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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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No Kings

17 Oct 2026 - 17 Oct 2026
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    • No Kings is pretty brilliant as a political slogan. It captures the essence of the US founding principles, at a time when they are under attack by actual monarchists (or cosplaying monarchists, but same difference). ABOUT — No Kings
    • The Protocol movement does not have a clearly defined political alignment (probably smart), but obviously has some affinity with No Kings. In a protocolized world, individual leaders don't matter that much. Protocols when they are successful tend to flatten hierarchies, replacing rulers with rules.
      • OK I'm quite proud of that bolded phrase, but it seems so obvious someone must have said it before, in protocol land or elsewhere
        • Ask Claude
          • Good news for your originality: the exact phrase "replacing rulers with rules" does not appear in any search results. You're likely in the clear.
          • What does exist is the adjacent framing — mainly from anarchist thought — that contrasts "rules" and "rulers" as distinct concepts.
          • The anarchist tradition has long played on this: anarchy doesn't mean "without rules" — it means "without rulers," a subtle but important difference, where no one person has authority or power over another.
          • There's even a piece from 2025 titled
          • "No Rules, No Rulers," which argues that the idea of anarchy as "a society with rules but no rulers" is a fundamental misunderstanding.
          • The conceptual territory is also well-trodden in political theory through the "rule of law vs. rule of man" distinction.
          • The "rule of man" refers to a type of personal rule in an unaccountable society where rules change from ruler to ruler
          • — the implicit counterpart being that the rule of law is precisely about depersonalizing authority.
          • So the idea is ancient and common. But the specific, compact formulation — replacing rulers with rules — as a positive description of what protocols do, aimed at tech/governance audiences, doesn't appear to be a prior coinage. The anarchist framing goes the other direction (rules and rulers as inseparable or opposed), not the Protocol movement's more optimistic framing that rules can substitute for rulers as a governance upgrade.
          • You're probably fine to claim it. The phrase is pithy precisely because it compresses a long-running philosophical debate into four words.
    • The protocol movement was spawned by the crypto world, which tends to the libertarian. I have a long running battle/obsession with libertarianism, but nowadays it seems to be split into two principle components – the kind that is authoritarian at heart (that part become neoreaction) and the kind that actually is in love with decentralized rule-based regimes (markets and their generalization in protocols).