It’s been a big, eventful first year for the Protocol Institute so far, and we’ve been busy working out how to transform the community energy and research momentum of four years of the Summer of Protocols program into the agenda for a longer-term organization.
Over the past four years, hundreds of participants in our programs have gotten protocol-pilled and nerdsniped, developed expertise in protocols, and helped establish the brave new field of Protocol Studies. Dozens of papers, essays, and videos have been published, at least two protocol-themed PhDs have gotten underway, and we’ve even gotten the whole new genre of Protocol Fiction going along the way, with nearly 70 short stories published. And along with our friends at the Serpentine Gallery and the Berggruen Institute, we’ve helped get a Protocol Art movement going.
That’s a lot, but it’s not enough. We think it’s time to level up. Now we need books about protocols. Lots of books.
So this November, we’re hosting the first ever PiBoWriMo — the Protocol Institute Book Writing Month.
If you have an idea for a protocols-themed or protocols-adjacent book, register on our website via the link above, create a project in your dashboard, and tag it PiBoWriMo! There are half a dozen book projects listed already.
If you can make it, we will have a kickoff on our Discord on November 2nd, and we have a Discord channel already set up for our discussions.
We’ll also have asynchronous check-ins, a wordcount tracking leaderboard, coworking sessions, support for using AI effectively if you want to do that, and peer-mentorship sessions.
Read on for more!
The idea of PiBoWriMo is inspired by the old NaNoWriMo event (which wound down in 2025 due to “scandals and financial issues”). We plan to take that basic model and adapt it to our community.
Your PiBoWriMo book can be any kind of book — a general nonfiction book, a book focused on applications/practice in a particular protocol domain, a book looking at a particular aspect of many protocols, or a book of speculative fiction exploring protocols.
If you’re one of the people who helped us establish this young field over the past few years, and you have an idea, we need you to write a book.
If you’ve been cultivating an interest in protocols independently of us, and have an idea for a book, this would be a great time to join us and find a community of like-minded folks who will really get what you’re up to.
If you’re an established expert in a field that has a protocols aspect — such as AI, healthcare, policing, computer networking, or climate — but you’ve never really thought broadly about the protocols aspect of your field, we invite you to take a stab at a protocol-themed book about it. It’s a surprisingly fertile lens!
If you’re a speculative fiction writer who wants to take a stab at the emerging genre of Protocol Fiction, join us. There will be people around who can help you make sense of this young genre and its conventions, and give you fresh ways to approach your fiction ideas.
So why do we want to promote more book writing?
Because books force us to be more ambitious, more rigorous, explain our thinking more deeply and clearly to others, and generally level up our thinking.
For twenty years, there was basically only one book about protocols, understood as a broad class — Alexander Galloway’s rather dated Protocol (2006). Our work has resulted in one more — the Protocol Reader (the ebook is free to download), a curated collection of essays based on our 2023 research. Another contemporary effort published a book called As For Protocols (2025). A member of our community, Nathan Schneider, has a fourth book on the way. Oh, and there’s one in German book called Das Protokoll.
That’s just five general non-fiction books we know of, for a field that clearly deserves at least forty. And probably closer to four hundred. Look at the hundreds of books published about nations-states or corporations for instance. Protocols are at least as significant a concept today, and only poised to become ever more significant. But so far, they have been criminally under-theorized.
And on the fiction front, while there are a handful of writers we’ve retroactively tagged as protocol fiction writers (J. G. Ballard, Cesar Aira, and Voltaire among them), the genre so far only has half a dozen story cycles/anthologies. These fascinating objects have been criminally under-storified.
We aim to change all that, starting with the first PiBoWriMo!
So sign up to write your book, and join us for the kickoff, this coming Monday, Nov 2, at 9 AM Pacific, to get your book going!