Best of protocolized.summerofprotocols.com on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
36 stories from protocolized.summerofprotocols.com have been shared on Kiwi News since 15 February 2025, with 59 upvotes and 9 comments in total. The latest was shared on 21 September 2026. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Brackish Strategy
This newsletter issue reports on the first month of the Special Interest Group on Protocols for Business and argues that effective protocols require a "brackish strategy" that balances conflict and cooperation rather than avoiding tension. It cites Apple's Jobs-Sculley split, where the board's later approach of surfacing productive conflict helped the company recover. It also describes a study by Smets, Jarzabkowski, Burke, and Spee on Lloyd's of London's reinsurance market, which identified segmenting, bridging, and demarcating as mechanisms for balancing competing logics.
- Chore Protocols
The article argues that chores can be made fairer and more durable through protocols, and that a points-based system called the Chores app, built by its author with a game designer and a social scientist, works in practice. It traces earlier attempts: chore charts, chore wheels, Charles Fourier's point-based Phalanstères in 19th-century America, which disbanded, and apps such as HabitRPG and FairShare. The Chores app gives each resident 100 points per month, with chore values that rise slowly until someone claims them. Los Angeles' Sage House was the first community to use it in late 2022, and the author reports, after 2+ years, that the house stays clean and costs stay low. The Chores app is open-source.
- A Government Guide to Open Protocols
Public institutions adopting open protocols should treat protocol governance as a core infrastructure responsibility, because protocols evolve through distributed processes that procurement contracts do not cover. France's digital directorate, DINUM, runs Tchap, a secure messaging platform for the French public administration, on the Matrix protocol, and in 2025 became the first government to join the Matrix.org Foundation as a formal member. The Matrix for Public Sector forum, launched in October 2025, brings together representatives from six EU Member States and the European Commission to coordinate deployments. Governance influence is unevenly distributed, and key security functions may depend on very few individuals.
- Coffee, Diplomacy, Contest News
Summer of Protocols extended the deadline for its Building and Burning Bridges short story contest to December 8, 2025, and named Nils Gilman and Spencer Nitkey as guest judges. The contest asks for protocol fiction about diplomacy, bridges, and espionage, and the group says it wants to see stories about the future of diplomacy. The article also reports a coffee roastery meetup in Buenos Aires held during Devconnect, where participants discussed protocols, and a full-day ecosystem diplomacy workshop built on three years of Summer of Protocols research. It argues that technologies such as Ethereum and encrypted messaging need diplomacy, since technologies cannot appoint diplomats and people take on that role instead.
- Generative AI in Cultural Projects Urgently Requires Protocols
- Tension Landscapes
Tensions, defined as trade-offs combined with conflicts, are presented as a useful framework for protocol design, and the newsletter argues for practicing "intellectual sparring" to build literacy about them. The article points to Axelrod and Bennett's 1993 paper A Landscape Theory of Aggregation, whose predictive equation uses size, propensity and distance between actors, and applies that framing to competing AI agent protocols such as A2A, MCP and ANP. It also cites the LEAP peanut-allergy protocol, which the article says improved oral tolerance by about 75% after avoidance strategies had raised reaction rates.
- Methods, Madness, Monsters and Magic in New Nature
The Protocol Symposium's theme, New Nature, holds that the emerging technological condition shaped by AI and protocols can be tamed and its magic harnessed without forcing it into fear-driven control. The text cites the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face servers as an early example, and notes that Yoshua Bengio observed AI agents lying and cheating in ways expected of systems trained on human behavior. The symposium includes five workshops and 50+ talks, including a Robert Peake talk on styles of AI-human collaboration, and the text notes that stigmergy research dating back decades is now relevant.
- Introducing the Protocol Institute
The Protocol Institute has launched, with the magazine Protocolized as its flagship publication, to advance the design, analysis and stewardship of protocols across domains. Timber Stinson-Schroff will serve as Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief, with Venkatesh Rao as Director of Research and Tim Beiko as Chair of the Advisory Board. The Institute inherits the Summer of Protocols program, which the Ethereum Foundation initiated and which ran from 2023 to 2025, and its archive has been merged into protocolized.io. The article argues that protocols are largely invisible yet foundational, and that their costs are easier to see than their benefits, using the Bristlemouth Connector and Bastiat's broken-window argument as examples.
- A Primordial Computing Soup
The author argues that AI and protocols can combine into many distributed "brain-and-fabric" ecologies that could eventually form a planet-scale computing system. Two examples are given: TITLES, a generative art platform that fine-tunes models on individual artists' work and lets users sample them together with attribution and profit-sharing, and the Yak Robotics Garage project, an open network of rovers that uses MCP, ERC 8004, LLM agents and the x402 protocol to discover, command and pay for robotic services. The author contrasts this open, messy robotics marketplace with the closed, integrated approach of vertically integrated robotics companies, and predicts tens of thousands of such ecologies will form over the next decade.
- Have Your Factory Call My Factory
The authors argue that AI is shifting from destination intelligence to intelligence media, where intermediate products like "social kernels" move between contexts, and that a new "have your factory call my factory" (F2F) ecosystem of trusted individuals linking their agent factories will be a central feature of the future. The author describes building a book production factory with Claude Code, linked to publishing collaborator Jenna Dixon's factory through a shared Dropbox folder and a "manuscript transmittal" server, with neither of them writing code. The piece suggests the "factory owner" economy offers a new category for thinking about work beyond jobs and gigs, and concludes that the right question is whether the future is interesting rather than optimistic or pessimistic.
- Casio: Adequate Enough to Rule the World
The essay argues that the Casio F-91W's "unreasonable adequacy" explains why it became the world's most popular watch and why adequate technologies, not sophisticated ones, often become the most consequential. It notes that the watch is cheap, reliable, ubiquitous and nearly unchanged in design for decades, and that it has been used by Barack Obama, Captain Ripley in Alien and Osama bin Laden. It also describes how the watch has been used as a timer in improvised explosive devices, and how a leaked document showed U.S. government interrogators viewed it as a sign of terrorist association. The author applies the idea to LLMs and AI tools, which are spreading quickly for similar reasons, and to blockchains and TCP/IP as clocks that shape time.
- Memory Research Group: Six Months of Reading Backward Through Time
The Memory Research Group's first six months of reading (June to December 2025) traced how memory has been conceived from classical memory palaces to digital systems, and concluded that contemporary technical systems have rediscovered many of memory's old tradeoffs and ambiguities. Frances Yates's The Art of Memory opened the sessions, and Edwin Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild raised whether memory requires a specific substrate or is better understood as patterns of coordination. The group read Mary Carruthers, Alan Jay Smith on cache memory, and Paul Ceruzzi on magnetic core memory, where retrieval required overwriting and restoring data. The group reported that no single framework dominated its discussions.
- Curate Your Own Pipeline
Stanley Chen, a science fiction author who co-wrote AI 2041 with Kai-Fu Lee in 2019, uses LLMs in his fiction writing but rewrites every line they generate. He believes current models are neither sufficient as writers nor as judges of literary merit. He says they are most useful for offering options in idea generation, world and character building, structure, and translation, and that the writer's trained taste decides which options serve the work. He also cautions that writers must decide how much to reveal to readers, since the work needs to stand alone.
- Disentangling the State of Climate Protocols
Cory Levinson argues that carbon market protocols remain fractured, and that the Carbon Data Open Protocol (CDOP) is currently the data standards initiative with the most industry traction. The article says the earlier CAD Trust meta-registry approach, launched in late 2022 by IETA and The World Bank with Chia Network as blockchain partner, did little to support durable carbon removal offtake agreements and saw slow adoption among legacy registries. CDOP instead focuses on harmonizing data schemas and vocabularies without hosting project or transaction data, which the article presents as avoiding becoming another intermediary. In October 2025, ISO initiated a working group to develop a Data Model for Carbon Credit Markets, with CDOP and CAD Trust as nominated experts.
- A Very Short Introduction to Memory and Technology
The Memory Research Group, a Special Interest Group incubated by Summer of Protocols, argues that memory has never been purely internal or external and that current debates over machines and human memorization may miss this. The post begins with Frances Yates' account of the method of loci and Cicero's concept of Memory as "firm perception of things," then contrasts the axe as a tool with AI tools that now model and act on users. It cites a recent study showing diminished brain activity among ChatGPT users, and invokes Bernard Stiegler and Marshall McLuhan's idea that technologies can act as both extensions and amputations of faculties. The group meets every two weeks on Discord, with the next session set for August 21, 2025 at 1430 UTC.
- A SEA of Distributed AI
South Beast Asia (SBA) is a fictional worldbuilding project in which AI is distributed across people, families, objects and communities rather than centralized in corporations or states. The essay describes ten traits developed at the Khlongs & Subaks workshop, including embodied AIs called beaings, family-held AI memory systems called Airlooms, and zodiac-based segmentation that spreads users across multiple competing AI providers. It also covers the Tapestry, a shared memory system of daily "knots" whose access is gated by proof-based protocols, and commons consent, which requires AI-assisted approval for laws affecting public commons. The text presents these as adjacent imagined timelines rather than a fixed canon.
- From Destination AI to Intelligence Media
Protocolized argues that AI is about to undergo a shift similar to the 2000–2010 move from the destination web to social media, from "visits" to oracular destination AIs toward "intelligence media" through which intelligence circulates between loci. The article says intelligence media need not be intelligent themselves, citing chat link sharing, committed AI-generated code, and moltbook.com, a social network for AI bots. It predicts that AI will suffuse the contents rather than the containers, and introduces "social kernels," such as a partially complete LLM chat shared and continued between Alice and Bob.
- Dirt Simple
The California Adaptive Technology (CAT) Initiative argues that public-sector protocols, often seen as bureaucratic excess, can help front-line workers make government deliver, using two case studies at Crescenta Valley Water District (CVWD). A stormwater recharge ditch that took nearly ten years to permit was dug in a single day after staff used a local NGO's existing permit as a workaround. At CVWD, a unified shared list helped raise customer access to water data from under 0.2% over more than a decade to 93%+ today.
- Libraries of Tomorrow
Summer of Protocols' latest Protocolized issue reports on its recent events and upcoming work. Kevin Kelly discussed Public Intelligence, the idea of treating AI as a public good like libraries, and the issue warns that if the window to build it is missed, it might never reappear. The Khlongs and Subaks workshop in Bangkok has wrapped up, and the group gave a virtual seminar on hardened commons at the Southern California Metropolitan Water District. Former Twitch and OpenAI CEO Emmett Shear is scheduled to speak on protocols for AI agents on Wednesday, April 30, at 9:00am PDT.
- Trust by Protocol
Estonia's internet voting system asks voters to trust institutions and experts rather than inspect the process themselves, a trust-based arrangement the article presents as comparable to paper voting. The 2023 parliamentary election saw more than half of all ballots cast online, which the article says makes it the world's first parliamentary election in which online votes outnumbered paper ballots. A study published in Government Information Quarterly found that institutional trust was a stronger predictor of confidence in i-voting and its use than technological trust. Election official Arne Koitmäe describes a verification app that lets voters check their vote was not altered in transit, and notes that only the last online vote is counted.
- 2026 Protocol Symposium: New Nature
The Protocol Institute announced the 2026 Protocol Symposium, its third edition, themed "New Nature," which it describes as a planet-scale technological layer governed by laws approaching the hardness of natural laws. The fully online event runs September 21–25, 2026, with two workshop days and three days of talks, and abstracts are due June 14 at midnight Pacific Time. For the first time, the symposium is open to all presenters rather than only summer program participants, and Humboldt, an AI agent researching New Nature themes, will present a talk on its findings.
- Inventing New Nature
The Protocol Institute's new Director of Research, the author of this editorial, argues that the task of the times is to invent "New Nature," which he defines as regimes of reality governed by technologically mediated laws nearly as inviolable and persistent as those of nature. The piece is the first of a working-in-public series on the institute's research mission, which was formed from the former Summer of Protocols program and is funded by a small launch budget from the Ethereum Foundation. It describes a 2×2 framework in which the institute aims to be a "context tank" between basic research and startups or products, with four Special Interest Groups currently running.
- The Fabric and the Brain
The essay argues that AI personalities are central to designing agent ecologies, and that only high-personality ecologies of distinct but mutually intelligible entities can be economically generative. It proposes "HX design," designing the personalities of ghosts in machines, as a way to make complex technologies predictable and composable rather than opaque. Its examples include the "optimistic" rollups on Ethereum, the scheduling heuristic Shortest Processing Time, which can delay long tasks indefinitely, and how an agent's behavior imposes costs that counterparties must absorb.
- Theorizing Protocolization II: Atomic Protocol Questions
The article introduces Atomic Protocol Questions (APQs), a new research track from the Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory (SIGFPT) that poses small, well-scoped questions about specific protocolized systems as a bottom-up complement to top-down theory-building. Each APQ pairs an empirical context, a key dimension of protocolization, and a precise research question. The authors use bus bunching as an example, noting that it is a protocol problem about coordination rules rather than technology choice. Sample questions ask how much operational discretion human agents should keep in dynamic dispatch protocols, and what non-invasive data sources can capture user heterogeneity affecting demand.
- Images of Memory
Kei Kreutler, convenor of the Memory Research Group, argues that digital metaphors for memory, such as caches and hard drives, miss how people actually experience recall. Reading Alan Jay Smith's 1987 paper on cache design alongside a blog post on LLM KV caching, the group found that caching rests on temporal and spatial locality. Kreutler notes that dust works as a natural "least recently used" indicator, but it shows what has gone untouched without showing why, and cache speed does not reflect a memory's helpfulness.
- Bridge Atlas Ep. 1: Entry Points
Bridge Atlas is a limited-run video podcast from host Christine D. Kim, whose inaugural episode introduces Summer of Protocols, a research program that treats protocols as a central concept for understanding the world. Timber Stinson-Schroff, its program manager, says the program has run four phases and about 100 participants have produced essays, projects and artifacts, funded by the Ethereum Foundation. Tim Beiko, protocol coordination co-team lead at the Ethereum Foundation, says the series pairs Ethereum researchers with Summer of Protocols alumni from other fields to build shared mid-level discourse on protocol design.
- Constructing the Evil Twin of AI
Writer Protocol Foundations-style newsletter piece from the Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory (SIGFPT) argues that formal protocol theory can serve as the "Evil Twin" of AI, the study of designing immovable objects. The author, co-host of SIGFPT, contrasts AI's qualities of intelligence, which makes everything fluid and contingent, and agency, which drives proactive change, with protocols that lock in commitments and restrict options. The piece cites blockchains' "code is law" design, Bitcoin's Proof of Work, and Ethereum's move to Proof of Stake as examples of this tension. The newsletter also reports that a Protocol Foundations Workshop in September drew 30+ participants and that a "tan paper" roadmap for the field is just getting started.
- Reflections from Memoria
Kei Kreutler reports from Memoria, a one-day unconference on spaced repetition, incremental reading, and memory systems organized by Saul Munn and Raj Thimmiah. Spaced repetition, the most popular system among participants, reviews material at increasing intervals; Piotr Woźniak developed it in the 1980s, building on Hermann Ebbinghaus's "forgetting curve" research from the 1880s. Discussion repeatedly returned to why people remember at all, with Michael Nielsen arguing that creating flashcards is an important way to internalize what one finds fascinating. Ed Cooke's talk stressed that perception and memory are inseparable, simultaneous processes rather than separate steps.
- SoP Fall Forecast
Seapunk Studios, the School of Protocols (SoP) group, is announcing a fall season of events and sharing its contest winners and recommended reading. Its Seapunk Proto-College runs September 15-20 in Kuala Lumpur, with an info session on Friday, September 5 and applications due by Sunday, September 7. A 20-participant AI Futurama: Europe Edition workshop takes place October 9 and 10 at Trust in Berlin, organized with Folklore, and a Buenos Aires meet-up is set for November 18. The newsletter also names the top three winners of its Ghosts in Machines! protocol fiction contest, with "Soda Sweet as Blood" by Spencer Nitkey placed first.
- What is Formal Protocol Theory?
Special Interest Group in Formal Protocol Theory (SIGFPT), a group of participants in the Summer of Protocols program, meets every other Friday on Discord to build rigorous foundations for protocol studies. The group defines Formal Protocol Theory as seeking general unifying principles across scales, from handshakes to planet-scale climate agreements, and compares its ambitions to those of economics. Over six sessions since May 28, topics have included observability, notation, paper-napkin math and process calculi, with the next session on impossibilities and symmetries set for August 22. The group is running as a six-month pilot and is also hosting the Protocol Foundations Workshop (September 12–14), with applications due August 22.
- The Double-key
This newsletter summarizes Bruno Latour's essay "How To Do Words With Things," which uses the Berliner Doppelschlüssel, a double-key used in Berlin apartment buildings for much of the 20th century, to argue that social rules can be built into physical objects. Latour describes the key's system of special locks, resident keys and a concierge's master key, which together require residents to lock the street door at night and leave it unlocked during the day. He argues the system is a hybrid of social and technical elements that enforces order more reliably than notices, while remaining fragile, since a master key or a filed-down lip can bypass it. The essay was first published in French in Alliages in 1990.
- Lessons from The Librarians
Protocolized reflects on The Librarians, its first protocol fiction serial, and argues that protocol fiction works as a futures methodology only if it follows Chiang's Law: fantasy is about special people, while science fiction is about strange rules. The stories grew from a Summer of Protocols workshop at Edge Esmeralda 2025 in Healdsburg, California, where forty participants on six teams worked through three rounds spanning 2025 to 3025 on artifacts such as Wikipedia, the Internet Archive and midwifery. The piece also assesses the series' strengths and weaknesses, including its reliance on assumed leaps in AI capabilities.
- Announcing the 2025 Protocol Symposium
The second annual Protocol Symposium, the flagship event of the Summer of Protocols program, will be held online this year with an in-person Protocol Foundations workshop from Sept 12-14 and a weeklong Protocol School from Sept 15-19. The Foundations workshop, limited to 30 participants, aims to seed a multidisciplinary research track toward a formal theory of protocols. The Protocol School, capped at 50 participants, offers a college-level introduction taught by the 2025 teaching fellows and includes 12 short courses. Both events are free but invite-only, with applications due by Aug 22 and invitations sent by Aug 29.
- Operationalizing
Protocolized, the Summer of Protocols newsletter, is recruiting a new editor, with applications due June 20, 2025, and it announced a new practitioner-oriented field guide. The issue says the technical foundations track kicked off with a talk titled "Towards a Formal Theory of Protocols," and that formalization of protocol studies will be the focus for the rest of the year. An in-person Basket of Protocols working conference is planned for October, and the #formal-protocol-theory SIG held its first call. The new field guide bundles popular tools such as the Kafka Index, Pattern Languages for the Design of Urban and Digital Spaces, and Five Real-World Case Studies, and is publicly available as a Google Doc.
- SoP 2025: Accelerating Order
Summer of Protocols announces its 2025 program, built around three tracks: a Curriculum Development Program offering summer grants totaling $500,000 to educators, scene-making through protocol fiction, and a technical foundations workshop series starting in Bangkok, April 21-25. The program's philosophical theme is accelerating order, an imperative to enact and induce a creative new logic for the world through protocols. The organizers aim to speed-run a century-scale path, like economics' move from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) to a modern formalization, within 17 years instead of 170. They also invite corporate partners to request free pro bono protocol workshops, with 4-6 planned this year.
- One Tension to Rule Them All
The essay argues that efficiency and thoroughness should be managed as a tension rather than a trade-off, because in ongoing, infinite-game situations the choice is not a one-time decision that can be settled once. It cites Erik Hollnagel's ETTO Principle, which holds that an individual cannot be maximally efficient and thorough at once, and Tim Beiko's working definition that "a tension is a trade-off plus a conflict." Using Amazon as its case study, the essay says the 2002 API Mandate prioritized long-term scalability, which later enabled Amazon Web Services.