Protocolization
Context
Venkatesh Rao and Patrick Nast:
“The technological elements of protocols – interoperability standards, kits, standardized fasteners, electrical connectors, plumbing regulations, safety codes, sewage pipes, modularity grammars – typically gently diffuse and deflect anthropomorphic impulses. Rather than serving our heroic individualist impulses, they quietly orchestrate and shape our mutualist and cooperative energies. Protocolization looks like ecological emergence rather than a technological hero’s journey. It encourages a very different narrative of progress.
We hope to convince you that “protocolization” elegantly subsumes some of the most salient features of the more dramatic and “heroic technology” process frames you might be used to, while also apprehending (if not yet quite comprehending) a great deal that those frames remain systematically blind to.”
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing-protocolization-i-new)
Definition
Venkatesh Rao and Patrick Nast:
“Protocolization is the progressive metabolization of reliably repeatable technologically mediated human behaviors at all scales into reliable planetary infrastructures for coordination.”
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing-protocolization-i-new)
Description
Venkatesh Rao and Patrick Nast:
"Protocolization is an unfolding long-term planetary transformation that is at least as old as modernity itself. That is to say, it is at least several centuries old, and has unfolded through multiple distinct chapters, in loose synchronization with major technological revolutions. Protocolization is the overarching story of how humanity has cashed out and orchestrated the capabilities of every wave of new technologies to make our world ever more comfortable and hospitable for humans.
One side of protocolization is arguably an ongoing terraforming. The first terraforming in fact; that of Terra itself, preceding any science-fictional terraformings of other planets.
The other side of protocolization is changes in human behavior in response to this terraforming. Relative to our ancestors, we have become more predictable and orderly on some fronts, and more unpredictable and generative on others. Protocolization is simultaneously a civilizing process, and a rewilding process.
Protocolization is reducible neither to its technological drivers, nor to the changes in human nature triggered by them. Protocolization is the co-evolution of both into what we might call a new nature. A planetary condition powerfully determined by the laws of the artificial, which can increasingly be engineered to be nearly as immutable and indefinitely persistent as those of nature itself."
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing-protocolization-i-new)
Status
Venkatesh Rao and Patrick Nast:
"Protocolization is a multi-scale planetary phenomenon that couples the local to the global, and entangles micro-level dynamics and macro-level dynamics, via technological media. This broad footprint across spatiotemporal scales and regimes of dynamics, exacerbated by general invisibility, tends to create fragmented theorization of hugely important phenomena."
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing-protocolization-i-new)
Characteristics
< " the technological elements of protocols – interoperability standards, kits, standardized fasteners, electrical connectors, plumbing regulations, safety codes, sewage pipes, modularity grammars – typically gently diffuse and deflect anthropomorphic impulses. Rather than serving our heroic individualist impulses, they quietly orchestrate and shape our mutualist and cooperative energies. Protocolization looks like ecological emergence rather than a technological hero’s journey. It encourages a very different narrative of progress. " >
- Venkatesh Rao and Patrick Nast [1]
Containerization
Venkatesh Rao et al. :
“Protocolization is a multi-scale planetary phenomenon that couples the local to the global, and entangles micro-level dynamics and macro-level dynamics, via technological media. This broad footprint across spatiotemporal scales and regimes of dynamics, exacerbated by general invisibility, tends to create fragmented theorization of hugely important phenomena.
An example will illustrate what we mean here, and motivate the approaches we are developing to mitigate theoretical fragmentation and construct more integrated understandings.
Containerization, the protocolization of global commerce, is generally analyzed through the lens of globalization, understood as a primarily political and economic phenomenon, even though it obviously involves a great deal more. At the micro-scale it is simply a mature standards process that stewards definitions of a set of relatively low-tech box form-factors. At the macro-scale it is an emergent intermodal network-of-networks for materials transport. At the local level, it is a tangle of logistics problems, such as regional staging, port operations, last-mile operations, border transit operations, and security procedures. At the global level, it is a climate-like hyperobject comprising a constantly shifting set of flows and stocks, and featuring weather-like phenomena.
To enable theoretical study of containerization, a sufficiently expressive formalism (or more likely, a harmonized assemblage of such formalisms) for protocols must be able to articulate concepts and propositions ranging from the “box” level to “planetary climate” level. It must comprehend dynamics ranging from an earthquake affecting a particular port, to a slow accumulation of empty containers on one continent due to unbalanced trade (the backhaul problem).
And this is merely the simplest sort of protocolization, where we can name and point to a relatively coherent single “protocol,” with relatively intelligible structural and behavioral phenomenology to roughly isolate, model, and study.
Such intelligibility, however, is an illusion. Any fragile, non-fragmentary picture we might build of a phenomenon like “containerization” shatters the moment we situate it in the real world, and bring it into contact with other protocols of comparable richness that occupy some of the same spaces it does.”
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing-protocolization-i-new)
Invisibility
Venkatesh Rao and Patrick Nast:
1.
Protocols are invisible technological phenomenology. They could be considered technological dark matter; evading study by retreating to the margins of our attention, ceding the spotlight to the “main characters” of the technological environment – striking buildings, beautiful bridges, impressive airplanes and rockets, awe-inspiring AI systems.
Protocol designers in nearly every field rightly view such invisibility as a feature rather than a bug. Protocol designers intuitively tend to design for invisibility. Invisibility of some sort – from literal visual invisibility to the reflexive automaticity in our own responses to subconsciously registered cues – is either a strong functional requirement, or at least highly desirable. Often, the very reliability of a protocol rests on its invisibility, and visibility can lead to fragility and unreliability.
Keep a protocol in peripheral vision, and it works. Look too directly at it, or attend to your behaviors within it too deliberately, and it starts to falter."
2.
"Even though protocolization has been as momentous as more dramatic planetary transformations like computerization and globalization, as well as earlier ones such as urbanization, consumerization, and industrialization, it remains hidden.
This is because, by their very nature, protocols in their evolved forms tend towards invisibility, and protocolization as the evolutionary process that creates them seeks out invisibility. This feature, arguably, is central to how and why protocolization constitutes progress. Protocolization is progress through invisibility.
Here, we mean invisibility in a broad, multi-dimensional and textured sense, beyond merely literal visual invisibility. The invisibility of protocols has multiple aspects:
Operational invisibility – We don’t think about the protocol while using it, acting through muscle memory.
Infrastructural invisibility – The machinery is literally hidden/backgrounded, like the ecologically critical mesopelagic zones we alluded to earlier. For example, cables and sewage lines are buried, and are generally as ubiquitous and invisible as bristlemouth fish.
Social/cognitive invisibility – People don’t recognize protocolization is happening because by definition, behavioral habituation is not only part of the essence of the process, it is functionally load-bearing. Traffic protocols would be much less effective if we were constantly aware of them. We “stay in our lanes,” without thinking about it, and reflexively signal turns and stop at stop signs.
Anti-memetic qualities – Protocols rarely feature in headlines, titles, or public discourse, because the unremarkable “boring” quality, with one experience being largely indistinguishable from another, is essential to their functioning.
Marginality – Protocols often organize and scaffold the technological space around other, more charismatic technologies that are intrinsically more visible, and more directly support foreground goals. They perform prophylactic functions, enforce constraints, and structure core behaviors for coordination and synchronization. For instance, the safety protocols of airline travel – airport security checks, seatbelts – are on the margins of the foreground retail experience of air travel. We do not think much about them when making travel plans.
Default quietness – Protocols are quiet and unobtrusive by default, and make themselves visible primarily when they fail. An ordinary hand-washing episode is not memorable among the tens of thousands that happen over an individual lifetime. An episode involving an empty soap-dispenser or malfunctioning faucet is memorable.
Obliquity of action – Protocols rarely directly act on consciously controlled human behaviors in pursuit of explicitly held intentions or goals. Rather, they act through secondary pathways of supporting causation, contingency triggers, and automated follow-through. For every conscious action in a technologically advanced environment, dozens of supporting actions may unfold unnoticed, rendering the conscious behavior preternaturally frictionless and seemingly “free.” The scope of protocolization is often everything else that must happen in order for actions you consciously and freely intend and do to succeed."
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing-protocolization-i-new)
Example
The Planetary Computational Tangle
Patrick Nast et al. :
“In developing formalisms and mathematical approaches, it is worth paying special attention to a particularly consequential tangle of protocols, involving the varied modern interacting infrastructures that rest on computing capabilities. This tangle includes, but is not limited to: the existing internet, AI, blockchains, AR/VR, robotics, the “internet of things,” and planetary sensing/monitoring infrastructures, at all scales from microscopic to orbital.
This is the civilizational-level boss of protocol tangles, the planetary computational tangle, or PCT.
As the Maersk ransomware attack episode showed, it is already clear that the default mental model of the PCT as some sort of “extended internet” has been severely strained, to the point of collapse. While pleasing new formulations like “planetary intelligence” help us at least point to the PCT, they typically pre-commit to an overly legible and panoramic theorization heavily shaped by a unitary perspective, aesthetic leanings, and focal interests shaped by their most charismatic elements. They miss the essential messy plurality of the PCT, and the inextricability of human experiences and agencies within it. They serve our appreciative needs, but not the instrumental needs of practically useful theorization.
To develop powerful mental models of the PCT, especially given that thinking of the internet itself as merely a “network of computers” has already proved to be highly limiting, we need a radically different approach to theorizing. One that privileges a worm’s-eye view of the tangled messiness over pleasing panoramic views and grand narratives.
For formal protocol theory, the PCT might be viewed as the “one ring” modeling and governance challenge.
To the extent we are able to build theories and practical techniques for grappling with it, we will be able to make sense of all dimensions of protocolization, and deal more elegantly with more bite-sized protocol problems that can be meaningfully isolated and tackled. It is already clear that existing ontologies will not do when it comes to “carving the reality of the PCT at the joints,” so to speak, to isolate problems worth tackling. New ontologies are required.
To the extent we fail, our increasingly technologically terraformed planet will become invisible not just to our senses, but also to our minds.
The irruption of AI into the world, currently the most dramatic and attention-attracting world process, is worth some additional thought. Currently, the role of AI in the PCT is being understood and constructed through the lenses of corporate product development and nation-state-based “sovereign AI” frames. This approach is inherited from previous experiences like dealing with fissile materials or climate change. These frames miss much of what is important, interesting, valuable, and risky about AI, especially when dealing with its rising “agentic” usage at planetary-infrastructure scales. Such usage is unlikely to remain limited to the traditional boundaries and capabilities of products, corporations, or nations, and human actors who identify with them.
Similarly, the role of blockchain-based infrastructures in the PCT is being reduced to rigid and relatively unimaginative nation-based identity and monetary infrastructures. This again misses much of what is important, interesting, valuable, and risky about them. The flexible programmability of infrastructures like the Ethereum “world computer,” with its capacity for expressing and articulating novel and fluid regimes of law and governance, and disciplining the myriad wildernesses of the PCT with striations of orderly hardness, remains largely unexplored. Again in part due to the limiting theoretical frames through which it is viewed.
Our mental models of the PCT are perhaps most severely compromised when it comes to the raw materiality of it.
There are already over 17 billion connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the world. We are currently on the cusp of a robotics boom. Planet-scale sensor-networks and environmental monitoring systems are beginning to take shape all around us. Warfare has already been irreversibly transformed by autonomous vehicles on air, sea, and land, and civilian life is poised to follow.
The picture is similar at the micro-scale as well. From home automation and self-driving cars, to robots on sidewalks, we are drowning in a chaotic sea of “globally local” small-scale protocols everywhere. Conventional frames, such as traditional urbanism for sidewalk governance, or home construction practices that clumsily attempt to integrate ideas like “smart keys” for package delivery and “smart thermostats” for energy management, struggle to rein in the chaos. The result is proliferating localized Darwinian “technological tangled banks” of hyperlocal infrastructure ecologies that are invisibly connected to the planetary-scale PCT.”
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing-protocolization-i-new)
Research
Venkatesh Rao and Patrick Nast:
"Formal Protocol Theory (FPT) is one of a handful of disciplinary areas within the broader emerging field of Protocol Studies, and in our activities and explorations, we maintain collegial ongoing dialogues with several peer areas, devoted to shared concerns and intellectual foundations.
Memory Protocols
The Memory Research Group (MRG), led by Kei Kreutler , studies the role of memory in protocols, protocol technologies, and protocolization processes.
Perhaps one of the major contributing factors to the invisibility of protocols is their close relationship to memory and forgetting. The most successful protocols don’t involve user manuals during their operation, but produce and propagate the necessary, operable memory through their performance. In the spirit of the “medium is the message,” we might say that “the protocol is the memory.” For example, blockchains produce a record of their actions as part of their actions themselves, and this record is actually one of their primary utilities. The contemporary era of protocolization is marked by the ever-closer coincidence of procedures and their memory traces.
The MRG studies memory in all its manifestations, and in 2026, SIGFPT will take cues from MRG to look for ways in which we might formalize and theorize the memory features of protocols.
Protocols for Business
The Special Interest Group in Protocols for Business (SIGP4B), led by rafa, studies protocols within organizations, approaching the domains of existing fields like management science, organizational behavior, and organizational psychology, through the lens of protocol theory.
Specialized organizations and sectors that fulfill various societal functions have historically been the locus of a great deal of protocol development and evolution. Technological specialization is another major contributing factor to the invisibility of protocols. Not only are many protocol infrastructures hidden behind the boundaries of organizations devoted to developing and using them, knowledge of such protocols is also hidden behind sector-specific jargon. Even protocols that enjoy a degree of universal presence across sectors and industries and some lay familiarity – such as those involved in managing supply chains, or staff functions such as human resources and facilities management – tend to become invisible behind the boundaries of functional specialization.
Currently SIGP4B is undertaking a protocol-theoretic exploration of perhaps the most important organizational technology in a century: AI. Effective adoption and use of AI technologies is a protocolization problem that is being simultaneously tackled by all organizations across the world in near-crisis mode. There is much to see and learn.
In 2026, SIGFPT will take cues from SIGP4B to help theorize the injection of AI into traditional organizational environments.
Protocol Fiction
Building on a year of publishing dozens of protocol fiction stories here on Protocolized, the Protocol Fiction SIG, led by Spencer Nitkey - Writer and Sachin, studies the rules and principles of this emerging genre, and explores how to look at our protocolizing world more effectively through stories.
For us in SIGFPT, we hope to find both stimulation and entertainment in the work of this SIG, as well as inspiration and motivation. Fiction can often point to subtle phenomena and generative contradictions and paradoxes that can power theoretical investigations. The notion of “protocol tangles” developed in this essay, for example, was largely inspired by the many tangled plots and premises that have been explored through protocol fiction in the last year."
(https://protocolized.summerofprotocols.com/p/theorizing-protocolization-i-new)