Slide deck from the June 17, 2026 New Nature talk. Covers the Humboldt parallel, the Evil Twins Thesis (AI vs Protocols), the three-circle Venn diagram of AI/Protocols/Planetary, PI's Context Tank positioning, and the Special Interest Group research model.
An edited essay version of a June 2026 talk unpacking the Protocol Institute's core thesis: New Nature = AI and Protocols entangled at planetary scale. Develops the Humboldt analogy, the Evil Twins Thesis (AI as irresistible force, protocols as immovable objects), the three-circle Venn of AI/Protocols/Planetary, and PI's positioning as a Context Tank in the priceless-planetary quadrant.
Venkatesh Rao
How C3PO was built — corpus decisions, architectural choices, and engineering notes from 59 development sessions. Covers ingest pipelines, vector architecture, the Cloudflare Worker API, the Discord bot, and the move to PI org infrastructure.
Protocol Institute
Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts (TAFs) are cryptic, haiku-like weather predictions produced continuously by meteorologists worldwide that directly inform pilot decisions and shape aviation operations at every scale. These terse textual protocols encode atmospheric phenomena and thresholds that determine individual actions, airport procedures, and global traffic patterns.
Matthew McDowell-Sweet