Guest Talk with Matt Webb | Fiction, Desire, and Belief

TalkMatt WebbMay 19, 2023

Matt Webb builds on his earlier essay 'Who Could Write Protocol Fiction' by arguing that protocol designers must deliberately engineer belief and desire, not just reference implementations, drawing on Gabriel Tarde's sociology (imitation and imposition as the only social forces), Dave Winer's 'Rules for Standards Makers,' and design fiction's use of charismatic material artifacts as boundary objects. He illustrates this with Stripe's 'seven lines of code' onboarding and 1950s science fiction's 'consensus cosmogony' of space exploration, then leads a workshop where participants invent protocols (anti-spam payment-gated messaging, death/grief archiving rituals, hazard-alert networks, and the Bristlemouth marine hardware standard) and brainstorm artifacts to generate belief and desire for each.

Topics

belief-and-desire-gabrielle-tarde consensus-cosmogony design-fiction-and-boundary-objects fiction guest-talks protocol-fiction protocols rules-for-standards-makers-dave-winer

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