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Exit to Protocol

PaperShuya Gong

Exit to Protocol examines how protocols can facilitate graceful retirement and archival by drawing parallels to narrative closure in television, specifically how platforms and communities can transition from active operation to preserved legacy. Gong argues for a framework where protocols enable individuals and organizations to exit with dignity while preserving their work and knowledge for future reference.

Related resources

Framework

Fire Protocols: Case File

Fire Protocols reframes fire from a destructive force to be suppressed into an essential ecological tool by developing community-based protocols for fire knowledge transmission and large-scale coordinated action across social, political, and ecological systems in Sonoma County. The framework positions attention as an autopoietic space that allows communities to regenerate and maintain fire knowledge while resolving tensions between geopolitical top-down structures and cultural knowledge systems.

Nathalia Scherer, Jiordi Rosales

Talk

Oil, Uni and TV: Post-Soviet Infrastructures Shaping Protocols for Web

Polina Kolozaridi presents fieldwork from the Club for Internet and Society Enthusiasts examining multiple 'local internets' in post-Soviet Russian cities—an oil-company network in Tyumen, a TV-cable pirate video network in Vladivostok, a university-business hybrid 'Tomnet' in Tomsk, and a cross-generational kindergarten network in Pereslavl-Zalessky—arguing these show the internet's protocols were never singular but path-dependent on local material infrastructures. She proposes the concept of a 'protocol of the protocol' (or missing manifesto): these local internets lacked explicit proclamations distinguishing themselves, which let their histories be erased in favor of the single global internet narrative, a dynamic she warns is repeating with AI's singular origin story.

Polina Kolozaridi

Fiction

The Librarians

A Summer of Protocols fiction anthology exploring librarians and archivists as protocol designers — curators who shape what knowledge is preserved, findable, and forgotten.

Summer of Protocols