Protocols/Study
25 Jul 2025 - 20 Aug 2025
- (56) Intro to Protocol Studies - YouTube
- what is a protocol? Better not to define, but: "an engineered argument"???
- I guess that reflects that people have conflicting motives and only agree tentatively?
- "a stratum of codified behavior that allows for...complex coordinated behavior"...
- technical side and social/human side
- "protocolization debt" the pope will help...
- Protocol Studies 101: terms
- engineered argument
- agents
- strata and loci
- tensions
- a trade-off (engineering) plus a conflict (social)
- every loci has a set of trade-offs (eg productivity vs safety)
- whitehead advance
- "civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them"
- eg abstraction, but they don't use that word for some reason
- kafka protocol (index)
- measure of protocol badness (eg TSA, no feedback loop, more decision burden)
- hardened commons
- a system that produces or stewards shared resources with resiliency
- Wikipedia(? my example)
- vulnerabilities: commons abuse, goodharts law, etc.
- VGR: managing tensions at an ecosystem level
- Robert Peake
- Protocol Reader
Where the cyberpunk hero was a lowlife maverick outsider who typically had to hack their way to technological agency from an external locus, what we might call the protocol punk hero operates from within a protocolized environment where boundaries separating insides and outsides are increasingly meaningless...The protocol punk hero is an archetype that merges the 1950s style insider bureaucrat hero5 and the 1980–90s style outsider maverick hacker hero.
When everything is inside the belly of the technological beast, there is no “outside” or “underbelly.” There is only a range of postures of greater or lesser agency that one can adopt while on the inside. The greater the attunement to the protocolized environment, the greater the agency. The greater the attunement to mere technocracy, the lower the agency.
- >Where the bureaucratic hero has mastered a specific set of institutional realities (and is typically helpless outside those realities), the hero of a protocolized world has mastered a general set of technological patterns that undergird not just the internal realities of organizations across the entire planet but even the interstitial spaces between them.
- Whitehead advance a bit of jargon, which basically means "institutional abstraction"
- Observability with Charity Majors who does database monitoring and stuff like that. Cool person it looks like.
- Ben Zucker, protocol engineering and music (intersting!)
- from monitoring to observability. Architecture has exploded, no longer possibnle to have simple models.
- vemlat ref IBM Autonomic Computing, feedback and control theory.
- auto instrumentation. "add little notes to your future self" to record intent. Need fast feedback loops.
- The kids today don't know about cycling power supplies
- Devops movement is ending?
- How does Honeycomb interview? Takehome, but judged on review process. Makes sense. They try to lower the stakes, but its hopeless. everybody hates interviews.
- Venkat brings up AI, ok, that is more interesting. MLOps. Charity: little has changed. LLMs are just another trace. OK. "the only companies making money from AI are those who laready have reliabiliyt/observabilty in place". MCP is mentioned. Charity is somehwat AI-skeptic.
- API gives the same answer, MCP doesn't.
- Some companies require using AI coding assistance (bleah). Charity doesn't because not authoritarian, but most people are doing it anyway
- disposable vs durable code. both have their uses.
- Venkat brings up protocol observability at 45:00 or so.
- "high cardinality" has some special buzzword (eg ssns vs gender).
- Venkat: scattering small microphones to detect illegal logging.
- I happened to Dig up a copy of this: Rules of Encounter: Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation among Computers (Artificial Intelligence): Rosenschein, Jeffrey S., Zlotkin, Gilad: 9780262181594: Amazon.com: Books a 30-year old book on computational protocol design.
- Also mechanism design:
- Protocol town hall Nathan Schneider, academic at U Col and looks interesting
- Prof of Media Studies, sigh, this is the kind of person I should have been. Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
- Alexander Galloway, Protocol. 2004 (important book that I have not heard of) (but there are critques)
- Protocols as hgistorically foundational: "Understadniugn Early Large-Scale Collectives" (book by archeologiests) – sounds really interesting
- His lab is working on dispute protocols for online communities (sounds useful).
- "Dispute Protocol Builder"
- Protocol capture
- "Protocological Governance" Between Sovereignity and Entanglement (with Johannes Bennke)
- "Vernacular Protocols" with Avery Edenfield Pattern Design from Below (some stuff with trans community)
- as opposed to Galloweay's top-down concept
- Broad definition: protocol as pattern of interaction
- Agh: How Engineering Replaced Politics | Compact
- actually this looks good but why is it in fucking Compact?
- book: Governaable Spaces, implicit feudalism
- VGR comes on, says Nathan has been doing work in paralleil with SoP community, interesting.
- Some notes about diaspora jews, network protocols vs dominator protocols (see The Jewish Century )
- Control and Consciousness of Time. Saffron Huang
Social protocols are codified procedures that coordinate human behavior...timekeeping is a device-mediated social protocol
- A lot on the cultural politics of timekeeping, good review but pretty standard.
- Made me think of that Harlan Ellison story, "Repent, Harlequin, said the Tiktokman". Protocol Fiction