An easy protocol is an alternative mode of coordination and repetition that resists the rigidity and latent authoritarianism of formalized protocolic institutions. Rather than containing possibilities through excessive formalization, easy protocols allow for emergent order through practice and relationality.
Ethos
- Non-Formalized Repetition - Patterns that emerge through practice rather than explicit codification
- Similarity - Recognition of resonance and patterning across instances
- 3rd Time = Tradition - The threshold at which repetition becomes recognizable as tradition
- Relationality - Coordination grounded in relationship between participants
- Metastable - Capable of shifting states while maintaining integrity
- Externalized - The protocol exists in the space between agents
- Play - Ludic possibility and experimentation within the protocol
- Proposition - The protocol as offering rather than mandate
- Consent - Participation based on ongoing agreement rather than coerced compliance
- Risk - Acceptance of uncertainty and vulnerability
- Semantic Shallowness - Easy protocol is stifled by deep categorization and formalization. Computational treatments of easy protocol should be as shallow as possible.
- Visible Irreversibility — maybe
Story
What is a easy protocol? My friend Nimo asks as we wade waist deep through apprehension about the leftist desire to protocolize social relations: think putting your co-op’s shared expenses on the blockchain, phone apps that quick temperature checks on bargaining priorities to union members, and so on. But we also shared a felt tension, a nascent feeling that we ought to admit that formalization engenders expediency. Again and again, we stumble against the blockage of all-or-nothing thinking: it is either all bureaucracy, or anything goes. If a soft protocol is to do anything, it is to carve out the middle, not only as a cheap moderation of extremes, but to raise up the middle in its own right.
The term protocol precedes the development of silicon-based digital technologies. The word comes from the Greek protokollon, where proto means first and kollon refers to glue. The protokollon provides the reader with an onset to a body of knowledge: a summary, a verification of the text’s origins. In the 15th century, the French take up the word in their own tongue to designate a draft, something unfinished. In our world, we misread the Greek meaning, we take it to an extreme; we believe that the first page must in fact envelop all those which are yet to come, that what a protocol portends deserves to bind to the pages that follow. This is what I will call hard protocol: a set of procedures which provide context for sorting dissensus into consensus, misunderstanding into understanding, unmeasurable to measured. It is a rigid formalizing of presuppositions from the get-go, in advance of what is to unfold, which are meant to maintain their own validity for the duration.
Hard protocol is the fantasy of a crystalized formalization of the world, which relies on gods who create alphas and omegas, of social experience as a closed system. If neurosis is an intolerance of ambiguity, hard protocol is the fixation of the neurotic par excellence. Ambiguity here designates an incompatibility between how desire compels us and the strictures of social forms. When Jung wrote that “neurosis is a substitute for real suffering”, we find that beneath the auspices of the supposedly disambiguating power of hard protocol, lies a mental mechanism aimed at the defense of itself against a fuller feeling of the world unmediated by the hard protocol of social forms.
A theory of soft protocol is an acceptance that the world is never complete, that despite our fantasy, experience always rides in on a draft through an invisible crack arriving at our skin with a shiver of fright or ecstasy. A stake in soft protocol does not, however, find its grounding in the neurotic’s fixated reaction to the world’s unstoppable churn to become unfixed. Soft protocol is nothing if not constantly reinvented; a soft protocol is a proposition, a lure to feel that feels freshest because it is t in the very moment when one feels the world becomes unfixed. It is a speculation responsive to what has come to pass about how we may become, does not strive to totalize the set of possible interactions, but rather takes as its ground that contingency itself is the medium of experience.
Appearance
Every attribute can map into registers / domains. The domains are also messy. Protocolization of easy is about games, we’re talking about the game protocol.
Just because its dehierarchialized doesn’t mean its done by massaging power in social relations.
Yearning to get outside of control / outside of societies of control. In the age of computer, the enclosure is culturally fading away. Example: open office plans. Sense of non-hierarchy. Power switches from top-down enclosing of time and behavior to modulation. Management and capital hitting against each other switched to startup, decentered competition between entrepreneurs (Entreprecariat). In institutions we resort to old technologies. unions. boundaries.
How to maintain a sense of autonomy while also dealing with the very hard protocol of power modulation?
Need to be put into place:
protocols are virtualized
the world is protocolized
on one side dismantle
what’s hard about easy protocols you have to tend towards both tendencies you’re both aware of the mental-social tendency towards concretizing and locking down and territorializing, and on the other hand tending towards something that wants to dissolve those tendencies.
ex-communication
protocols: thinking between scales. tension between allowing global moralizing norms to overcode a local scale. best practice: use google not AI, artists can’t use AI. the fear is complicity, quels the possibility of resistance. the opposite is also true in what it means to scale. its not about normalizing. the hope is that the interventoin or the practice, the even trancends the local, and has nonlocal impacts. that influence other registers.
the movement from morality to the local, is different from the motion from the local to the cultural
easy protocols are not interested in noramlized
time based interventions
what can be soft about computation?
- how people compose media
- time
spaciality:
- between the open world and the void