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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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Protocol book thinking

31 Oct 2026 - 02 Nov 2026
Open in Logseq
    • Some book-shaped ideas for PiBoWriMo 2026. S

    • Latour for Protocolistas

    • The past and future of software

      • Too big a topic. Expand on point in blyg post that the role and nature of programming languages are going to radically change.

    • Protocol as cognitive primitive

      • blyg post too fresh an idea, not sure how to turn it into a book. I have a maddening feeling that there's a really powerful idea here but it's too obvious to see.

    • Political as protocolized violence

      • Based on Charles Tilly, who identified such protocolish elements of politics
        • Boundary activation/deactivation
        • Polarization
        • Certification
        • Although violent rituals share causal processes with adjacent forms of collective violence, their organization gives special prominence to certain mechanisms and processes. To an exceptional degree, those mechanisms activate relevant boundaries, stories, and relations to the exclusion of most others as they incorporate all the relevant actors and social sites into a single connected set of performances.
      • Alt, more positive: Protocols as practical anarchism
        • what about protocols of cooperation?Protocols and group formation / boundary maintainence.
        • Protocols: anarchism for autists.
          • Libertarianism is the belief that there is (or should be) only one protocol (trade). Or that you can factor social reality into TWO protocols, trade and violence.

    • Burning Man protocols

      • An interesting topic, but not really my thing. On my one visit to Burning Man I was very obsessed with all the nifty weird protocols that kept it going. Somebody more into the scene should write this.

    • World Brain protocols

      • A history of older proposals for global knowledge systems: Paul Otlet and the prehistory of the web, Memex, Doug Engelbart Project Xanadu Not sure how protocolized these actually were (Xanadu definitely had a protocol orientation but unfortunately other factors intervened in its deployment.)
          • Ask Claude
            • Here's a structured synthesis of each proposal and its degree of "protocol-ness":

            • World Brain Proposals: Protocol Orientation Survey

            • 1. Paul Otlet & the Mundaneum (1895–1934)

            • Vision, not protocol.
            • Otlet was a Belgian bibliographer who conceived the Mundaneum, an ambitious project to create a universal repository of all recorded knowledge.
            • He also developed the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), an innovative system allowing catalogers to express relationships between multiple topics.
            • The UDC is the closest thing to a "protocol" here —
            • published in 1904, it divides all knowledge into nine categories further broken down into 70,000 subdivisions, making it possible to classify bibliographic and library materials to a level of fine detail; updated and translated into 50 languages, it is widely used today in 130 countries.
            • But the system itself was pre-electronic and highly centralized.
            • Otlet's true conceptual breakthrough came in his Traité de documentation (1934), which proposed a global "réseau" or network of "electric telescopes" — early workstations to be linked to the Mundaneum by telephone and television, supporting audio output and even data sharing and social interactions among users.
            • This is visionary but not formalized as an interoperability protocol — it was a blueprint for a centralized hub with spokes, not a distributed protocol.

            • 2. Memex — Vannevar Bush (1945)

            • Conceptual design, no protocol at all.
            • The memex, first proposed by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay "As We May Think," is a theoretical device that aimed to enhance human memory and knowledge by allowing people to store and recall information in a mechanical way.
            • Bush's proposed Memex would access information stored on microfilm by association, not numerical indexing.
            • Critically, the Memex was conceived as a personal device —
            • Bush saw the trails taken by users as first-class citizens of the hypertext environment, as important as the text content itself.
            • There is no notion of a shared network, distributed servers, or interoperability — so no protocol orientation whatsoever.
            • The memex presaged and encouraged scientists and engineers to create hypertext, the internet, personal computers, and online encyclopedias,
            • but it was upstream inspiration, not a technical specification.

            • 3. Doug Engelbart & NLS/OHS (1962–1990s)

            • Working system, later explicit protocol ambitions.
            • Conceived by Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, NLS was the first system to feature hypertext links, a mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, and presentation programs.
            • NLS was a fully implemented system, not just a concept —
            • the key tools it provided were: outline editors for idea development, hypertext, linking, tele-conferencing, word processing, electronic mail, and user configurability and programmability.
            • In his later career, Engelbart pushed explicitly toward a protocol layer.
            • He proposed the Open Hyperdocument System (OHS), arguing that the "CSCW future" must include something like this — and coined the term "Open Hyperdocument System" at McDonnell Douglas, where he began to define functional and interoperability requirements for wide-area online cooperative knowledge work.
            • The OHS was defined as "an integrated, seamless multi-vendor architecture in which knowledge workers share hyperdocuments of all kinds on easily shareable screens."
            • His interest was focused on the enormous knowledge management requirements of an aerospace program lifecycle, which strengthened his resolve to motivate the IT arena toward global interoperability and an open hyperdocument system.
            • The OHS remained aspirational —
            • what was available in practice was "a hodge podge of point solutions" that didn't amount to a fast, flexible open hyperdocument system.

            • 4. Project Xanadu — Ted Nelson (1960–present)

            • The most explicitly protocolized of all these proposals.
            • Project Xanadu is a hypertext project founded by Ted Nelson in 1960, predating the World Wide Web by nearly 30 years; Nelson envisioned a global network of interconnected documents with features the Web still lacks: bidirectional links, transclusion (quoting content by reference with automatic attribution), version control (every version preserved), and micropayments (authors paid when content is accessed).
            • The protocol orientation is explicit and formalized. Xanadu had 17 enumerated system rules, which are essentially protocol requirements. Key ones include:
            • Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified; every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
            • Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
            • Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
            • Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed.
            • The Xanadu client–server communication protocol is an openly published standard; third-party software development and integration is encouraged.
            • At the implementation level, the structure is interacted with by the Xu88.1 FeBe (Frontend-Backend) protocol, and a BeBe (Backend-Backend) protocol also exists for server-to-server communication.
            • The failure was not conceptual but practical.
            • The Xanadu project failed to flourish for a variety of disputed reasons; Gary Wolf published an unflattering history in Wired in 1995, calling it "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing."
            • Administrators declared it superior to the Web, with the mission statement that "the World Wide Web trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."

            • Summary: Protocol Orientation Spectrum

            • | System | Type | Protocol Orientation | |
              |
              |
              | | Otlet / Mundaneum | Pre-digital, centralized | Weak — classification scheme (UDC) only | | Memex | Personal device concept | None — no networking layer | | Engelbart / NLS → OHS | Working system → open spec | Moderate → explicit, but never standardized | | Xanadu | Spec-first system | Strong — 17 formal rules, defined client-server and backend protocols; never widely deployed |
            • Your intuition is right: Xanadu is the outlier in having a genuine protocol orientation from the start. The others are better characterized as architectural visions or working systems that gestured toward but didn't fully specify an interoperability layer.