New Nature
30 Oct 2026 - 30 Oct 2026
- The Protocol-ist idea of New Nature. It's a bit hubristic, but not inaccurate! Protocols like TCP do create a new nature, a whole world where various forms of life come ink together and interact.
Protocolization is an unfolding long-term planetary transformation that is at least as old as modernity itself. That is to say, it is at least several centuries old, and has unfolded through multiple distinct chapters, in loose synchronization with major technological revolutions. Protocolization is the overarching story of how humanity has cashed out and orchestrated the capabilities of every wave of new technologies to make our world ever more comfortable and hospitable for humans.
Protocolization is reducible neither to its technological drivers, nor to the changes in human nature triggered by them. Protocolization is the co-evolution of both into what we might call a new nature
- Not to be a drip but sounds like it's just modernity. I mean viewing modernization as protocolization is interesting, it subsumes capitalism, bureaucracy, and everything else. Not a bad abstraction though.
nuclear reactors, supercomputers, AI systems, miracle medicines, robots. These “hero” technologies lend themselves to anthropomorphic projection,..By contrast, the technological elements of protocols – interoperability standards, kits, standardized fasteners, electrical connectors, plumbing regulations, safety codes, sewage pipes, modularity grammars – typically gently diffuse and deflect anthropomorphic impulses.
- I don't thing "anthropomorphic" is quite the right word here, but I get the idea.
- Huh, it reads to me as kind of gender-coded: the "anthropomorphic" technologies are kind of big, loud, projections of strength, individualistic (male coded). While protocols are genrle, pervasive, shared, community-focused (female coded).
Rather than serving our heroic individualist impulses, they quietly orchestrate and shape our mutualist and cooperative energies. Protocolization looks like ecological emergence rather than a technological hero’s journey. It encourages a very different narrative of progress.
- This seems surprisingly watm and fuzzy coming from Venkat, but maybe I have an oversimplified image of him. Anyway, I'm there, sounds like the kind of thing an old hippie like me would like.
Protocolization is the progressive metabolization of reliably repeatable technologically mediated human behaviors at all scales into reliable planetary infrastructures for coordination.
- OK that's a good crisp definition. "Progressive metabolization" I'm not sure about, but I guess it is akin to institutionalization and learning.
- And I guess I would "argue" (not really, its a definition and he can mean what he wants) about "technologically mediated". Why should we exclude all the natural protocols, or social protocols that don't rely on technology? In fact I thought handshaking was a prototypical example case for formalization, and no technology is involved.
- I had an exchange with vgr about this (on the Protocol Formalisms discord chat)
vgr: I think we need a similar disciplined distancing from complexity sciences. There I’m very wary of the bias towards “simple rules —> complex behavior” explanations. Protocols are complex rule sets! And there’s a need for complexity in rules that is the whole point. Otherwise you don’t get agency and controllable futures with hardness. New nature becomes indistinguishable from old nature.
me: "new nature becomes indistinguishable from old nature" -- doesnt old nature contain protocols? Sorry too big a question but are we talking about only hard engineered protocols or can we model old, soft, emergent protocols?
vgr: I am. I tend to avoid letting things like DNA or natural language into the definition
- Oh never mind!
Here, we mean technological mediation in a broad sense, encompassing conceptual and cultural technologies such as the decimal system (instrumental in the development of modern book-keeping) or hygiene or nutritional practices that first took shape as religious observances
It is worth noting that though we only mention human behavior in the definition, these behaviors shape the fates of all other life on the planet as well. Not just the major domesticated species of plants and animals, but through the shaping of “wilderness” regimes of the planet, all other life as well
- OK that's an even broader definition than I would use. I'm a little confused.
- Protocols tend to be in the background
But we do sometimes notice – when we travel to a city or country with more reliable subway services than our own, for example, we are struck by a sense of serendipity suffusing our transit experiences; a sense that the world is unusually hospitable in ways precisely attuned to our needs.
- Thatis protocolization; steadily accumulating ecological transformations of the planet, each of which makes us feel surprisingly, magically lucky when we first encounter them, but which rapidly turn into tuned-out backgrounds and unconscious expectations of artificial lawfulness in our environmental contexts.
- "artificial lawfulness" is a nice phrase. It's common to notice that physical laws and human laws work very differently. The first can't be broken, the latter are always in danger of being violated and need enforcement mechanisms. But protocols are sort of self-enforcing like natural laws despite being constructed.
- There's a section about protocol invisibility and Whitehead advances that isn't that interesting to me, already got that idea. However it also feeds into this female-coded image "They could be considered technological dark matter" oh yeah.
Keep a protocol in peripheral vision, and it works. Look too directly at it, or attend to your behaviors within it too deliberately, and it starts to falter.
- Very Zen, for lack of a better word. Also mkes protocol design a bit self-contradictory (which is very Zen)
- Anti-vax movement as a protocol failure: the vaccination protocols became so normalized that people forgot what they were for and started to resist them. I'd say this is more of an institutional / large-scale social failure; there are simply a large group of people who do not believe the official ideology of science and seek something else, vaccines are only an occasion for this. It's a failure of the basic rationalist ideology that ought to hold society toether. That still might be considered a protocol failure, but at a deeper level.
- Random unconnected thought – protocolism is kind of pro-capitalism, pro-globalism, pro-monoculture. A good protocolist would rejoice at the replacement of quirky little local cafes with Starbucks, because standardization is good
- (I recall Venkat saying something like that, lets ask_zirp
The praise is structural, not sensory. In "Cloud Mouse, Metro Mouse" 7(https://ribbonfarm.com/2012/09/27/cloud-mouse-metro-mouse/), I'm explicit that Starbucks coffee is beside the point — what I actually value is the stream, the globally portable infrastructure of routines. "The familiarity of Starbucks is designed to sustain your routines anywhere." The Quora coffee answer 2(https://ribbonfarm.com/quora/2012/how-is-coffee-served-in-different-parts-of-the-world-and-why/) gives Starbucks only a 24% chance of drinkable drip — hardly an endorsement.
The real argument is that for cloud mice, local cafés require behavioral investment that doesn't port. "Behaviors are expensive things for cloud mice. It pays to develop only the most highly portable ones." Starbucks wins not because it's better but because it's legible everywhere — it's the American military base network of coffee, not a cultural outpost
- Not sure I can get down with that on an ideological level, although on a real-life level, the relentless standardization of capitalism is pretty convenient, I don't want to have to deal with a lot of actual people. Starbucks is a relief. But that's because I'm autistic, and I am suspicious when autistic preferences turn into ideology
- Some good stuff on the requirements and tradeoffs of a protocol formalism
- Interesting side-by-side comparision of Internet and containerized shipping – both packet-switching, kind of.
- The notion of "protocol tangle" – sounds like Bruno Latour