What is Protocol Fiction?
A first report from our protocol fiction writing group, led by regular Protocolized contributors Spencer Nitkey and Sachin Benny. Join tomorrow, Feb 12 and every other Thursday, at 8am Pacific.
This is the question that the recently formed Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group (SIGFIC) has been meeting biweekly to work out.
A boring answer might be something like: a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on protocols as world-shaping technologies. This is a bit like calling science fiction a subgenre of speculative fiction that focuses on science, though. True, but a little tautological for my taste.
So, how about a couple of big picture ideas, things we consider foundational to the genre. One that stands out is Chiang’s Law, based on Ted Chiang’s differentiation between fantasy and science fiction: “Fantasy is about special people; science fiction is about strange rules.” Protocol fiction is, in this distinction, firmly in the science fiction camp, and those strange rules are protocols.
In any case, as we’re finding, genre is a messy concept to begin with. The group has approached it from a variety of angles so far: contracts between readers and writers or between institutions and the public; modes and techniques of discourse; and commercial categories designed to help move books in the traditional print and publishing industry.
Fingerspitzengefühl
The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it. Forcing yourself into hundreds of interactions where the only way out is through. In these early days, we’d argue that the best way to understand protocol fiction is to try writing it.
Develop some fingerspitzengefühl, a German word loosely translated as “fingertip feeling.” It’s a word for the kind of instinctual tact and skill one acquires through actually practicing in a field. You could read a thousand books and watch a hundred videos outlining the mechanics behind a judo throw, but you will still be missing a vital, embodied understanding that comes from spending hundreds of hours on the mat, actually attempting it in meat space.
As part of my presentation (and a subsequent workshop) at the Ethereum Foundation’s developer conference, Devconnect, I put together a basic outline for structuring a protocol fiction story. This protocol (ha),arose in part through the conversations we’ve had in the SIG, and also from reflections on the various pieces of protocol fiction I’ve successfully, and unsuccessfully, taken a stab at.
When we first talked about genre in the SIG, I posited that genre rules and insights are best viewed as doorways, rather than scripture, and I hope this formula is taken in the same way. It’s intended to help generate, not limit.
It goes like this:
Render a rule
Rehearse a Failure Mode
Reveal a Human Insight
To break this down a little more, let’s take each step in turn.
Render a Rule
Protocol fiction is about strange rules. Specifically, it is a form of science fiction that treats rules as a class of technology. In other fictional genres, I might start a piece with its characters, emotional core, or plot elements. To help me adapt to this newer genre, I’ve found it useful to start by working on the conceptual/conceit level: find a rule and make it strange.
There are two kinds of rules I’ve explored in my work: existing protocols and speculative (i.e., invented) protocols.
In the former case, I’ve found the protocol studies concept of a “Whitehead Protocol” to be a really rich vein to explore. This term, I’ve learned, comes from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s claim that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” These subconscious operations often take the shape of protocols. Think about driving and the manifold rules and operations most of us perform without thinking (using turn signals, flipping on hazards when stopped precariously, stopping at stop-signs, accelerating when there’s a green light). The ability of billions of people to drive in and out of our urban centers every day follows from the fact that the vast majority of them do not have to actively think about every action they take in relation to the flow of traffic.
A fun way to start writing protocol fiction is to find yourself a protocol that has become invisible, or unconscious à la Whitehead, and start to imagine ways in which that subconscious act could become conspicuous again. Often this means transposing it into a new field. For example, how might traffic protocols adapt in response to teleportation and time travel?
Of course, you can also invent your own speculative protocols, in the way science fiction writers have often invented new technologies. What’s a protocol equivalent of Ursula Le Guin’s faster-than-light communication device, the Ansible? I don’t know, but if you do, you should write that story for Protocolized!
Rehearse a Failure Mode
Protocol fiction has plot, and plot is driven by friction. A fun tool for generating friction is exploring the failure modes generated by a strange rule. I’ve found, too, that for protocol fiction, this is often best done by exploring how the negotiation between protocol and agents (usually human characters, but not necessarily!) breaks down, rather than just “the rule stopped working!” Protocolized editor Timber Stinson-Schroff’s formulation highlights the importance of this: “The rule works, but what doesn’t work about the rule?” Science fiction writer Fredrick Pohl has a great quote that captures this idea:
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
Here, again, the emerging field of protocol studies provides rich conceptual resources on which to draw. Take the concept of Kafka Protocols (not just because they’re named after a fiction writer, though it helps).
According to Nadia Asparouhova, Kafka Protocols happen when a “protocol holds too much power. Participants are trapped in a maze that they can’t understand and also can’t escape.” Think of the numbing bureaucracies so many of Kafka’s protagonists find themselves buried within, and you’ll find a great primer on one way protocols can fail the people they organize.
In my talk and accompanying workshop, I used genre as a scaffold to help consider questions that might generate some interesting failure modes and plot lines.
Horror – what’s the scariest way this rule could fail?
Mystery – what’s the most puzzling way this rule could fail?
Cyberpunk – what’s the most hackable way this rule could fail?
Dystopia – what’s the most tyrannical way this rule could fail?
Utopia/Solarpunk – what’s the most beneficial way this rule could fail?
Humor – what’s the funniest way this rule could fail?
Again, these should ideally serve as doorways, not prescriptions, but they give you a good starting place to conceive of your protocol fictions.
Reveal a human insight
This is usually the hardest part for me, but a great story will always reach a kind of escape velocity from the gravity of its specifics, reaching something transcendentally true or resonant. Counterintuitively, though, specifics generate universality.
Take Ted Chiang’s short story Exhalation. It’s a story about confronting entropy, about the joy of discovery and effort even in an ultimately futile universe, and a meditation on the grace of accepting one’s fate rather than fighting it. To accomplish this searing emotional feat, Chiang does not begin with wide assertions about humanity or the cosmos as a whole. His story centers on a single member of a mechanistic alien species powered by pressure. Paragraphs are spent following this character as he dissects his own head, discovers that his world is slowly dying, and tells of the myriad efforts his planet takes to circumvent or forestall their fate.
Universality comes through specificity, and there is no shortage of human truth and emotion to explore. Something I have found fruitful to play with is the intersection of these experiences with emotions. Write a story about grief and greed, senescence and desire, fear and freedom.
If you can use these three steps to sketch out a story, you probably have yourself a protocol fiction pitch.
Again, this is by no means the only way to write a protocol fiction story. There’s an abundance of creative protocols that one could use to write the next great protocol fiction story, but if you want to get your fingers literate in the language of protocol fiction and don’t know where to start, give this method a try, and see how it turns out.
Ultimately, protocol fiction is about living in relation to the protocols that prefigure and drive so much of our contemporary reality. Protocols are the engine of the present world, helping organize web traffic via DHCP, keeping our streets quiet from 10pm to 6am, shaping both human and machine memory, and so much more. Protocol fiction is about investigating the present and then stretching the logics, machinations, and trends of this current time toward the future. It’s about finding future traffic jams, exploring how they will change and shape us, and (hopefully) writing a kick-ass story about them.
If you want to learn more about protocol fiction, get feedback on your story ideas and drafts, and talk shop with a small group of passionate fellow writers, check out the Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group on our Discord. Beyond just genre, we’ve talked protocol monsters (with a forthcoming SIGFIC update on this topic coming soon!), investigated the differences between cyberpunk and Lovecraftian world-building techniques, practiced grafting Antarctic field safety manuals onto science fiction tropes, and learned a lot about writing through the whole process.
If any of that sounds like fun, join our next meeting – tomorrow, Thursday, February 12 from 11 to 12 EST in Discord! Shape the future of protocol fiction yourself.