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)
Characteristics
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)
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)