Open Protocols
Description
1. Extitutional.Space:
"Freely propogated social and technical protocols woven together into a memetically tight compound cultural protocol of improvisational, empirical imagination.
If institutional protocols tend to have constraints on reproducibility or empirical veracity (military classification or organizational newspeak), open protocols are the spontaneous result of the absolute zero-point of these impulses: maximal memetic reproduction combined with dedicated empirical curiousity and integrity. Exposed to the weathers of this extitutional zero-point, compound protocols become refined into a flow-state or [machinic point] where the cultural injunction to open experimentation is entangled with a technical toolkit such that the technical protocol becomes synonymous with freedom and pluralism."
(https://www.extitutional.space/Glossary/open-protocols)
See also: Open Protocolization
2. Jem Bendell and Matthew Slater:
"A protocol is like a language, convention, or standard and as such, use of it cannot be restricted, prevented or monetised any more than use of a word, gesture, or social code. The Internet is essentially a set of protocols (such as TCP/UDP, http, HTML), which leads to a fundamentally more democratic infrastructure. That need not have been so: in a parallel universe, Microsoft R&D invented the web and now every page is a visual-basic-enhanced word document, MS Office is the only tool for authoring them, and it costs $5000 for a licence and still look wrong on Firefox! The open protocols avoided that particular dystopia and in the early days provoked a great deal of optimism about how the new freedoms implicit in the Internet would be the basis for a new kind of society."
(http://matslats.net/sites/matslats.net/files/Bendell%20and%20Slater%202017.pdf)
Discussion
Open Protocols for Platform Cooperatives
Jem Bendell and Matthew Slater:
"The proper function of an institution is not to crunch algorithms or own infrastructure that could be common, but to manage trust and social relations. In this context drivers might aggregate into cooperatives to present a trusted brand appealing to those who wanted, say, flash cars, women only drivers, criminal record checks, insurance, etc. Moving beyond ridesharing this protocol approach has many domains. Airbnb could be replaced in the same way. Real Estate agency could also change. Why should you have to commit to a single Estate Agent to sell your house and troop around many estate agents to find a house? There could just be a protocol for advertising and searching for residential property. Why is it still necessary in 2017 to advertise a second-hand bicycle on a centralised, censored, platform like craigslist, freecycle or the local supermarket or newspaper? Why isn't there simply common space for that? Open protocols would help pave the way.
The history of open protocols shows they enable efficiencies and economies of scale (e.g. the USB and x86) which reduces prices and waste. Open protocols also wrest control from individual firms with the relevant intellectual property and thus enable competition from new entrants. However, they do not prevent new monopolies from emerging over time. With the internet, capitalist interests, as manifested by venture capital and then investment banks, backed those enterprises that worked out how to build services, private territories and gateways on top of the internet’s open protocols and to build the notion of private property and the means of production into the internet. Only then could companies like Facebook and Google/Alphabet start monetising value for investors, even while the lower layers remain free as designed. The importance of network effects to the value of any platform, whereby they are as useful to the extent they are ubiquitous, it is hard to imagine any platform like minds.com competing head-to-head with Facebook succeeding to become similarly large and influential.
One recent protocol that threatened to democratise everything was Bitcoin. As described earlier, Bitcoin is a protocol for different 'wallet' programmes on different computers to share a common ledger and thus agree how much is in each wallet. It enables a global payment system without the need for a central institution to keep the definitive ledger, and so it allows a money system without states or banks. Bitcoin has turned out to be flawed in that its mass adoption led to an unintended form of centralisation, where computing power is decisive. Better algorithms have long existed, although so far Bitcoin retains its first mover advantage. (Torpey, 2014)
To summarise, we see that platform cooperatives have limited potential unless new open protocols are introduced to enable multiple entrants into a single ecosystem. In absence of benevolent monopolies, utility will be sub optimal unless open protocols enable interoperability. Open software protocols mean that it is more difficult to maintain a monopoly position so, forcing entrepreneurs and investors to focus on competition rather than attempting to monopolise a whole market. . As many new entrants will fail, if there are open protocols, what they have created while failing can add to the ecosystem, rather than adding to the mountain of junk code or leaving users stranded."
(https://matslats.net/sites/matslats.net/files/Bendell%20and%20Slater%202017.pdf)
Open Protocols for Underground Cultures
Exeunt:
"This touches on a key dimension of open protocols, mainly that they are inextricably linked to cultural undergrounds. In a fruitful foray into a more archival approach to the protocol underground question, we looked at four historical cases: the California LSD scene of the 70s and 80s, the UK Free Party Movement, the West Coast Appropriate Technology Movement of the 70’s and the Bay Area S&M scene of the same time. For each of these scenes, we identified an extitution (the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Spiral Tribe, RAIN and the Society of Janus, respectively) and a value it distinctly embodied/ helped export to the cultural field.
Notably, all of the above protocols were culturally marginalized and, at one point or another, very illegal - this seems to have been a historical prerequisite for the development of autonomous values. For more on these particular scenes, you can check out my Local DAO Summer talk and our second essay, “Sketches Toward a Theory of the Protocol Underground”, but the crucial point is how they helped us construct a set of characteristics to not just explain the protocol underground, but the nature of the alternative values that keep its inhabitants avoiding institutional scaling at all costs.
Later, in “Undercapital,” we identified three hazards of scaling that inform the intentionality of the underground:
1) Institutional-behavioral bias, a set of regulatory and cultural “multipolar traps” that lead to reflexively policed passive consumption (elsewhere known as the problem of spectacle)
2) Limits to circulation of scene protocols, wherein mutual expectations of high agency and consent are logistically difficult to scale vertically,
3) Cults of personality, for obvious reasons including internal capture, the degrading presence of a figurehead to withdraw agency to, and a target for external capture.
To quote from “Sketches”: “there is no objective vibe, there is no monopoly of the real. Feeling, sense, atmosphere are relational, and without institutions to impose a mystified neutrality - the oppressive, monoculture din of a Walgreens, bank, or a hospital - we are challenged with the responsibility and freedom to constitute for ourselves what the sense of things are, and in so doing, redefine what possibilities exist in them.” Of course members of the underground depart, conform, become institutional subjects through and through, but the underground persists because its forms are innately decentralized, capture resistant, modular, free and open."
(https://www.extitutional.space/Articles/Speculative-P2P-and-the-Urban-Protocol-Underground)
Open Protocols for the City
Exeunt:
"From early on in the research vector, we understood that the open protocols of the cultural field had a primary difference from those within a virtual network: while open web protocols depend on a shared computational substrate - a standard - open protocols of the urban field have only practical adequacy, the hardness of certain material conditions and the shifting features of the socio-cognitive fabric of the city as their shared substrate.
Despite this fact, the propagation of these urban protocols formally mirrors what we see in the Ethereum ecosystem in distinct ways. (Informally) codified knowledge sets for urban gardening, for community organizing or throwing a party in an unregulated setting, for squatting a warehouse or wheatpasting a message or getting a zine out, spread in a free and coherent manner ambivalent to traditional institutional infrastructure. They fork and merge to meet different landscapes of implementation. Teams of developers find temporary cultural cache and then dissolve into the milieu, while their creations persist and change. Most importantly, all of this social and intellectual reproduction happens outside of the channels of institutional control and coercion. Open protocolization, it became clear, was the fate of knowledge outside of the walls of institutional sanction.
Unsheltered from these boundaries, with their organizational propaganda, bureaucratic compulsions and procedural ossification, open protocols face the hard realities and pressures of the outside - institutional coherence is instead replaced by productive fracture, and impractical strategies are naturally selected out by the experience of free agents. [2] This was expressed in what we called “a twin commitment to divergent exploration and material grounding,” that is, characteristic features of memeticism and empiricism that seem unavoidable for protocols in extitutional settings. [3] In retrospect we might say that open protocols are about hacking the material world to find wells of possibility space: the twin question is always, does it work (performative or impractical gestures don’t survive) and does it allow me to improvise, generate novelty, be creative? (If a protocolist was interested in following orders, they’d join an institution.)
This broad grammar for seeing the city, as it were, inverted, led to several insights. We’ll give them an overview, then return to what the open protocol framework might imply for local interventions by Ethereum and how it might even help us better understand Ethereum itself, what it is and where it’s going as it likewise searches the economic and computational ruliad for its own possibility wells."
(https://www.extitutional.space/Articles/Speculative-P2P-and-the-Urban-Protocol-Underground)