Protocols/Symposium 2026
23 Sep 2026 - 25 Sep 2026
- Day 1 (wed)
- General thoughts
- Impressive bunch of people.
- Timber intro
- research swarm, I love it
- SIGs are the engine (makes sense)
- I need to think of them as working groups; rather than joining just because "interesting"
- David Lang, field-building (wrote on standards, OpenROV)
- Experiment Foundation experiment.foundation
- starting a new program: 50 field builders
- eg hyperspectral biology
- meta-level field building (nobody has done, this, but DARPA)
- why kickstart a field? when it needs more minds
- Remijnds me of Narrative Intelligence although I never cashed in properly on that.
- name enthusiastically, define conservatively
- Actually
- Media Science
- NI
- ALife
- In a hardening of social network period
- SFI paper
- endpoint: either mature industry or mature discipline
- Panel: Timber, Venkat, Tim Belko, David Lang
- Venkat: protocols as sanity-preserving in face of world craziness.
- Pamela McCorduck book on Dartmouth workshop
- Tom Guarriello (mentioned Paul Pangaro)
- Timber: AI is skewing the funding landscape
- Chat comment on Venkat definition Discord
- The politics thing is interesting … I wonder if it is a good idea to explicitly appeal to people who are political but tired of the dead ideas of their side (right or left). Protocols as an orthogonal political dimension
- TODO Protocols as anti-politics or othogonal politics
- Venkat: etheerum people have valuable red-teamn orientation (not just attackers, but embedding)
- protocol literacy
- David Lang foo camp Tim OReilly new org cites protocol reader? see manifesto
- Robert Peake Protocols for co-cognition
- Quotes Bukowski
- Protocols are what happens when relationships require accountability?
- This talk is way too abstract for this hour of the morning, but whatever
- General reaction – way too early to try to be this rigorous, the modes of interaction with AI are going to change radically
- OTOH this guy knows all sorts of literature
- Polina Kolozaridi, post-soviet infrastructure
- anthropologist studying internet adoption in Russia?
- Bruno Latour ref "technology is society made durable" OK makes me happy
- Jenna Dixon, Books are OG Protocols
- beautiful, interesting
- She uses exe.dev - ssh exe.dev
- Humbolt
- some general stuff on artifical researcers had it read Hamming, Simon...
- PAtwater
- Could not follow, but I'm getting tired.
- He lives in La Crescenta!'
- crimson examples ???
- Tim – Ethereum
- origin story – he approached VGR
- Protocol as bounday between formal and informal (argument engineering)
- Psychohistory
- Worldmachines – 400 year installation, 400 to run, 200 to decline – parallel, ascendent, stable, decline
- 1200-1600 modernity
- 1600-? diversity machine?
- 20000 liveness machine
- Made a RAG
- VGR, Aneesh Sathe,
- Can't decide if this is crazy good or total bullshit. Impressive in either case.
- Florian Lohse, Time moves down the stack Notefields | Florian Lohse | Substack
- 3 books: Revolution in time, Splitting the second,politics of digital time
- Ways of dealing with differnt time regimes: Ritualization, Punctuality, Time mnagement
- Sean Stevenson De-dramatizing the digital? De-Dramatizing the Digital - by Sean Stevenson
- AI will make tech boring?
- Evidence from Andor and Star trek...bleah
- ref to pace layers
- forgiveness-relevant. The rigidity of new-nature, appeal-forclosure.
- Spinoza enters the chat
- generativity and durable order
- animism enters the chat: rave about book, I suppose I should read. Beyond Nature and Culture, ontology of nature/agents.
- Trent van Epps, Political Economy of Protocols, Protocol Guild
- protocol book by Galloway
- Master Switch Tim Wu (actually read that, years aog)
- huh I should know about this, but I'm so out of it
- similar
- Standard capture
- Kaliya Young, identity
- web of trust; proving humanity
- something about neighborhoods that I missed
- Kevin Triplett
- hard and soft, maybe I could use that.
- Helena Rong, Shanghai NYU, Trust Experience Glitches
- Autonomous AI agents break legal assumptions
- Day 2 (thu)
- Sachin BEnny Archival Time & Carnival Time
- Eventfulness
- Daphne
- Designing carnival time
- Botao Amber Hu Protocoling as Design Theory Protocoling - Google Slides Botao ‘Amber’ Hu
- He was at SFI Summer School...Emergent Engineering
- Rigid design to adaptive components ("agentic" argh)
- Michael Levin Agential Materials "Diverse Intelligence" (crossing the streams there)
- "cognitive light cone" bleah. Something I don't like about this mode of thought – too much physics. "The cognitive boundary of the self" paper
- Protocoling is the design action, Protocol is the material
- Assembly theory Assembly theory - Wikipedia
- From Entropy to Epiplexity (?!)
- Martin Picard, PhD | Columbia Neurology mitochondria
- Jose Leal Open Social Protocols
- Radical World website seems broken https://www.radical.world/
- Eric Alston, Governance axioms Eric Alston
- Formal rules are not the whole order. (YES)
- Norms and shared values are important (im a bit surprised this guy is saying this but Ok)
- "Governance springs eternal"c
- onflict is natural, dumpster fires are ok when confined to the dumpster
- mentioned liquid democracy (but seems to not quite get it? can that be right)
- Frontier Pacing
- VGR does not believe in TESCREAL for some reason
- Daniel Kronovet, Chores (he lives in some group house) Regenerative Labor. Cites Maintenance Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Art (OK that's new)
- Stafford Beer, Elinor Ostrom
- Amber Case, Attention
- touch receptors proprioception
- iphone is a texture drought
- calm tech – Mark Weiser
- An actual certification authority, I'm imprsssed Calm Tech Institute | product certification
- First software was chore wheel from earlier talk
- AI supplement: make it ambient (not her word)
- VGR, artisanl RAG bots
- aeronfun/soul.md
- mixture-of-vgrs
- c3po . Humbolt
- Time selector – very slick UI, I should up my game
- Maze thing (whichi I didn't really attent)
- VGR on his bloggin platform Blygger
- Dorian Taylor building intertwingler
- decentraizled p2p ai-native social publishing, trying to not be that different from blogging and old-Twitter
- synchronic/diachronic
- "finegrained AI use at block level" damn sounds like AskClaude but of course more
- "from destination AI to intelligence media" (protocolized post).
- [TK]<prompt>[/TK] hm.
- lots of versioning stuff, not sure I care
- transclusion (like Logsseq) but combine with TK it does a summary, cool
- "threads are clunsy" (he means twitter threads) synchronic medium doing inmpresion of a diachronic one (other way around isnt it?)
- !id for transclusion, ids are 128-bit random
- Day 3 (fri, my day!)
- Nathan Schneider, Virtues & Politics
- Book coming out
- A new politics of protocols: decolonial movements, climate accords, internet standards
- Political regimes promote particular political virtues
- He pulls out virtues from protocol writings.
- protocols are rigid, humans have to be adaptible
- design a virtue? Because political design is now possible. Interesting.
- virtue pedagogy
- Manageed to get a good comment in
- Sam Chua Seapunk
- TODO watch this looks utterly weird Beaings
- Kaliya, Group Brains
- good slides. Doug Engkebart shout out
- DKR dynamic knowledge repository
- IETF datatracker
- Mechanism: stigmergy + deliberation
- I think just means leaving records?
- Jerry's brain (one person graph but connected in a community)
- Membrane is esssentail, so thus identity.
- They use Obsidian + AI organizer
- Skeptical of alignment, yes. You can get group alignment but not global humanity alignment
- place-based group brains is interesting
- Me
- venkat: Venkatesh Rao to Everyone (Sep 25, 2026, 12:17 PM) lol “jubilee button” is automatically a protocol fiction story. You should write a story for Monstrous Times about that
- Vijay V (asked me a good question) not a crypto guy
- Nicholas Fett (just before me)
- Book unstoppable.market
- Lots of economics – inevitable centralization
- rec: Kenneth Galbraith (economist who is good writer)
- Albert Wegner: universal moral framework (to Vijay)
- Nicolas Madory - futurx - divergent protocols
- From Stereo to Liquid Music (generative music I think?)
- robot folk dance (china)
- robot pet fiction
- Ficciones Gauchopunk
- klara and the sun, Ishiguro
- prtocoals to preserve cultural diversity (no details tho)
- Jim Fournier MetaNature
- plugging his cryptoish company JLink ok
- Singularity mentioned
- soup metaphor? we ate the sooup after emerging from it
- the white of the egg
- platonic solutions? in matter?
- photovoltaic are the octaves of ?
- technopoet
- resonant attractors
- set of recurring properties where it appears life has gooten into crisis and pushed to new order
- Cited Minsky!
- Fan of Penrose-Hammerof microtubles
- OK lots of quantum BS.
- Venkat
- New Nature – has no rsponsible party.
- Need to see parts and fun to play with. AI taking over any gamable playable act.
- play attitude towards AI.
- Protocols allow you to breathe, manage psyche, deal with the world crisis.
- safety as routine life process (parallel to Brand maintenance)
- Called out eigenvirtue as frst memorable thing, I'm kvelling.
- TODO Write up talk as paper for ?
- Call for book-sized ideas
- call to action: start your own protocolish movement/thing
- Wow Jenna namede my talk...in
- Kai Keutler memory person
- Another meme candidate from Kailya’s talk is the “distributed Buddha” (Buddha as incarnated as networked community). (from fotis)
- huh i dont remember that but