Das Protokoll
Issue #40: From Palace Etiquette to Internet Code
In this issue: we had o3 translate and summarize the recent German-language book Das Protokoll. The book provides a fresh glimpse of how protocols have evolved and proliferated over time. While this summary will surely miss details and nuance of the original version, it’s been hand-edited to highlight many of the most relevant insights.
In the age of Louis XIV, protocol determined whether you would kiss the king’s hem or be thrown out the palace gates. A commemorative coin minted in 1661 shows the Sun King rising from his throne to greet kneeling petitioners, flanked by children, under the motto facilis ad principem aditus — “easy access to the prince”.
This image of accessibility was carefully curated. In reality, any audience with the monarch was choreographed by strict court protocol to solve the “access to the sovereign” problem. As citizenships ballooned in headcount under empire, rulers could not sustain the same rate of direct contact with constituents. Out of necessity, every gatekeeper, from minister to maid, fiercely regulated what impressions reached the ruler. Protocol, in other words, is a script of rules deciding who gets to do what, when, and how. It’s the hidden choreography behind diplomacy, bureaucracy, and even our digital networks today.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and we find protocols at the core of internet infrastructure — strange rules of cyberspace that steer how computers communicate. The concept of “protocol” has traveled a long way on its journey from royal courts to WiFi routers.
The German-language academic volume Das Protokoll (edited by Peter Plener, Niels Werber, and Burkhardt Wolf, 2023) maps this concept’s sweeping transformations. In 15 diverse essays, the book explores how protocols structure, regulate, and document interactions across diplomacy, administration, technology, literature, and religion.
Why focus on protocols? Because, the volume argues, they have long been the central medium by which loose human interactions are turned into binding order — writing down and prescribing what must (and must not) be done, filtering messy reality into an authoritative record. Ultimately, protocols ensure that something gets decided.
The book’s four thematic sections — Prozedere & Prozess (procedure & process), Mitschriften (minutes & transcripts), Techniken (techniques), and Schreibweisen (writing modes) — each spotlight a different arena where protocol operates. Together, they show the chameleon nature of the concept. From etiquettes of power to the algorithms of a networked society, protocols are the connective tissue of order. Let’s explore each in turn, to see how Das Protokoll illuminates the protocol’s journey across ages and fields.
Procedure & Process: Rituals of Decision and Diplomacy
What does it take to get an audience with a king? Or a hearing in government? This section explores protocols as the rituals and processes of decision-making. Co-editor Niels Werber opens with an essay titled Protokoll, bridging the gap between old-world diplomacy and the digital age. Werber revisits Schmitt’s “access to the powerful” problem by examining how diplomatic protocol in royal courts literally scripted who could appear before the monarch, when, and in what manner.
In one striking historical case, a Swiss delegation was denied access to the French king — not due to personal offense, but because diplomacy’s preferred medium was face-to-face interaction and the protocol wasn’t met. As communication media evolved (telegraph, telephone, email), the rules of access shifted: personal audience gave way to protocols of communication.
Werber’s chapter concludes by leaping into the present with a bold thesis: the Internet Protocol (IP) itself “re-adjusts the question of access” and establishes new digital hierarchies and centers of power. In other words, even the open internet has gatekeepers — just as palace officials once controlled entry to the throne room.
Diplomatic protocol in the classic sense also gets its due. Tobias Nanz’s essay Das diplomatische Protokoll recounts the evolution of diplomatic etiquette and ceremony. We learn how formal court protocols (like the Spanish Habsburgs’ elaborate Hofzeremoniell) weren’t mere pomp — they were tools to manifest political order and rank.
Anthropologist Anna Weichselbraun then takes us “word for word” into the analysis of diplomatic verbatim transcripts as historical sources, showing how even the tiniest procedural phrasing in a treaty negotiation can become critical archival evidence. Through such studies, this section highlights protocols as both process and product: the meetings and negotiations themselves, and the written records that outlive them.
Interestingly, protocol can also become a site of contestation. Jonas Mirbeth’s contribution looks at West Berlin’s 1969 university reforms, specifically Protokoll und Protest in lectures by Klaus Heinrich. Here, we glimpse protocol colliding with politics: student protesters and a dissident professor challenging the official meeting minutes and procedures of an education reform — essentially fighting the system by arguing over its protocols.
And in a leap back to imperial times, Peter Becker’s essay Protokollbücher als Steuerung von Entscheidungsprozessen. Die Kabinettskanzlei und der Schreibtisch des Kaisers reveals how seemingly dry protocol books steered decision-making at the Emperor’s desk. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, cabinet meeting protocols and registers at the imperial chancellery weren’t passive records — they actively guided which issues reached the monarch and how decisions were formalized. Protocol, we see, is power: from grand diplomatic set-pieces to the minutiae of bureaucratic paperwork, it is the mechanism by which human authority is choreographed and decisions are inscribed.
Minutes & Transcripts: The Authority of the Document
If you’ve ever been the note-taker in a meeting, you know the power (and pain) of writing the official minutes. Mitschriften, the second thematic block, delves into protocols as written transcripts — the minutes that become an institution’s memory.
A running theme here is how these transcripts turn into tools of truth and accountability. As one chapter title puts it, protocols can be “für die aufmerksamen Zuhörer eine Pein, für die unaufmerksamen ein Schlafmittel” — “for the attentive listener a torment, for the inattentive a sleeping pill”. This wry quote (borrowed from a historical source) captures the paradox of bureaucratic minutes: painstakingly detailed records that are often painfully dull to read. Yet within that tedium lies authority.
Historian Therese Garstenauer’s essay examines disciplinary hearings of public servants in early 20th-century Austria, where protocol played a pivotal role in Wahrheitsfindung — finding the truth. Her findings are illuminating: “Das Protokoll schreibt institutionell produzierte Wahrheit fest” — the protocol writes down institutionally produced truth, guaranteed by formal procedures and by the presence of the stenographer as an eyewitness. In courts and administrative tribunals, nothing is considered real until it’s in the minutes. “Ein nichtprotokolliertes Verhör ist kein Verhör,” she notes — an interrogation not recorded in a protocol is not an interrogation. This echoes the old Latin maxim: quod non est in actis, non est in mundo — what’s not in the records is not in the world. Such is the power of the pen in bureaucracy. Garstenauer even shows how, in a 1920s case of a civil servant accused of insulting a court verdict, the painstaking compilation of protocols, witness statements, and even site inspections all served to manufacture an official truth upon which punishment could be decided. The protocol, in effect, was the truth-maker.
Other contributions in Mitschriften underscore this authority of the written record. Stephan Kurz uncovers a trove of ministerial council minutes in Cisleithanian, Austria (1848–1918) — administrative-political protocols that formed the backbone of governance in a multinational empire. In these records, one can trace how policies were debated and how the empire’s fate was charted on paper. Maren Lehmann’s intriguingly titled piece Die Eitelkeit der Organisation (The Vanity of the Organization) considers how protocols function as “Vor- und Mitschriften formaler Mitgliedschaft” – pre-records and transcripts of formal membership. In clubs, committees, or even states, to be included in the protocol is to be a member, and vice versa. Her sociological lens suggests that organizations “write themselves into existence” by keeping minutes of their meetings — a vain exercise perhaps, but crucial for defining who’s in and who’s out.
We also encounter a reflexive, critical note in this section. Thomas Eder’s Protocol Analysis. Materialien zu einer Kritik; oder Wo bleibt das richtige Protokoll? questions whether there can ever be a “right” or complete protocol, compiling materials for a critique of our obsession with record-keeping. And in a thought-provoking finale, Thomas Just bluntly declares “Das Protokoll gibt es nicht” — there is no such thing as the protocol. By this, he points to the idea that protocol is always plural and contextual. There is no single Platonic form of protocol, only protocols embedded in specific cultures and purposes. This resonates with the entire volume’s message: protocol is a shape-shifter. It can be meeting minutes, a treaty’s fine print, a ceremonial code, or a computer language. In every case, though, it materializes authority — turning spoken words and social interactions into enduring, actionable scripts.
Techniques: Protocols of the Machine Age
Having examined the human side of protocols in meetings and diplomacy, Das Protokoll shifts gear — quite literally — to the technological dimension of protocols. The third section, Techniken (techniques), asks how protocols function as media and technical infrastructures. Here we move from the dusty archives to the world of code, algorithms, and information systems. Yet the continuity is striking: even in machines, protocols are about setting rules and order for interaction.
Sebastian Gießmann kicks off this section by delving into the history of something seemingly prosaic: the credit report. His essay Protokollieren und Formatieren explores the media history of credit reporting. In the 19th and 20th centuries, financial institutions developed standardized forms and ledgers — essentially protocols for personal data — to record individuals’ creditworthiness. The act of protokollieren (logging) and formatieren (formatting) in this context was a technique of trust: by following a set protocol (fill in these fields, use these codes), banks turned subjective judgments into objective-looking reports. Gießmann shows that even our financial lives have long been governed by protocols that decide who is “good for it” and who isn’t.
From ledgers we move to images. Media scholar Roland Meyer’s chapter, pointedly titled Everything that happens to a photo, examines analogue and digital protocols of image logistics. Consider how photographs today carry metadata (timestamps, camera settings, GPS coordinates) or how digital image files undergo standardized compression, transfer, and storage. Every step follows a protocol. Meyer’s essay suggests that every click of the camera and every upload leaves a trace in a larger protocol — a hidden itinerary of the image as it travels through databases and networks. The phrase “everything that happens to a photo” hints at a world where even creative or personal media are enmeshed in technical rules. In effect, our memories (in photos) are being administered by protocols of file formats and algorithms.
Perhaps the most futuristic (and ominous) example comes from Nina Franz’s contribution. Her essay Über das Protokoll hinaus (beyond the protocol) examines the quest for total control through algorithms in military and police contexts. She discusses the “phantasm of automation” — the fantasy that human decision-making (with all its messy contingency) could be rendered unnecessary by perfect technical protocols. Think of predictive policing systems or autonomous weapons: they aspire to protocols so complete and rigid that nothing is left to chance. Franz analyzes how realistic this vision is, and what it means when protocol-driven automation meets the unpredictable real world. The very title “beyond the protocol” is telling — it suggests trying to eliminate the unpredictable outside of protocol, an impulse as old as bureaucracy and as new as AI.
Finally, Anna Tuschling’s standout essay Offene Totalität, Internetprotokolle in der spätkapitalistischen Gesellschaft brings us squarely into the realm of the internet. Tuschling argues that to truly grasp the internet age, we must expand our notion of protocol. Technical protocols like TCP/IP — the internet protocol suite — do more than ensure an orderly exchange of data. They have become, she writes, the sine qua non of connectivity: without technical protocols, the linking of computers wouldn’t just be disorderly — it would be impossible. In other words, internet protocols aren’t just another step in the progression from court etiquette to phone rules; they radically widen the concept of protocol. These are rules that actively create the networked world.
Tuschling builds on media theorist Alexander Galloway’s famous idea that “protocol” is the new form of power in our era. Internet protocols hide in the background of our online lives, quietly integrating, regulating, and controlling the flow of information. They decide which devices can talk, how far messages reach, and where the bottlenecks are. In her analysis, internet protocols exhibit an “open totality”: they strive to include an ever-expanding multitude of nodes (people, computers, devices) in one network, but not by enforcing uniformity or centralization. Instead, they achieve a kind of all-encompassing connectivity — an ‘open integration’ of everyone, on a technical level, into a single web. This open-ended inclusion, paradoxically, is a form of totality: the internet tends toward engulfing the whole globe, not by a top-down plan, but by the bottom-up logic of its protocols. Such total connectivity brings its own power dynamics. Tuschling notes that while early internet enthusiasts saw decentralization as liberation, the reality is that protocols themselves wield power — just in a diffuse way. They set the conditions under which communication is possible, thereby indirectly shaping social possibilities.
In sum, the Techniken block paints a picture of protocol as infrastructure. Whether it’s a bank’s credit database, a camera’s software, or the Internet backbone, protocols form an invisible scaffold holding up modern life. They are the new bureaucracy — not of paper, but of code. And as with the old bureaucracy, we must ask: who designs these protocols? What values do they encode? The book doesn’t offer simple answers, but by placing technical protocols in historical context, it reminds us that even the newest technologies draw on an old desire: to bring order to chaos through rules and records.
Writing Modes: Writing in the language of Protocol
In its final section, Das Protokoll turns to the realms of literature and religion, showing that protocols are not just bureaucratic tools but also cultural narratives and writing styles. Schreibweisen means modes of writing — and here the focus is on how the protocol format itself becomes a literary or spiritual form. These essays offer some of the most surprising connections, from Jesuit spiritual exercises to Kafka’s novels, underscoring that the impulse to document, list, and prescribe spans domains as lofty as faith and as lowly as paperwork.
We begin on a spiritual note. Andreas Bähr introduces us to a distinctly religious kind of protocol: the “Sünden-Protokoll” — the sin log. In Ignatius of Loyola’s 16th-century Exercitia Spiritualia (spiritual exercises), practitioners are instructed to keep meticulous charts of their sins and progress in overcoming them. Bähr’s essay Punkte und Linien (points and lines) lays out Ignatius’s guidelines for this sin-protocol. Imagine a penitent with a notebook, marking a point or a line for each lapse in virtue each day — literally a tally of the soul’s trespasses. This was a disciplined writing practice, a form of self-examination by record-keeping. Bähr compares this Jesuit practice with later Pietist and Puritan “Seelenprotokolle” (soul protocols or spiritual diaries), as well as with more secular 17th-century lists of calamities and atrocities (essentially sin registers in chronicles of war). By placing these side by side, the essay asks: what makes a protocol “religious”?
The answer seems to lie in their purpose and structure. These early modern religious protocols were “Verzeichnisse heilsrelevanter Geschehensabläufe” — lists of events relevant to salvation. They had a precise structure and spatial layout (columns, tables, tally marks) that reflected a belief: if you could faithfully record your moral life, you could understand and perhaps improve it. In the process, as Bähr notes, quantitative dimensions of the religious popped up — a kind of spiritual bookkeeping. The protocol format turned prayer into a ledger, repentance into a series of entries. This captivating look at Ignatius’s Schreibweise shows protocol in a surprising light: as a tool for self-governance and conscience in the quest for salvation.
Next, the volume pivots from the sacred to the downright infamous. Niels Penke tackles one of the most notorious “protocols” in history — Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion (the protocols of the Elders of Zion). This text, fabricated in the early 20th century, purports to be the secret minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders plotting world domination. In reality, it was a malicious hoax — fiction presented as archival truth — that fueled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for decades. Penke’s essay Fiktion, Archiv, Funktion unpacks how this forgery wielded power precisely by masquerading as a protocol. Its fictional narrative was cloaked in the form of meeting minutes, giving it an air of authenticity and bureaucratic authority (the logic being: “if it’s written like a protocol, it must be true”).
The chapter likely explores the function of this fake protocol — how it served as a political weapon — and the concept of archive — how it was treated as a discovered document in libraries and trials. This example underscores an important insight: protocols carry a built-in claim to truth. Even a false protocol can persuade if people trust the form. Penke’s analysis shows the dark side of protocol’s aura of authenticity — how the genre of a text (e.g. minutes with numbered points and formal tone) can be used to deceive and manipulate.
From propaganda we move to literature. Co-editor Burkhardt Wolf brings the great writer Franz Kafka into the discussion. Kafka, himself a lawyer and insurance officer by day, often wrote about labyrinthine bureaucracies. But here Wolf examines Kafka not just as an author of novels like The Trial, but as a literal minute-taker (“Mitschriften”) within bureaucracy. Wolf’s essay delves into Kafka’s handling of bureaucratic writing.
One scenario in Kafka’s writings features a police officer recording an accident report — and the act of writing the protocol becomes a spectacle of its own. Instead of the protocol being a neutral byproduct of an event, Kafka makes it the main event. In the text, the bureaucrat’s attempt to record a simple incident turns into a comic, error-ridden performance — the protocol falters, the form doesn’t fit the chaotic reality, and this breakdown itself becomes the drama. As Wolf observes, what should have been a “silent transcript below the threshold of perception” — the kind of rote administrative writing no one notices — suddenly takes center stage when it gets stuck.
Kafka thus reveals the theatrical, even absurd, side of protocollary writing. The very “schematism of the protocol” (all those blank forms and rules) can itself produce horror and humor when confronted with life’s messiness. Through Kafka, we see the protocol as a literary form: a style of writing that can be deployed artistically to critique the systems it usually serves.
Finally, literary scholar Heinz Drügh wraps up the section, and the book, with Über das literarische Protokoll und seine Ästhetik (on the literary protocol and its aesthetics). Drügh’s piece synthesizes many threads: how writers have adopted protocol formats (think of novels told through diaries, documents, transcripts), and what aesthetic effects this produces. From modernist experiments to contemporary art, the protocol style — its impersonal tone, its focus on details, its claim to objectivity — can be a powerful artistic device. After all, Kafka’s works themselves sometimes read like bizarre committee reports or legal dossiers from an alien bureaucracy. Drügh might argue that the protocol is a genre of writing as much as a bureaucratic tool. And when authors play with that genre, they invite us to see the world with a bureaucrat’s eyes — or to see the absurdity in doing so.
This summary was generated by o3 from the original German, publicly available here.
The State of Climate Protocols
Join us next Wednesday, August 6th at 10am PDT for a protocol town hall with engineer, analyst and artist Cory Levinson. Cory will provide a survey of the current state of climate protocols, including those targeted at carbon accounting standards and emission reduction agreements.