Lessons from The Librarians
Six Principles for Protocol Futures
In this issue: we reflect on the conclusion of our first protocol fiction serial The Librarians, and we are live for a Guest Talk with Charity Majors in one hour at 10am Pacific Daylight Time. Stay tuned for Ghosts in Machines! contest updates.
Last week, we published the sixth and final act of The Librarians, written by
. These short stories emerged from the work of six teams that participated at a futures workshop run by Summer of Protocols at Edge Esmeralda 2025 in Healdsburg, California.Knowledge Futurama
A bit of context on the work behind this series. The Knowledge Futurama workshop’s theme — 1000-year libraries — was inspired by the work of our friends at The Long Now Foundation, and in particular by their most recent annual journal, Pace Layers. Forty participants kicked off this futures workshop by answering the following questions:
What is the knowledge artifact that you want to preserve for 1,000 years?
What is the technology stack for the preservation?
What is the social milieu for the preservation?
The workshop employed an adversarial, blue team vs. red team format. Blue teams were builders — they fortified, maintained, repaired, and upgraded preservation protocols. Red teams were crises — they designed catastrophes and periods of decline to stress test preservation attempts. Each team played both sides three times, starting as a blue team, as knowledge artifacts rotated through the room. Teams first picked their artifacts and preservation protocols, and finished the round by handing their worksheet to the neighboring table. The second prompt followed:
Describe the crisis that affects the prior preservation effort. Keep it sociologically realistic and technologically plausible. No zombies or time travel. The crisis should threaten and reshape in unexpected ways, but not destroy.
What is the state of the preservation effort at the end of the crisis in [year]? Describe the state as a set of circumstances and conditions.
Each round was set in a different epoch. Round 1: 2025→2125, Round 2: 2125→2425, Round 3: 2425→3025. The artifacts were: Wikipedia. Muir Woods National Monument. Internet Archive. Urban Water Cleaning. The ability to dream. Midwifery. These knowledge artifacts then served as the inspiration for Protocolized’s first official series.
In this issue we share how to use protocol fiction (PF) as a futures methodology, then look to The Librarians to assess the methodology’s strengths and weaknesses. We’ve made the hybrid worldbuilding/wargaming template publicly available here, as part of the Protocol Field Guide. The following six principles are based on our experience facilitating Knowledge Futurama workshop and the nature of the narratives that emerged from it.
Principle #1: Define the future with a system of rules, not events.
Key Tension: Heroic Myths vs. World Engines
Our inaugural issue proposed Chiang’s Law as a guiding mantra for Protocolized: “Fantasy is about special people. Science fiction is about strange rules.”
It’s not easy to abide by that law. The Hero’s Journey dominates storytelling. By default, it’s an arc that generates individual aspirations or fantastic worlds that we can escape into — not thorough explorations of possible futures.
In order to use PF as an effective futures methodology, you must follow Chiang’s Law. If your long-term thinking warps into fantasy the exercise and outputs won’t be useful. And if you are in the business of futures or long-term scenario planning, you understand that it’s too high stakes to use fantasy as a frame.
Even the heroes in Homer’s Iliad were subject to the whims of a council of gods and burdened by routine and ritual. Today’s fictional heroes are unbound in their godliness, perhaps atrophying our sense of respect for contemporary world engines and our ability to comprehend how they’ll drive our world forward.
Principle #2: Bundle classes of futures based on media.
Key Tension: Collective Worldbuilding vs. Divergent Creativity
Over time, protocols have gained fresh meanings. Protocols combine elements of rules and procedures, but also increasingly help compose media and techniques.
One tricky aspect to any futures work: how do you stoke creativity AND steer attention to the problem at hand? We recommend you use different types of media as creative buckets.
Want to explore the possible failure modes of a nuclear waste storage facility? Write PF using safety reports and newspaper clippings. Interested in testing the robustness of a succession plan? Tell a story with board minutes, a CEO’s diary, or an email thread with the company lawyer.
Protocol media include meeting minutes, timestamped logs, recipes, diaries, secret letters signed with code names, computer error messages, safety briefings, investment pitches… For a well-known example, Dracula was written in epistolary style as a series of letters and newspaper entries. Because we associate communication protocols with unique settings they can be a clever way to quickly set the vibe of a story.
Principle #3: Choose non-human continuity characters.
Key Tension: Magnetic Leaders vs. Witness Artifacts
Tales of Great Men, Great Bureaucrats, and their great-on-great violence dominates our headlines. While there are people in positions of massive power, it is not usually the people who are the compelling elements. It is the roles that they are in that are interesting and the things or rules that lend their power to those roles.
One strand of the history of science and technology has shown that when the moment is right, multiple people can make the same discovery. Newton and Leibniz created calculus in parallel. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace both sparked biology’s paradigm shift to evolutionary theory. Elisha Gray and Graham Bell filed paperwork with the US Patent Office on the same day. If we extended this history into the future, the continuity characters would be the scientific method, social milieus, technologies, and research institutions that interact to produce these discoveries — not the individual scientists.
There are several ways to maintain a link to the present without overindexing on specific people. For example, you could construct a PF with a plot that extends over more than three human lifespans. Or cast a material device as the continuity character — like a building or an office space that has a wide variety of occupants and renovations over time.
Principle #4: Look for the constants of history.
Key Tension: Availability vs. Timelessness
What will still be here in 100 years? 500? 1,000? You might not find the constants of history on the main page of the Wall Street Journal or HBR. Our day-to-day attention tends towards the novel rather than the routine. Nor will you always find constants in traditional fiction. Epic arcs capture what changes in history — not what stays the same.
Look for the constants of history in interstitial lore. That means get away from the headlines and blockbusters. Big events are noisy. Elements derived from mundane paperwork, proverbs, procedural hacks, centuries-old superstitions, patterns of etiquette, and footnotes will provide your PF with a more solid backbone.
Principle #5: Do not make or let things go extinct.
Key Tension: Problem Solving vs. Problem Management
All futures methodologies have a normative element. Because they contain value judgements they make a statement about how the world should be. The no-extinction principle is the primary normative element of protocol futurology. Nothing is ever eradicated for good. If something is headed for extinction, efforts should be made to save it.
This serves two purposes. First, it’s in accordance with good protocol design. Biology has some notable examples of why we should not make or let things go extinct. Eradication of wolves in Yellowstone caused the ecosystem to begin collapsing as food chains oscillated out of control. The “Four Pests Campaign” of the Great Leap Forward in Maoist China decimated the sparrow population, leading to booms of locusts and low crop yields.
Second, this principle forces teams to consider futures that are more than “the present plus [insert thing your team is building]”. The future will be the present plus many new things. Forcing yourself to allow many competing things to exist will make for more compelling, realistic scenarios to explore.
Principle #6: Don’t assume that starting perspectives will be persistent.
Key Tension: Motivating Opinions vs. Agnostic Futures
Just because a think tank imagined a future doesn’t mean think tanks will, or should, exist in that future — let alone specific think tanks. The starting perspective of a PF futures scenario might not be a persistent one.
This isn’t a prompt to figure out the right side of history. Merely that to use PF as a futures methodology you should assume unpredictable changes in perspective. Opinions and value judgements are dangerous to set as constants of your scenario since they’re prone to change.
It is useful to consider future social milieus but changes in tools, environments, and social technologies (like media, markets, protocols, and technical standards) are more concrete. Perceptions of these things might change, but the underlying mechanics of those features won’t.
Tip: Reduce your assumption of persistence by casting your own organization into a peripheral role in the scenario, or even as a villain in the story.
Analyzing The Librarians
How do these principles appear in The Librarians? What do each of these stories tell us about the strengths and weaknesses of protocol fiction as a futures methodology? What do they say about the actual future?
Act I — The Genesis of Memory
This protocol fiction’s “main character” is the organizational form that maintains and protects a version of the Internet Archive. Over the 1,000 years in which the story unfolds, religion evolves into a bureaucracy, then into an embodied intelligence.
Strengths: Enemies in this story are diverse and appear in various forms, from software glitches to political movements fueled by suspicion. Redundancy reveals itself as a necessary component of a preservation strategy. The blend of religiosity and technology.
Weaknesses: Leaps in AI capabilities are a major assumption. As memory and storage are so readily available today, it doesn’t feel like a compelling focal point – even if it’s a critical topic historically.
Act II — The Curse of Wolves
Muir Woods National Monument is a grove of redwoods that naturalists have conserved for over 100 years. In our workshop, this artifact was assaulted by red teams with fungi, governance feuds, and public relations crises.
Strengths: Embodies the non-extinction principle. Hints at a debt that has led the Zhang family to continually train and practice as naturalists.
Weaknesses: Using PF well requires a continuity character that isn’t just one person. The team behind this scenario should have put more focus on the succession mechanisms in Zhang’s family.
Act III — The Whimsy Index
Dreams are a kind of knowledge artifact. One blue team chose to defend the capacity to dream. That scenario produced a story that is cerebral and deeply entertaining.
Strengths: Clearly follows Chiang’s Law and spots the traffic jams that a system of rules might generate. The characters’ preferences affect the flavor of the story, but its plot follows real protocols.
Weaknesses: This methodology can easily get out of hand depending on the subject of the protocol fiction. Dreams are more or less invisible things and impossible to observe with current technology. This severed continuity with the present day.
Act IV — Phantom in Eden
Preservation of craft and knowledge is an important topic. Sometimes, even with new technology, we don’t want to lose old techniques and ways of life. Could midwifery last for another 1,000 years?
Strengths: Phantom of Eden touches on immemorial practices and folk tales of parenting to make its story real. It also doesn’t project today’s perspectives on childrearing onto future populations.
Weaknesses: PF doesn’t make rich arcs for personal development by default. If you want to have that as part of your story, you’ll probably need to make an explicit prompt.
Act V — Songs of Hydropolia
Urban water cleaning and management protocols have been an integral part of modern life for hundreds of years. Today, we mostly take them for granted. This team chose this artifact for exactly that reason, and it made for another great story.
Strengths: Highlights the confluence between sacred and mundane protocols. It also explores the tension between low-tech humanism and risk-tolerant engineering.
Weaknesses: While PF futures are particularly well-suited to exploring tensions, they aren’t always obvious in narrative form. This particular methodology seems to prompt people to imagine groups or artifacts that each embody one side of a tension, then play it out as a social conflict over engineering decisions (or tough trade-offs in social engineering projects).
Act VI — The Last Archive
In a nice twist on the first story of the series, The Genesis of Memory, part six concludes the series by exploring the iatrogenesis – the negative side effects – of memory.
Strengths: Sometimes the arc of protocol fiction tends towards gloom. This is a good thing for scenario planning, where the goal is often to spot potential negatives and chart a course around or through them.
Weaknesses: PF futures can err on the fatalist side, which makes it feel like there’s nothing we can do. Be mindful of that weakness and reign people in when they feel overwhelmed when they focus too much on things outside of their control.
Guest Talk: Observability
Join us in one hour at 10am Pacific Daylight Time for a guest talk with Charity Majors on the topic of observability as a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from its external outputs.