Coffee, Diplomacy, Contest News
Issue #76: A host of program updates from Summer of Protocols
Update on our current writing contest
We’ve extended the deadline for Building and Burning Bridges, our Bridge Atlas-inspired short story contest. The judging panel has now assembled and includes Nils Gilman, who appeared in episode 2 of the Bridge Atlas salon series, and previous Protocolized contest winner Spencer Nitkey, as guest judges.
Your story of diplomacy, bridges, and espionage is now due December 8, 2025.
This means that you’ll have one more opportunity to get some community feedback on your work. Join our Special Interest Group on Protocol Fiction for its next call, December 4 at 10am Pacific Time. More information in our public Discord server’s #protocol-fiction channel. We’ve provided thorough contest instructions here, and there are some bonus ideas hidden below to draw on.
After seeing the first three protocol fiction anthologies in print last week, we’re particularly eager to see this next thematic collection come together. This contest is our most complicated yet. We can’t wait to read some tales about what the future of diplomacy might be like – and to assemble another collection.
It’s time to lead the next renaissance in science fiction. We are on the cusp of so many new, interesting technologies that have not yet received thorough treatment in fiction. Cryptography, GLP-1’s, rapid vaccine development, glowing plants, cheaper-than-gas solar energy, universal translators, supersonic transport…
Protocol fiction, which focuses strictly on special rules over special people, is a good way to take a shot at telling stories about these strange new developments in science.
Plus there are tremendous prizes for the Building and Burning Bridges contest, which closes December 8, where you can tie in some of these technologies.
Meeting with protocol thinkers
The cafes of Paris, Vienna, and the rest of Europe were lighthouses of intellectual activity. People would discuss economics, philosophy, and industry, and drink coffee in quantities inadvisable by modern health standards.
In a protocol-ish twist, we organized a meetup in a small, industrial coffee roastery. During our Bridge Atlas event at last week’s Devconnect, we invited a mix of participants from Buenos Aires and some visiting from abroad to share and discuss ideas. Of course, the first topic was coffee production – participants watched the roasters in action as they walked everyone through their protocols during a small batch. Like listening to someone explain protocols for poetry or music, it was surprisingly technical. The freshly roasted beans were then bagged and taken home by attendees.
The meetup included two panels that discussed how protocols could be used to bridge divides between technology and culture, then debated how the protocolization of migration and mobility will continue. Some key highlights:
It’s hard to explain how the world works (or fails) and simultaneously tell a good story.
The work of translating technical features of a protocol into marketable features is an artistic practice.
Just as there are safety protocols in place for internet users, there must be safety protocols for AI users.
Citizenship has scaled from cities to states – rules for planetary citizenship are creating a future which we’re already seeing glimpses of.
Traditional diplomats are on the back foot. New side channels continue to open up and more non-state actors are getting involved in a permissionless fashion.
We’re still working on making a distributed Vienna for protocol studies happen. If you do research as a hobby (and you should!) the Summer of Protocols Discord is a unique place to hang out and share caffeine-powered ideas.
Running a diplomacy workshop
Devconnect is a biannual conference for developers who work on the Ethereum protocol. We attended as well, to learn about frontier developments in programmable cryptography, and to facilitate a workshop on ecosystem diplomacy.
Governments, standards bodies, and corporations create critical infrastructure – often together – and must manage tensions. Technology ecosystems (especially those that maintain protocols like Ethereum, TCP/IP, Linux, or even how we decide when to wear medical masks) must also build bridges with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, technologies can’t hire or appoint diplomats. People instead choose to take on that job.
We put on a full-day workshop on ecosystem diplomacy. It was based on three years of research from Summer of Protocols and especially our recent Bridge Atlas series. Why diplomacy? Isn’t that just for governments?
The workshop talks introduced some useful tools and are available on the Ethereum Foundation’s YouTube channel. Watch the talks here. Get the slides here.
No – even a technology like steel production needs diplomacy. For example: there are strong cultural and political factors at play when a company chooses a location for its next plant. People’s relationship with work and with employers varies a lot between cultures. That relationship can directly affect production schedules and planning processes. And that’s just to make metal, where causality flows mostly one way: from culture to the technology (and its implementation).
Protocol technologies like encrypted messaging have a deeper political element. The causality flows both ways, which means stakeholders have, well, more at stake. A tool like censor-resistant social media will affect culture in hard-to-predict ways. Making new markets and customers isn’t just about interfaces or features, but increasingly about diplomatic groundwork.
Summarizing the Bridge Atlas salons
If you haven’t already, be sure to listen to the series of salons we recorded leading up to the ecosystem diplomacy workshop at Devconnect. There are five episodes, each featuring a bridge-building conversation between one member of the Ethereum ecosystem and an external counterparty.
Episode 1 - Intro: Tim Beiko and I discuss what this series is about, how Summer of Protocols approaches bridge building, and why protocol thinking is a good thing to get good at.
Episode 2 - Paradigms: Josh Stark and Nils Gilman talk about hardness and planetarity, two extremely useful terms for anyone interested in protocols. Plus, they explore applications for programmable cryptography at unprecedented scales.
Episode 3 - Commons: Trent Van Epps and Yancey Strickler go deep on how to protect and grow a commons so that everyone can win, by playing the long game. Between Van Epps’ experience with Protocol Guild and Strickler’s experience having founded Kickstarter and Metalabel, there’s a lot to take away.
Episode 4 - Alignment: Former CEO of Twitch and OpenAI – and current CEO of Softmax – Emmett Shear joins Alex Stokes of the Ethereum Foundation to talk about alignment and why most people get it wrong. Protocols are a more appropriately scaled approach to the problem.
Episode 5 - Verifiability: Shreya Shankar, creator of DocETL, and cryptographer Justin Drake explore the importance of verifiability in both AI and blockchains. They use the underlying similarities they discover to build a bridge between these two important domains.