Noise Ordinance
Issue #21: 1st Place Story, LA Meetup, Argument Engineering for Dummies
In this issue: The first place story of the Terminological Twists protocol fiction contest! Plus, Argument Engineering for Dummies, a meetup in Los Angeles, another SoP25 spotlight, a new webpage for the teaching fellows, and highlights from Discord.
The average sneeze is around 60-90 decibels. I take pride in keeping most of mine below 20, even in pine season. A whisper spends 10, a sigh 20, and a single shouted word – ”why?” “how?” “please!” — can waste up to 110 decibels all by itself.
I’m frugal with my sounds. Saar and I were finally approved for a house in Neighborhood A7b six months ago and, even though I’ve only heard her hoarse alto whisper my name a few times since we moved in, the clean air, real trees, fences, fresh fruit, multiple bedrooms, and, of course, the quiet make it all worth it. The various quiets are both the best and worst parts of living in Neighborhood A7b. The quiet of others, the subtle noises of a peaceful planet finally returning to my ears after years in the churn and anger of the city, is a wonder. The quiet of myself, my caution in my own home, and the void in me that Saar’s voice once filled in the dwindling hours is hard, and it grows harder. But it’s worth it.
Society lost the war on light pollution. Stars hide behind a thick muslin of refracted fluorescence. Noise pollution, though, can still be fought, and after the recent Three-Month Riots, more and more areas like Neighborhood A7b provide just that. Peace and quiet. Quiet and peace.
Saar wakes up late, integrating the vibrations from her silent alarm into whatever strange worlds she travels through in her dreams. I am downstairs, still stewing on last night’s fight. Our words had spilled from our phone screens and notepaper chicken scratch into the air, and by the end of the fight we’d used almost all of our weekly noise allowance. Noises spent during “sleeping hours” are doubled, so last night was especially expensive.
She’s being reckless and unreasonable; I’m being cowardly and inflexible. It’s another iteration of the same fight we have over and over again. She came home late with a black eye, and was sweaty, haggard, and oh so happy.
She visited the soundproof bar in the basement of Madame Luxury’s Cosmetic and Costuming, an illicit, noisy place, Saar insists is unpatrolled by the noise drones. I don’t get it. Risking eviction, or worse, for a chance to listen to clanging punk music and screaming strangers seems like an utter failure of risk analysis. I love her. I think this life we have is enough. It’s safe. It’s clean. It’s peaceful, except for nights like last’s. We are happy. Right? I hate this gaping feeling her soiries left me with. Wasn’t this all enough for her?
I hardboil our eggs in the silent cooker while she sleeps. I intentionally cut the carton I finish into little pieces so Saar can’t use it as a cover to the basement next time she wants to sneak out and risk everything.
Saar comes downstairs with her shiner. It’s gotten worse since last night. The worst part of it all is that I can see in her a very real, embodied relaxation. Despite the fight that I’d spent the morning stewing over, despite the danger, despite the physical damage, she was happy.
I don’t want to fight, I write out on a sheet of paper I slide to her.
Then don’t, she answers. It’s nbd, she adds quickly as she slides the paper back to me.
It’s a VBFD to me, I write.
It’s all I have! she writes, grunting a little as she hands it to me. I wince as I watch another tick fall from our noise allotment tracker, then wince again as the meaning of the words hits me.
I tear up the paper, which somehow takes yet more of our allowance, and feel a white, angry heat begin to boil inside me. My watch vibrates, telling me the eggs are done, and breaks me from Saar’s defiant gaze.
You have me, I write, pressing the pen into a torn sheet of paper so hard that it tears even more.
Saar looks hurt, her eyes down at her bruised knuckles. She writes something on a note and scrawls it out. She wants to say something, but we’re almost out of noise. She shakes her head and goes back to the bedroom. I eat my egg over a small bed of kimchi and bring her a bowl, trying to walk the tightrope between apologizing and holding my ground.
She’s got her head in a pillow and her breathing is hitched. I run to her and try to pull the pillow away. Tears run down her face.
Are you concussed? I hold my phone out for her to see.
She laughs, through the tears, and I watch our noise allowance fall farther yet.
I scowl, despite her tears, or to spite them, maybe. She shows me her phone. Her brother is dead. I’ve never met him. He lives—lived—on the other side of the country, and even though they weren’t close, he was family. I hold her, even as I watch the rest of our noise allowance slowly drip to nothing with each heaved sob.
When she’s back asleep, I put in a bereavement increase request, and am auto approved as the AI agent scans the obituary and news articles I’d attached to the submission. The increase is limited to the household itself, and is, of course, non-transferable.
Two days of quadruple-noise-rations, and they go by so quickly I hardly notice them. We talk, finally talk, in quiet whispers dampened beneath the sheets. Her brother and her sang in the choir together, and I burn with shame realizing I didn’t know she sang. She cries, too, plenty. Loss sits on all of us differently.
“Do you know what my favorite game to play with my brother was?” she asks me one night beneath the sheets.
“Chicken,” she says.
“Like the game where you drive cars toward each other until one of you panics and swerves?”
“No, no. It was this game we came up with, kind of, where whenever we were in a big public place that was mind-numbingly boring, we’d each take turns making a chicken noise. A squawk, a bock, you know. Only catch was, each noise had to be louder than the last. If you couldn’t: you’re the chicken. I remember one time, we were in some doctor's office, and they’d been making us wait for like an hour past our appointment time and so we started playing. I started with this tiny whisper of a chicken. Without even letting me finish, he stands up on his chair and in the loudest voice I have ever heard, does a full cocadoodle-doo, and to this day, I think it’s the hardest I’ve ever laughed.”
I realize how much I’ve missed her voice. So much of her brain becomes instantly legible to me through her speaking, while it’s usually opaque and distressing trying to decipher in text. I have always thought best through the written word. The intentionality, its measured process reflect the slow iterations of my internal language. She, though, sparkles in the spoken word. Language shoots like tiny sparks from her tongue and I see her, really see her, when I can hear her.
We make jokes and can laugh at them, too. When you make space for tears, it turns out you’re also making space for joy. When our increase ends, I feel better than I have in months, but I am ready to return to our routines. The quiet comes back to me like an old friend or a well-worn leather shoe.
Saar is restless, though. She fidgets. She’s sleeping less and less every night. I often wake and find her face illuminated with a weak blue, staring. dead-eyed, at some silent video of protestors or horror film where people’s tongues are burned out.
By the weekend, she tells me she’s going to go to Madame Luxury’s again. Tonight. I beg her not to. I use my words, convinced this will help her see reason.
“It’s this or fucking moving,” she finally snaps, and then leaves, slamming the door as a chunk of our regular allotment goes with her.
Neighborhood A7b is a gated community, but the gate works in both directions. Allowing interlopers into designated quiet zones is, obviously, a non-starter, but the demand for these holistically low-pollution neighborhoods is so high that leaving is a non-starter, too. They—we—are building a better, more peaceful world. Doing so requires commitment. Skin in the game. Buy-in helps prevent aural-degradation.
I am home alone, marinating in my annoyance with Saar, when the Riot alarms flash. Bright, searing white and red lights flash silently throughout the house and the neighbors’ and the streetlights and everywhere. We’re supposed to close the windows and enter lockdown protocol, but Saar isn’t home yet. She’s at Madame Luxury’s. If riots have somehow crashed into this neighborhood, then they must have been large and bad enough to have made it through the more heavily police surrounding neighborhoods and societal bulwarks that shield Neighborhood A7b.
Saar isn’t safe. Either the riots themselves or the response to them would get to her. The thought of losing her erases all the annoyance that I’d let marinate and fester and rot.
I leave the house, even though I shouldn’t, and jog, as light-footed as I can, toward Madame Luxury’s.
I hear Saar before I see her. An ancient, more-rust-than-paint, pickup truck coughs down the main street of town in the crepuscular light. In the bed of the truck an amplifier and speaker system blare. Loud, miserable cries screech through the dusk. Saar half-sings-half-screams into the microphone. She wails. She shouts. She holds one hand high in the air, defiantly, while the other holds a microphone, and she shreds her throat to ribbons.
A pain dehisces my chest open like a wound. There’s such agony in her voice. Who had I been kidding, pretending three days of whispering and inside jokes could have soothed her pain. I burned with shame, too, because I hadn’t noticed. I’d been too annoyed, too scared, too focused on my own concerns to see the fire raging inside her. Left without an outlet, she’d driven herself to this. A reckless, stupid act that wouldn’t change anything. A driver, a woman who I’d seen on walks, but never met, smiles from the front seat.
Saar’s voice cracks, but that hardly stops her. The more torn and hoarse she grows, the louder she screams. She screams until the riot police come. She screams even as they mount their noise suppression cannons and send inverse soundwaves into the air that quiet the night in an instant. I am pushed back, along with a couple other busy-body neighbors, when they apprehend Saar and her accomplice. They put her in the back of a van and disappear into the night.
A stone-faced detective leads a thorough search of our computers, trash, notebooks, mattress, pillowcases, bookshelves, and even toilets, later. I’m let off with a warning, and told to check my mail regularly for news about the enforced divorce procedures that the HOA would be going through to get me separated from this bad actor. Shame, once a kindled torch, was now a forest fire. I deny all knowledge of her illicit activities. They ask if I knew anything about her illegal activities. If she’d been acting strange. I lie and throw her under the bus and feel so guilty I consider breaking every mirror in my house when the detective finally leaves.
I keep one secret for her, a final acquiescence to an argument that seems so stupid now in retrospect. I don’t tell them about Madame Luxury’s. I don’t know why. I’ll probably never see Saar again, unless I, too, lose my mind.
#
A year and two very quiet months later, I cannot sleep. I miss Saar more each day and nothing I do seems to help. The meditation practices I get from my therapist do not help, or calm me. The oils and medications and transcranial magnetic stimulation designed to help treatment resistant depression do nothing but give me two months of migraines.
I don’t know what compels me, but I leave the house after fishing an egg carton from the recycling bin. I walk two miles to Madame Luxury’s. I walk around the back to the cellar entrance and knock four times, pause, then knock seven more. The door slides open, I hand a tall man my egg carton and he lets me inside.
It’s a dank room that smells simultaneously of mold and some kind of rubbing or drinking alcohol. It’s tight packed, and there are many faces I would never have expected to see in a place like this: my elderly neighbor Carole and her husband Greg; the stodgy single mother with a permanent frown from across the street; even the tight-lipped librarian are all mulling about and talking freely. There are smiles, though I note that I’m not the only one nervous about being here.
The lights dim for a minute as a few people climb onto the makeshift stage at the front of the room. An amplifier turns on. painful, shrill note crackles from a guitar. The drum comes in behind him. The walls, lined with row after row of egg cartons meant to dampen the sound, shake, and the whole room begins to bounce.
It takes a minute for me to make any noise. I am not used to it. I have been silent, almost entirely, since Saar left, and I am out of practice making an impact in the world.
I turn my head to the ceiling and surrounded by a complete cacophony I let all the pain inside me loose. I scream. I shout. I hurtle every expletive I know into the din. I scream Saar’s name. I shout every apology I ever kept buried beneath my pride and ego, even though it’s far too late. I scream, and I don’t feel better, but I feel more. The music thrums. I am free. The guitar wails. Saar is gone. I miss her so much. I scream. No one stops me. This time, at least.
- by
SoP25 Spotlight
In each new issue of Protocolized, leading up to Protocol Worlds at Edge Esmeralda, we’ll introduce one of this year’s teaching fellows.
Felix works on decentralized governance innovations at the intersection of technology and democracy. His mission is to help design a new generation of institutions capable of tackling today’s complex, planetary-scale challenges. Bridging often siloed—or even opposing—communities, he connects legacy institutions, governance radicals, and emerging tech ecosystems. Felix is affiliated with the TUM Think Tank, the Harvard Kennedy School, and BlockchainGov. With a background in science and technology studies, governance theory, and systems thinking, he brings a transdisciplinary lens to reimagining governance for a more distributed, pluralistic, and resilient future.
On Thursday, May 15th, we had a great little kickoff for this summer’s program. You can now get to know all eleven teaching fellows on this biographies page.
Argument Engineering for Dummies
We have a new talk up that provides a fresh synthesis of the past two years of research. Put it at 1.5x speed to jumpstart your protocol literacy in ~30 minutes. This presentation, Intro to Protocol Studies: Argument Engineering for Dummies, was based on a recent seminar and upcoming in-person workshop as part of SoP’s corporate workshop track.
These workshops have been fun so far and we have capacity for more starting in June. Interesting in partnering on a talk, workshop, or project? Learn more and reach out.
will be in LA from May 21-23 to run the workshop with the Met, and will also organize an SoP meetup on Thursday night (May 22nd). Want to join? Drop a message in the coordination thread.Server Highlights
Discord continues to be a surprisingly functional research hub. Threads and voice channels are hallways and meeting rooms. The document channel acts as a kind of library. Discord’s popularity with gamers jives nicely with SoP’s punk approach to field building. Here’s what happened on the research playground this week:
A new channel, #protocol-commons, was proposed and will be live soon as a container for research on hardening, conflict, and commons.
Conversations about edtech and a firsthand account of a Kafka Protocol whirlpool in #idle-protocol-musings.
Alumni and friends of SoP started to share their workshop and session ideas in #edge-esmeralda – they’re open to feedback, and if you’d like to see it livestreamed, let us know.
An analysis of the 50 Ohms standard in radio frequency engineering was analyzed in #candidate-tensions. There’s an open thread with GPT 4o that you can pick up the conversation with.
What are you researching in your spare time? Let us know!
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