2023 Retrospectus

PaperSummer of ProtocolsDecember 13, 2023

The 2023 Retrospectus is a collection of essays from the Summer of Protocols initiative examining how protocols function across social, economic, and technological domains, featuring contributions on topics ranging from killswitch mechanisms and protocolized economics to memory-making and emergency response systems. The volume presents a multidisciplinary exploration of protocols as generative frameworks for organizing collective behavior, coordination, and cultural production in both digital and physical contexts.

Topics

organizations protocols research summer-of-protocols

Related resources

Talk

Building Psychohistory: An Infrastructure Field Report

Aneesh Sathe presents an infrastructure field report on 'World Machines Theory,' a framework for reading history as the interaction of long-cycle civilizational 'machines' (Modernity, Divergence, Liveness), and demonstrates the two systems built to operationalize it: the Oracle, a multi-agent RAG pipeline over a shared knowledge lake that generates oracular 'prophecies,' and the Prime Radiant, a typed knowledge graph of ~500 historical 'machine cards' that can be simulated forward to project future institutional ecologies. He frames this as an Asimov-inspired but decentralized, commons-based reimagining of psychohistory, contrasting it with Seldon's mathematical, control-oriented original. The talk opens with context from the Contraptions Book Club, introduced by its host.

Aneesh Sathe

Talk

Inventing Psychohistory: Discussion

Open discussion session following the 'Inventing Psychohistory' symposium talks, with participants including Andre, Florian, Shawn, Venkatesh Rao, Sachin, and Mike Travers debating pace-layer time theory, fashion as an interface layer, and Shawn's concept of 'new nature' as technological systems with no one to appeal to. Venkatesh Rao connects this to Paul Ford's 'why wasn't I consulted' essay and Dan Davies' unaccountability machine thesis, arguing complex systems becoming unaccountable makes them paradoxically more predictable as autonomous machines; Mike Travers questions how this relates to historical disenchantment and Descola's animism framework.

Aneesh Sathe, Andre, Florian, Shawn, Venkatesh Rao, Sachin, Mike Travers

Talk

The Political Economy of Protocols

Trent van Epps (Protocol Guild) presents a four-corner political economy framework for protocols adapted from Lawrence Lessig's 'pathetic dot' theory—norms, market, state, and new nature—arguing that protocols generate far more value than they capture and whoever governs the funding/labor/legitimacy flows shapes the protocol itself. He proposes measurable indicators for each corner (e.g., open-source status, corporate sponsorship share, legal mandates, cryptographic discretion-reduction) and traces trajectories through case studies including the English commons, CHI conference capture, Chromium's market dominance, DNS/ICANN's state transition, Linux's 30-year drift toward center, and Ethereum's tensions around Bitmine's treasury strategy and EF succession.</br>Van Epps introduces concepts like 'capture,' 'tenseity' (borrowed from tensional integrity sculptures), and ossification to describe how competing vectors pull a protocol's governance toward different corners over time, closing with open questions about whether AI and post-quantum transitions will shift Ethereum's position in this political economy.

Trent van Epps