Protocol Institute
= "to advance the theory and practice of protocol design, analysis, and stewardship across domains, as well as promote protocol literacy". [1]
URL = http://protocolized.io/
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations it can perform without thinking about them” - Alfred North Whitehead [2]
Context
Venkatesh Rao:
1.
"Protocolization is transforming our world at this very moment, alongside more visible processes like AI adoption and climate change. As with past global transformations like industrialization, urbanization, globalization, and digitalization, it will radically alter the human condition. Stewarding protocolization thoughtfully is an urgent imperative because it is progressing invisibly whether we like it or not."
2.
"Civilization has established many important “unbroken windows” through the process of protocolization. The eradication of smallpox. The absence of nuclear holocaust. The pandemics dodged and economic depressions avoided. The coal mines that did not catastrophically explode. The standardized drillbits that unlocked new markets. The randomized control trials that prevented dangerous drugs from entering markets. The shipping containers that formed the modular backbone of the global economy and avoided trillions in breakbulk shipping costs. The famines that never happened. The internet protocols which have enabled us to do things whose costs were once so prohibitive that they were not done at all."
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/introducing-the-protocol-institute)
Description
1.
"The mission of this institute is to advance the theory and practice of protocol design, analysis, and stewardship across domains, as well as promote protocol literacy, appreciation and cultural salience globally. In other words, our mission is to build the field and community capable of stewarding the ongoing planetary processes of protocolization – the slow, largely invisible means by which human behaviors become standardized into the coordinating infrastructure of civilization.
The Protocol Institute inherits the work of its predecessor, the Summer of Protocols (SoP) program, which ran from 2023 to 2025. The Ethereum Foundation initiated SoP with a bold thesis: deepened understanding of protocols generally would enable better governance of the core Ethereum protocol specifically.
As a seasonal grants program, SoP was designed to:
- Bootstrap a new field of study around protocols
- Establish protocols as a first-class concept for thinking about and acting in the world
- Seed a scene and improve literacy around protocols."
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/introducing-the-protocol-institute)
Status
- "many of the world’s critical protocols, both old and emerging, are failing:
Carbon accounting regimes have proven to be easily manipulated
Protocol-based social media has been unable to catch up to the network effects of rent-seeking social platforms like TikTok, Facebook and X
Diplomatic protocols have not been able to stop 21st-century wars of aggression
While improving, the global banking system remains wildly inefficient and exclusive, when compared to what it could be re-engineered to become
The legitimacy of some voting protocols in states around the planet has faltered, leading to wars over state capacity."
2.
"Protocols can be understood as infrastructural technologies for producing non-events at scale, often without a central coordinating mechanism. For that reason, we like to call protocols engineered arguments. They are not universal agreements, but rather mostly predefined sets of rules that allow individual actors to make trade-offs without becoming embattled. Following Bastiat’s reasoning, since non-events are systematically undervalued, we systematically underinvest in protocol analysis, design, and improvement. A tenet of our mission is to address this underinvestment, and a few examples will illustrate the philosophy we are pursuing in order to do so."
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/introducing-the-protocol-institute)
More information
Bibliography
The 'Protocol Canon':
Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott
Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom
Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow
The Control Revolution, James Beniger
The Box, Marc Levinson
The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
The Tacit Dimension, Michael Polanyi
Who Could Write Protocol Fiction for Speculative Infrastructure, Matt Webb
The Complete Stories, J. G. Ballard
Mother Earth, Motherboard, Neal Stephenson
Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Alexander Galloway
The ETTO Principle, Erik Hollnagel