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.
"Protocol" is. a deliberatly vague, evocative term. Pretty much any kind of pattern involving multiple agents can be considered a protocol.
Intro to the Protocol Reader - Summer of Protocols a protocol origin story, but makes it sound like protocols were a new idea caused by the fall of Twitter, rather than something that has been around for decades.
Organic vs engineereed protocols
One popular definition in the protocol community: "a protocol is an engineered argument". Evocative but rather limiting, it would seem to exclude all organically arising protocols. The emphasis on argument (or tension or conflict) is interesting, but also maybe too limiting.
Handshaking (a widely used example) would not seem to be very engineered.
Almost everything around us, in technologically modern environments, comprises “engineered arguments” that resemble urban traffic in their phenomenology.
Etiquette as formalizing what presumably starts out as informal protocols. I remember reading Miss Manners back in my gnarly youth and being impressed by the logic of polite society. She's still at it!
Religious rituals like prayer have the interesting property that one of the participants is imaginary or at least, not physically present. The ritual's purpose is to conjure the presence.
Scripts
The Schankian AI model
Standards
Micro and macro protocols
Micro: handshaking, and other small local social rituals.
Macro: cargo containerization
Against formalization
(not really against, but carping with the particular approaches being used)
Objects, actors, and multi-agent AI as early protocol theory
object-oriented programming began as an attempt at a protocolized version of computer science. Casting all computation as patterns of message-passing.
Carl Hewitts work was both an attempt to make a more rigorous formalization of OOP (Actors) and apply it to large-scale socio-computational systems (eg in Offices are Open Systems)
Protocols in fiction
The protocol people are inventing new genres of "protocol fiction" but I'm more interested in detecting protocol themes in existing fiction (very common, esp given an expansive definition of protocols to include basically all social behavior) They are so commonplace and foundational to social interaction. Everything from comedy to police procedurals involves protocols, often explicitly (that is, characters don't just enact them, they are aware of them and talk about them). Still, this scene from The Sopranos stands out because it involves a collision of two different protocol worlds. [The Sopranos - Patsy and Burt failed extortion attempt at "Starbucks" - YouTube)
The Bruce Sterling story Maneki Neko has a network-mediated gift economy that exists as a kind of subversive subculture within capitalism. This story also involves a conflict between protocol systems.
Protocols as practical anarchism
Politics and protocols. People like Charles Tilly studied protcols of conflict; 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.
The protocol movement has some loose resemblance to cybernetics (jointly thinking about natural and artificial systems eg) but definitely from a different era (and if the underlying energy of cybernetics was from WWII, the same from this community is from crypto, the funding comes from the Ethereum Foundation).
(from email to a friend – I think this explains my attraction to the field)