller, made bigger, made specific, and made dramatic by word order and choice. Sentence-by-sentence.

So what does the genre of protocol fiction build within each work? Where does its ductus take us, and how?

One solution so far has been to find protocols that aren’t working for people. Nadia Asparouhova calls these “Kafka protocols.” These are protocols that “hold too much power,” and where a “[p]articipant is trapped in a maze that they can’t understand and also can’t escape.” Here one finds a cliche of science fiction writing – it is easier to write about dystopias than utopias. My own story Noise Ordinance is a straightforward play at dystopia. More recent protocol fiction works, like Cameron Russell Armstrong’s prize-winning American Skyway, traffic in a similar, but updated satire/thriller-inflected tone. This again, culminates in a very dynamic event – the antithesis of the non-event which typically characterizes protocol studies.

In Armstrong’s story, we can see some micro-techniques of protocol fiction emerging. Let’s take the opening paragraph (specifically, its second sentence):

Clusters of bureaucrats dutifully feigned attention while quietly locked in desperate combat with the looming spectre of accidental slumber during this third hour of the 17th session on the ninth day of the quarterly two-day Reratification Accords for the treaty governing the Joint Defense of the Lebanon Space Elevator and Remembrance Zone, which memorialized the grand experiment formerly known as the United States of America.

Armstrong uses a very different valence to Jackson. His story begins with “clusters of bureaucrats,” the word cluster immediately suggests computation, statistics – protocolish realms. There’s also a nice scansion to the phrase (a wildly important feature of prose that needs careful attenuation) “clusters of bureaucrats dutifully feigned.” The oxymoron of dutifully feigning something immediately conjures the satirical tone that defines the piece. This hint of satirism is formalized in the next clause, where the epic tone of “locked in desperate combat with the looming spectre” is immediately undercut by “accidental slumber.” High language for what amounts to the simple struggle not to fall asleep in a boring meeting.

From there, we dive into a long, nested list defined by a succession of numbers: “The third hours of the 17th session on the ninth day of the quarterly two-day.” This cascade produces another effect; numbers abound, but mean little in this story. Ninth day of the two-day is fun, and the second oxymoronic detail in just the first sentence. What emerges here at the level of language is that the containers of numeric meaning contain irresolvable tensions that are too easy to ignore and too hard to fix. That this is nestled within a numeric cascade further drenches the text.

Then, there’s the finale of the opening line: “formerly known as the United States of America.” Like Jackson, I don’t think this paragraph would work at all as well if that detail was foregrounded, instead of having it hit at the very end of the sentence. Again, we have a collision of tones: “grand experiment” versus “formerly known.” If you begin the paragraph with “America is dead,” the tedium of the meeting and the nested numbers read as entirely tragic throughout, rather than letting the mundanity accrete and then detonate. This is, in short, if you haven’t read it, essentially the entire plot of American Skyway in miniature, in a single sentence.

In American Skyway, the U.S. has fractured into four successor states that all share a space elevator anchored in Kansas. This space elevator keeps all four economies functioning, and the ratification meeting described in the opening is held quarterly to keep the treaty up-to-date. Our intrepid, isolated hero is the only one paying close enough attention through the haze of routine to notice important details in the seemingly small amendments made by the California delegation, all of which grant the head of the rotational defense force “unilateral decision-making on force deployment and munitions storage.” He also notices the delegation bringing in a number of explosives-laden trucks. His objections to the proposed amendment’s buried implications are overruled. The accords pass. Everyone drives home. As Mark drives away, he looks back at the elevator behind him, just in time to see it erupt as a “small, sickly blue blossom slowly spread[s] across the upper atmosphere.”

The story is found (in miniature) entirely in the form, tone, and content of the second sentence. The surprise of the dead United States that appends the sentence mirrors the explosive ending of the story, but the tensions through which that explosion emerges also saturate the text. The oxymorons and irony nested in numbers that propel the sentence’s language act as a formal version of the Californian subterfuge. Meaning is buried in a cascade of routine, minutiae, and bureaucracy. The “desperate combat” and “looming spectre” which at first appear to be satirically overwrought are actually wholly accurate descriptions of what’s happening.

This is a clear ductus for protocol fiction: allow a protocol’s buried contradictions to accumulate until they become an event.

Protocol fiction has been quite good at exploring the failure space of protocols, and this is a well-trodden ductus for a reason. Armstrong’s story is one of the best examples of it we have. This is a valuable vector for the genre, but one of several. What is still being built, in my opinion, is a method for using these nascent techniques to invert or complicate a straightforward plotting that culminates in a dramatization of failure. What does protocol fiction without an explosion look like?

Or to put the question in this essay’s language: moving forward, what kind of associative, corrective, and accretive details can the genre use? One promising vector can be found in the Institute’s New Nature paradigm, a view of the world where “regimes of reality [are] governed by technologically mediated laws that are nearly as inviolable, immutable, and persistent as those of nature.” I believe this will mean a play between nature and technological imagery (the way Armstrong plays with mock-epic and bureaucratic language) – the katydids of Jackson and the cyberswarms of Gibson finding novel ways to bounce off each other.

It will require thinking through which details protocol fiction reveals and obscures, and in what order.

A lot of science fiction has involved using the knowable mechanisms of empiricism and science to reveal/explicate impossibly strange results: time travel, space colonization, alien intelligences. Think of so-called Golden Age science fiction. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are the clearest example of this mechanism: the stories literally start with a comprehensible schema of rules that govern robotics behavior, then walk readers through estranged results of these rules – robotic religions and seemingly impossible murders. Godwin opens his The Cold Equations with regulations, mass ratios, and engineering constraints, which propel the speculative strangeness of the work’s brutal results. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise presents readers with a space elevator rooted in tensile strengths, permits, and data. Known conditions (behavioral rules, engineering constraints, material/administrative constraints) move toward spectacular and strange worlds. The estrangement is downstream of the familiar.

New Wave science fiction is considered to be a break from this mechanism, but I think it is actually a relocation, rather than a reversal. Ballard’s “inner space“ expands the “knowable mechanisms” to include things like psychology, myth, media, and (sub)urban designs, from which strangeness emerges. Even a novel like Delany’s Dhalgren, which completely eschews mechanism, locates the strangeness in outcomes – an ever-changing city layout, two moons, a fully dislocated self.

It’s true that many of Stanislaw Lem’s novels, and the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, do explore truly ontologically unsettled mechanisms (the Zone, Lem’s ocean), and then render the understandable outcomes that emerge – economics, theorizing, technologies. However, Lem and the Strugatsky brothers both use the literal – extraterrestrial – alien to achieve this. The unknowability is external. This creates a distance from the ontological instability these objects create. When a system is fundamentally alien, a reader’s corrections are experienced as “well, this emerged from elsewhere, of course it is not sensible.” Obviously, these can still be deeply effective and vitally important for the genre, but they stop short of what I think science fiction can become. What happens when we locate instability as emerging from human, authored, and once-understood systems?

It’s my contention that a more contemporary science fiction will invert the strange outcomes × legible mechanisms engine. Strange human mechanisms (and the work here is dramatizing these mechanisms’ strangeness) will be explicated through a suite of understandable outcomes: distributed rules that are impossible for any single person to hold the history of, machine-generated decisions that operate via complex “black box” algorithms we can’t understand. Protocols that work even when no one knows why.

Classical tendency:
KNOWN RULE → STRANGE WORLD

Protocol fiction opportunity:
KNOWN WORLD → STRANGE RULE

We have a possible model for this, and, surprise surprise, I think it’s the very story we’ve been using: Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.

When Poe’s narrator wakes up strapped to the torture rack, Father Time above him, consider the sequence of events that actually occurs. He looks. He looks up. He takes in some greasy food. He lifts his head and looks again. He touches his bandage. There’s hardly any action here. Certainly no explosions, or even dramatic state changes of any kind. And yet, this is a propulsive bit of fiction. What is carrying, conducting the reader in such a dramatic way?

The corrections – the ductus – operate via the narrator’s updating model of the mechanism. What’s more, Poe very skillfully moves this on a schedule. First, we get an inventory of the room – all of which will be vital to the narrator’s eventual escape, but none of which register as such immediately:

I now lay upon my back, and at full length, on a species of low framework of wood. To this I was securely bound by a long strap resembling a surcingle. It passed in many convolutions about my limbs and body, leaving at liberty only my head, and my left arm to such extent that I could, by dint of much exertion, supply myself with food from an earthen dish which lay by my side on the floor. I saw, to my horror, that the pitcher had been removed. I say to my horror; for I was consumed with intolerable thirst. This thirst it appeared to be the design of my persecutors to stimulate: for the food in the dish was meat pungently seasoned.

The inventory: a strap, an arm, food, and a rule.

If protocol fiction is a genre of strange rules, then focusing on the rule is helpful for building out some techniques. The rule here is that the narrator can eat (a salty dinner) but cannot drink – there’s no pitcher. Immediately, the narrator begins to infer the intent behind this. He speculates that there is a designed cruelty here: a salty meal but no water. This isn’t a fact but an interpretation, perhaps a hypothesis about the logic of his situation. This prompts a reader to make a correction. They’ve moved from an image of a thirsty man to an image of a man inside a logic designed to make him thirsty.

From there, the narrator observes the ceiling. Recall that Father Time appears to the narrator as a painting at first. Then, both narrator and reader are corrected: “I fancied that I saw it in motion.” It’s a machine. From here, corrections accumulate. When he looks up later, he realizes it’s not just a machine, because the sweep of the scythe changes – it grows wider and gets closer. It is descending toward him.

… what mainly disturbed me was the idea that had perceptibly descended. I now observed – with what horror it is needless to say – that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor.

Each of the descriptive details emerges from an updated understanding of the machine. It’s not just an ambient movement, it’s a machine that is aimed at him, specifically. It’s not so much that the reality of the room has shifted, it’s that the purpose and logic governing the room has crystallized.

Poe pushes this even further moments later:

The vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to my length. I saw that the crescent was designed to cross the region of the heart.

It’s not simply aimed at him in some nebulous way. No, with horror, he realizes the extent and specificity of the machine’s purpose. It will fall and swipe its way through his entire body, starting directly atop his heart. The emergence of this knowledge doesn’t come from interfacing with the designer of the system, not from finding some secret blueprint or assessing the character of the men who put him here. The corrections here amplify the horror of the story, more so because they happen in the absence of the designers of the system and emerge from a character (and, by extension, us readers) correcting their understanding of the world. The horror is the slow reveal of the obscured logic and purpose of the situation.

This narrative tension can only hold for so long, though. There’s a limit. Once we, along with the narrator, know what will happen; once the model is “complete,” something has to change for the narrative to escalate and continue. The story must find new areas within which to deploy its corrective engine. Poe’s solution here is particularly instructive.

The narrator watches the blade descend, confronts his situation, and waits for his fate. In a kind of boredom, he mindlessly turns to the side and sees a number of rats have emerged, drawn to the scent of the meal he was fed. His attention soon returns to the blade that’s slowly lowering and to the ingenuity of his captors who designed this situation.

All of this is Poe planting and seeding the eventual payoff of this section of the story. Jackson used imagery to affix narrative and thematic weight to description – putting the birds and insects first. Armstrong seeded for detonation and “reveal” by holding “formerly known” until the end. Poe uses a third kind of reveal here: the details that he seeded earlier in the passage as something seemingly inert that become deeply relevant paragraphs later. This is, I think, quite valuable for writing propulsively about rules. In addition to the mood that Poe’s imagery and sequencing evoke, there is the effect of leaving an apparatus in “plain view” to both the narrator and reader, leaving it seemingly alone as window dressing, and then revealing that this apparatus is actually pivotal for completing the system or model.

Out of the boredom and exhaustion, Poe’s narrator “for the first time during many hours – or perhaps days” thinks. He begins to try to find a way out of the blade’s path. Finally, he remembers the rats, his free elbow, and the food.

None of this information is new to the narrator or the reader. The rats, the food, the free elbow, it’s all on the page already. The “correction” isn’t novelty, it’s instrumental and combinatory. He simply thinks to use all four of these realities simultaneously: he rubs the food on his restraints and rolls free as the rats chew through them.

Nor had I erred in my calculations – I at length felt that I was free. The surcingle hung in ribands from my body [...] I slid from the embrace of the bandage and beyond the reach of the scimitar. For the moment, at least, I was free.

He emerges, safe, rescued by the very components of the system that he had viewed as a designed prison moments earlier.

This sequence reveals one path for the ductus of a non-event. A stretch of time in which the primary movement of the story is the reader’s model of the rules (alongside the narrator’s) updating, correcting, hypothesizing, and then updating again. The mechanism itself becomes the vehicle for the climax. The initial reading of the salted meat as cruelty transforms into an instrument of escape. This occurs without the properties of the meat changing at all. The corrective force of a moment like this is distinct from a “sharpening image,” in the traditionally pictorial sense. Instead, this is a functional correction. The model of the world is updated, but not via its material, but instead through its capacity and logic.

Take three elements from Poe’s ending:

• Food: starts as torment, becomes bait.

• Rat: starts as ambient and verminous, becomes instrument.

• Free arm: starts as simple allowance, becomes interface for freedom.

Objects don’t change, their function inside the model does.

The techniques available to protocol fiction in large part already exist – this story is from 1842, far before any formalized science fiction genre emerged. The ductus-construction techniques exist already, what’s needed is applying them to novel technologies and logics – to protocols and science fiction. Poe’s narrator is trapped by a personed institution (even if those people are present through their absence in the story).

What’s novel is that we live within mechanisms that are distributed, disauthored systems – ones that were at one point authored that have become so evolved or diffused that they no longer function as such. We encounter these primarily through outputs, rather than design. We don’t need aliens to interface with these systems, but we do need ductus that can lead us through compelling stories about them. The crucial break between Poe and the future of protocol fiction lies in the designed versus emergent distinction, and whether the techniques used by Poe can be successfully wielded within narratives about diffused systems. With Poe’s instrumental turn, we have a promising possible system for protocol fiction. In fact, I’d argue that Poe’s method might work even better in fully ontologically destabilized systems, where the property of the meat remains unchanged, but the capacity for characters to use it is opened even further. Recombination in truly opaque systems is the only mode afforded to characters. What happens when we play with that even more?

So, to answer the question of how to dramatize non-events: The dynamism of the non-event can emerge from rendering the strangeness of the rules (the protocols) that shape the fictional world. This means moving some of the corrective momentum of the prose – the pace and places with which a reader’s image is corrected over the course of a story – away from the results and onto the rules themselves. The ductus moves a reader from outcomes that are legible into the darkened room of obscured and estranged governing logics. The reader’s model of the protocol which produced those outcomes gets corrected over time. The dynamism of non-events lives there. What accretes, word-by-word, is a model of the protocol itself.

We just have to remember, when it comes to fiction, worlds are built one word at a time.

Jamverse Contest Winners!

The winner of the first Jamverse contest is Second Coat by Spencer Norwick. Second Coat is a steganographic communication protocol in the city of Mayaford. The artifact combines elements of Zoothesia and Stockton Chronicles.

Four other artifacts that we loved and awarded are:

• A Few of John Warner’s Personal Notes by Kannen Ramasamy

• One Person Per Drone by Nick Punt

• Kinetic by ARL by William Wickey

• Big Man’s Small Batch Corn Liquor by Cameron Armstrong

This was the first fiction contest in which we sought artifacts set within existing story universes rather than fully developed stories. While reading through the entries, we learned that the best artifacts were fractal microcosms of a larger story that also revealed traffic jams in the universe. They used storytelling techniques to place the artifact in the world and we could see the artifact fitting into a fully developed story.

Looking at Spencer’s Second Coat through an Orson Scott Card MICE lens, it’s clear that it is set in the milieu of Mayaford – the artifact introduces a new idea (communication through residues left behind by city workers). The traffic jam emerging in the world is the graffiti subculture, armed with kappala halos, meeting the bureaucratic protocols of the city workers of Mayaford.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the first Jamverse contest. It’s great to see the variety of artifacts that have been created. It also gave us more insight into what makes a good artifact. We’re very interested in the use and repetition of these within stories since we experience protocols through day-to-day, artifact-shaped objects like notes, tools, maps, and apps.

We’d love more such artifacts to exist in the Jamverse, and if you decide to contribute one, these five have set the bar.

Dive into the stories and artifacts, and see where inspiration takes you!

They don’t need to know every single rule; they just need to have confidence in it. The polling station isn’t only a place where votes are collected but also a place where trust becomes visible. It’s a place where people stand in line, officials check names, and ballots move from booth to box to count. Even though the process isn’t perfect, what matters is that it is legible to ordinary people.

In Estonia, one of the world’s most digitally integrated states, voting is done somewhat differently. It’s done over the internet. The 2023 parliamentary election, during which more than half of all ballots were cast online, is now recognized as the world’s first parliamentary election in which online votes outnumbered paper ballots.

That didn’t happen because the state appended a voting website to an otherwise analog democracy. No, the system grew out of a broader digital state with an existing national digital identity program, and technical provisions for cryptographic infrastructure, software applications, audit procedures, and election oversight. And, given how Estonians have already used digital identity for taxes, banking, digital signatures, healthcare, and public administration, the introduction of internet voting (known as “i-voting” in English language documents produced by the Estonian government) wasn’t really a surprise.

In fact, while online voting is still considered unusual in democratic terms, at least for us living outside Estonia, for Estonians, it’s part of daily life. However, the ordinariness of this new system has introduced problems of its own into the electoral process. Trust issues, to be more specific, and the kind of trust issues that the traditional ballot simply hasn’t suffered from.

The vulnerabilities of the traditional ballot are easy for ordinary people to imagine. I-voting, on the other hand, prevents citizens from directly observing the voting process, prompting questions about what happens when election legitimacy depends on systems most citizens can’t personally inspect.

The Old Civic Protocol

Despite being simple in theory, paper voting was – and still is – anything but. It only feels simple because much of its complexity is visible to the public and supported by institutions people recognize as legitimate. It’s the illusion of simplicity that depends on rules and roles, documents, seals, signatures, observers, and non-negotiable timelines. A sealed ballot box matters because it’s visible, and because there are institutions, laws, and people responsible for keeping it sealed.

A polling station is, thus, a highly protocolized environment, with mandatory eligibility checks, privacy protections, and measures to prevent people from casting multiple votes. Ballots must be stored securely, the count must follow accepted rules, and the entire system must establish who voted without tying that person to their political choice.

Paper systems perform this latter function through physical separation. The voter list confirms the voter’s eligibility, the booth protects privacy, the ballot preserves the vote, and the counting table turns individual ballots into results. These steps are relatively easy to picture and follow by ordinary people, even if they don’t really understand the full institutional machinery behind said steps.

I-voting hasn’t simply moved these traditional systems onto a screen. In fact, i-voting reproduces many of the same democratic functions through a different set of dependencies. Paper voting relies heavily on physical custody, election officials, observers, and legal authorities, while i-voting relies on software, cryptography, digital ID systems, technical audits, and specialist expertise.

In other words, the democratic act of voting remains procedural, but the distribution of authority changes. Much of the process becomes less visible to the ordinary voter, and any meaningful inspections increasingly depend on people with the technical literacy to understand the systems underneath. The voter is still expected to trust the process, but the question becomes more complicated: who, exactly, is being trusted, and why?

When the Ballot Becomes a File

With the i-voting system, Estonian voters don’t need to go to polling booths. In fact, they don’t even need to leave the comfort of their homes to vote.

During the voting period, voters can download the voting app onto their personal computers, authenticate their digital identity, select their preferred candidate, and confirm their vote with an individual PIN. Votes are then encrypted, digitally signed, transmitted, separated from the voter’s identity, and counted.

The process looks rather simple from the voters’ side, but that simplicity is only superficial, because there are several safeguards operating under the hood. One of them is a separate verification smartphone app, which allows voters to check shortly after voting that the vote received by the system matches the one they intended to cast.

Arne Koitmäe, an Estonian election official closely familiar with the country’s internet voting procedures, explains why this layer matters: “When the vote is sent to the voting service, the vote is in the wild, on the internet. That environment cannot be controlled by the election administrator, so it is important to provide a way to make sure the vote is not tampered with while it is being sent.”

The verification app addresses one kind of risk: whether the vote was altered in transit. Revoting addresses another: whether the voter was pressured while casting it. Voters can vote online as many times as they want, but only their last i-vote is counted. In addition, a later paper vote can override an earlier online vote and thus alleviate certain challenges associated with remote voting, such as coercion at home by family and friends.

Polling booths, ballot boxes, and physical custody still exist for paper voters, while online voting performs comparable functions through software, cryptographic design, digital identity, and oversight.

In the digital system, a vote that was otherwise cast via a traditional paper ballot becomes a file, and that file has to be traceable enough for the system to verify, but not traceable in a way that exposes a voter’s private choice. It has to be secure enough to count, but anonymous enough to remain democratic.

Koitmäe also describes the counting-stage separation in practical terms: “Before decryption, the cryptograms are taken out of the digital signature container. From that point, they are anonymous. They are just cryptograms.”

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Trust as a Designed Output

We might tend to approach the trustworthiness of internet voting through the lens of cybersecurity, but security is only part of a larger picture. The main issue, at least from the perspective of trust, is legitimacy.

A secure system that doesn’t earn the trust of its citizens can’t possibly do democratic work, and a trusted system that’s not secure is even worse. Estonia’s voting system needs to produce trust indirectly, and it does so through layers of procedure. However, most citizens can’t inspect the software in any meaningful way; they can’t follow the cryptographic path of their respective votes, and they can’t personally verify the stages that separate identity from ballot content.

Instead, citizens must rely on the country’s national digital identity program and previously implemented digital infrastructures, election laws, cryptographic design, audits, observers, verification tools, source code reviewers, courts, and election officials.

Admittedly, this isn’t anything new, because paper elections also required trust in officials, storage rules, ballot designs, recount procedures, chain of custody, and legal enforcement. Most voters never inspected any of those things either. What actually changes with i-voting is the kind of expertise needed to independently assess implemented safeguards. Understanding the physical chain of custody is one thing, but evaluating cryptographic protocols, source code, or server security requires a much narrower form of technical literacy.

The issue here is that most voters don’t actually have such expertise, so voters are compensated for that gap largely through an appeal to trust in institutions.

The reliance on institutions isn’t merely theoretical. A study published in Government Information Quarterly found that institutional trust was a stronger predictor of both confidence in i-voting and its actual use than technological trust. In practical terms, voters appear to care less about whether they trust digital technology in the abstract than whether they trust the institutions responsible for designing, operating, and overseeing a particular voting system.

The same study found that higher digital literacy increased the likelihood of using i-voting, while age and education themselves showed no significant effect. That makes the divide between i-voters and those who vote traditionally less clearly generational than it might first appear, assuming a tendency for younger generations to be more digitally literate.

From the voter’s perspective, then, the question is not simply whether to trust the software, but whether to trust the institutions and experts responsible for designing, operating, and overseeing it. That kind of trust is not unusual, even if the technology makes it more visible. In written comments provided for this article, Byron Hyde, Honorary Research Associate at Bangor University, notes, “Trust in almost anything works through proxies because we rarely have access to the things itself to arrive at our own assessment.”

Ballots in traditional voting went into a box, and boxes are tangible, and their contents are, in theory, legible to anyone. The ballot in i-voting, on the other hand, becomes an encrypted digital object that moves through different systems that aren’t as easily accessible to the public. In this case, the public has to place its trust in procedures and safeguards that govern both the people and the machines handling their votes.

Transparency Without Direct Visibility

Internet voting changes the significance of transparency because full visibility isn’t possible, understandable, nor, in some cases, even desirable (from a privacy perspective). If anyone could access and see anything and everything, voter secrecy would be compromised, and the system would become potentially easier to attack and exploit. The solution is to divide the transparency and the responsibilities.

Voters receive one kind of access, while auditors receive another. The same applies to election officials, software reviewers, courts, cryptographers, observers, and political actors. Each of these groups sees different parts of the process under different rules, which creates narrower forms of transparency, in which voters aren’t permitted to inspect every layer directly. Instead, they’re asked to trust that the right segments of the system can be inspected by the right people under the right conditions.

Koitmäe describes this kind of observation as more technical, but not hidden: “Observing is more complicated than paper voting. We have a training program for observers so they can know what happens from the beginning until the votes are opened and we have the results.”

Though this might sound undemocratic, as the process can’t be reviewed by just about anyone, the reality is that it’s far from it. Modern societies already rely on expert-mediated systems, such as air traffic control or central banking operations, that ordinary citizens can’t independently inspect. Instead, they rely on certification, professional standards, independent oversight, legal accountability, and the possibility of public scrutiny when something goes wrong.

That last part is really important, because different institutions can review disputes, investigate failures, challenge procedures, and explain different decisions publicly. None of those mechanisms allows ordinary people to inspect cryptography personally, so ordinary people have to rely on different experts and specialist authorities. And since elections represent the procedure through which democratic authority renews itself, the burden of explanation and accountability also rises.

Edge Cases in the Republic

The Estonian protocol is easy to trust when everything works as designed. The voters authenticate successfully, the application runs without issues, the ballot is cast, and the verification tools confirm that the votes were received. The results are published, institutions accept the outcome, and everyone involved moves on. But what happens if the system is challenged?

What if cybersecurity researchers question the assumptions built into the system, or election officials and independent experts disagree about the seriousness of a particular vulnerability? What happens if a political party claims the system is rigged or exploited, and can’t be trusted?

For Koitmäe, that political layer matters because legitimacy cannot be repaired by technical safeguards alone: “Frankly, I don’t see that there are any technological measures that will change this narrative. It certainly affects legitimacy in the end.”

This is where the asymmetry between traditional and i-voting becomes important. Most irregularities in a physical election can be described in terms an ordinary voter understands, like missing ballots, broken seals, improper handling, or discrepancies in the count. However, vulnerabilities in i-voting systems are much harder to evaluate without expert knowledge, because they move disputes into technical language that not everyone can speak.

Sure, the public can judge how institutions respond to possible tampering or exploits, and whether courts, auditors, officials, and political actors treat the system as accountable, but most people can’t personally resolve a cryptographic dispute. This creates a shift in public judgment, which no longer examines the legitimacy of the ballot count, but the institutions that claim that the ballot count is factual and not tampered with.

Hyde warns that this kind of trust can remain stable until a visible failure or political crisis forces people to reassess it: “When everything appears fine from the public perspective, trust tends to remain stable regardless of trustworthiness. But that’s a vulnerable situation that’s easily disturbed by a crisis.”

Convenience and Authority

Estonia’s internet voting system works because of its sheer convenience. A vote that takes minutes to cast, remotely, and that fits into an already digitized civic life has obvious appeal compared to traditional voting. It also helps people abroad, people with mobility constraints, and people whose work or family schedules make physical voting difficult. It makes participation much more accessible, which adheres to democratic values.

That accessibility, however, shouldn’t be confused with universal digital competence. It might seem reasonable to assume that younger voters would be more comfortable with i-voting than older ones, but the aforementioned research suggests that age alone is a poor explanation and not a significant predictor of online voting, especially when other factors, such as technical knowledge, are taken into consideration.

However, convenience also changes expectations, because the ease of digital voting makes traditional polling stations feel inefficient. The importance of a polling station in the electoral process diminishes, and in-person voting becomes just one among a number of ways to vote. With the widespread acceptance of i-voting, paper voting becomes a fallback, or a safeguard, rather than the obvious center of the electoral process. Authority gradually moves towards the system most citizens actually use.

That shift isn’t driven by convenience alone. Research based on post-election surveys from Estonia’s 2021 local and 2023 parliamentary elections examined how technical knowledge, trust, confidence, and perceptions of the system’s performance influenced the decision to vote online. The findings suggest that not all voters approach i-voting in the same way: their willingness to use it depends partly on how much they understand, how confident they feel in that understanding, and whether they believe the system has worked reliably.

When the use of one system becomes prevalent and shows results, the procedural trust associated with the system and its processes becomes self-reinforcing. People trust the system because they use it, and they use it because it works. It works because it’s maintained, and it’s maintained because its efficiency has become a part of the democratic settlement. Over time, the question shifts from whether internet voting should exist to what kind of legitimacy its continued existence requires.

This is a rather important shift, because democratic infrastructure becomes harder to remove once it becomes ordinary, and that’s exactly what’s happening in Estonia. If a majority of voters vote online, turning off the internet voting would likely have adverse effects on the relationship between voters and the state.

The Distributed Ballot Box

Though it’s tempting to say that Estonia replaced the ballot box with software, the truth is that the ballot box hasn’t been replaced, nor has it disappeared. It’s only been reformatted. Paper voting still exists, and even the traditional ballot box was never an independent source of legitimacy because, as previously explained, it depends on election officials, printing and distribution systems, secure storage, observers, rules, etc.

Part of the ballot box now resides in the voter’s personal electronics, and other parts of it live in different systems, like encryption, election law, audit procedures, revoting rules, verification tools, public documentation, etc. In other words, internet voting added new layers of dependencies.

In that sense, the ballot box didn’t simply become digital; the authority surrounding it became more distributed. Sure, traditional institutions remain important, but they increasingly share the task of legitimizing the result with software developers, cryptographers, CS researchers, and other tech specialists. Their expertise now becomes part of the chain through which voters are asked to trust the result.

More importantly, this doesn’t weaken the authority of the state, but it does affect its role. The state still establishes election law and administers the voting, but it can’t make cryptographic claims credible merely by declaring them to be true. Those claims have to survive technical scrutiny, independent reviews, and public challenge, making electoral legitimacy dependent partly on legal institutions, and partly on expertise of different specialists.

These distinctions make legitimacy a maintenance problem. Sure, paper voting needed maintenance as well, in the form of poll workers, storage rules, recount procedures, chain-of-custody protections, and public confidence. Internet voting requires the same democratic seriousness, but in a different form. It requires secure identity, software assurance, operational discipline, independent review, legal clarity, and the willingness to respond seriously to technical criticism.

Final Thoughts

The introduction of Estonia’s internet voting system is not a story about democracy being replaced by code. It is a story about how democratic legitimacy changes when the procedures behind elections become more technical, less visible, and more dependent on institutional interpretation. Elections have always relied on protocols. The question is how citizens are persuaded to accept these newer protocols as democratic, and what institutions must exist around them for that acceptance to be justified.

Estonia’s answer is both practical and unusually coherent, as the state invested in building the digital identity infrastructure first and normalized its use. Make voting one civic act within that trusted system, surround it with cryptographic safeguards, legal rules, revoting options, verification tools, audits, and public explanation, and let repeated use reinforce the public trust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first failure was the flax.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were three things the hole could not take.

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

The second was the Big Man.

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

The third was the Travelers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Main Event Registration link (luma) (full)

• Workshops page (individual registration forms)

• Event home page with full agenda and details

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

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

The AI Angle

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

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

AI postures survey

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

Symposium Preview

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

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

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

The Workshops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Talks

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

We have 4 special sessions worth highlighting.

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

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

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

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

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

Key Links

Here are the key links once again:

• Main Event Registration link (full)

• Workshops page (individual registration forms)

• Event home page with full agenda and details

• AI postures survey link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pod hovered at the periphery of the storm.

“Watch,” said Shreea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shreea dove again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What else was new?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cill touched his shoulder.

“It was a good hunt,” he said.

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

“Swim with your freedom,” Cill said.

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

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

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

Shreea’s body vanished into the black.

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

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

It wasn’t true. But it felt true.

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

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

Internet, Meet C3PO and Humboldt

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

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

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

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

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

Vibe Infrastructure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protocol Art

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

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

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

OpenRecapper

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

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

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

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

Pressure Cooker Pedagogy

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are a few useful links.

• Cheat-sheet overview of the extended universe

• Current list of submitted artifacts:

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

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

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

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

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

I: The Burden of the Stable

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

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

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

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

I had named the curtains.

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

II: Badlands Booger, My Captive Muse

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

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

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

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

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III: The Choreography of the Nocturnal Embarkation

Consider what we are, when the lights die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV: The Freight That Was Not on the Manifest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing of note.

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

V: The Run

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

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

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

I refused the chute.

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

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

We did not make the morning stand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter the Jamverse Jam!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do we need this approach?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Discovery vs. Invention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily Walks in Logical Geographies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitter Lessons and Bewildered Inventors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the Mysteries Lurk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is there a better way to philosophize AI?

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

A Post-Romanticism for AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Post-Romantic Planetarity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter the Jamverse Jam!

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

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

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

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

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

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

He just couldn’t help it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Camera 27 weight vector – busyness revised upward.

It was hard to tell.

Thermal sensor 0034 weight vector – directedness incremented downward.

Yes, very hard to tell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so: He continued walking.

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

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

Because: Even with perfect coordination, slippage occurs.

Because: Sometimes that slippage had a name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so: He had to change himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because: He wasn’t as strong as Niol.

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

And so: He kept ascending the mast.

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

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

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

Many eyes turned toward him – unconscious – programmed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so: …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because: He was wounded.

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

Because: None of it had worked.

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

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

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

Why? Egrol didn’t care.

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Enter the Jamverse Jam!

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

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

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

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

I. What the Disposition Is

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

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

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

II. The Concord, as Best We Can Reconstruct It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. The Friend

The Friend lived in the woods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. The Chamber

There is a chamber under the Disposition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. A Note on a Certain Other Publication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. The Practical Problems the Disposition Has Caused

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII. How to Visit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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VIII. Closing

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

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

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

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

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

• The question is the visitor.

• The Disposition is the answer.

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

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

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

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

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

Enter our Jamverse Jam

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

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

Shafts to Wires

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rearchitecting the Digital Environment

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

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

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

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

Governed and Cultivated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Keeping the Medium Honest

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

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

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

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

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

Enter our Jamverse Jam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Nature Thesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Enter

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

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

   • Comic panels

   • Job postings

   • Poems

   • Forum threads

   • Historic documents

   • Encyclopedia entries

   • Anything you can think up!

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

The Jamverse Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stigmergy

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

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

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

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

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

All of these are examples of stigmergy.

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

Traffic Jams

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

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

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Contest Details + Logistics

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

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

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

  • A surprising “traffic jam.”

  • A relation to our theme: Stigmergy.

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

  • The artifact.

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

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

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

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

• Prizes:

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

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