The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols Web

The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols | Summer of Protocols

DRAFT Version 0.99, March 6th, 2023

Dangerous Protocols - Summer of Protocols

Protocols are frequently touted as the liberating alternative to walled technological gardens, but the historical purpose of protocols has always been to simplify decision-making and reduce human agency. How do we reconcile these two narratives? I explore the dangerous side of protocols, and how their ability to drive coordination means they also have

Knowledge Networks and the Politics of Protocols

Harmony without loss of Variety;  Variety without loss of Harmony.

Theorizing Protocolization II: Atomic Protocol Questions

Solving real coordination problems to discover the formal laws of protocols.

The emergence of consensus: a primer

The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science have provided quantitative insights on the mechanisms of social consensus. However, the literature is vast and widely scattered across fields, making it hard for the single researcher to navigate it. This short review aims to provide a compact overview of the main dimensions over which the debate has unfolded and to discuss some representative examples. It focuses on those situations in which consensus emerges ‘spontaneously’ in the absence of centralized institutions and covers topics that include the macroscopic consequences of the different microscopic rules of behavioural contagion, the role of social networks and the mechanisms that prevent the formation of a consensus or alter it after it has emerged. Special attention is devoted to the recent wave of experiments on the emergence of consensus in social systems.

Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization

How Control Exists after DecentralizationIs the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

So I finally finished reading this and while I agree with the recommendation, I’m a little wary of some of the context it’s rooted in ideologically and I’m wondering if others have thoughts on these things. Equality in the marketplace I think the main problem with the text is that it relies heavily on the idea of “marketplace of ideas,” leaning heavily on the idea that protocols are actually good for markets specifically because they make competition more perfect (because there’s better knowled...

Routledge International Handbook of Complexity Economics | Ping Chen,

The Routledge International Handbook of Complexity Economics covers the historical developments and early concerns of complexity theorists and brings them into

The Purpose of Protocols

Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?

The Purpose of Protocols

Every open social protocol generates shared resources, but none has produced a governance framework adequate to those resources. So who fills that vacuum?

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

What is clear is that there is no simple solution to these challenges, and most of the ones that are normally presented tend not to deal with the reality of the problems or to understand the technical and societal challenges that likely make them impossible.

Willow - Protocols for an uncertain future (FOSDEM'26)

Centralised systems were designed with the best of intentions, but were turned against us anyway. And peer-to-peer systems will be exactly the same. How do we make the next generation of protocols ...