In our world, we misread the Greek meaning of protocol, 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 we 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 foreseeable 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.
Our world precedes in terms of hard protocols. Schedules, rent economies, algorithmic media system, credit hours, professionalization criteria, performance metrics, and so on. They are imposed from without, elide with them or suffer the consequences. This is where the dictum “program or be programmed” from media theorist Douglas Rushkoff comes into play. But this dictum itself is a hard protocol. It is not that we can simply reverse the flows and become the masters of our domain, and we should be suspicious always of such desire towards totality.
It is that hard protocols carve our experience, our time, our emotions and capacity to be affected. A protocol is computed. It’s given life through its enactment. A hard protocol draws its power from portability, from its universalizing extension through time and sociality. With the computation of every event, every 15-meeting weekly Google calendar invite, it reaches towards a transcendent infinitude, a universal comparability. I select the box to end my meetings five minutes early, and my breaks to smoke and piss are encoded, classified (discretely, by omission from the procotol) and protocolized. Repeatability, reusability. A hard protocol exists at scale, provides legibility far and wide, its goal is communicability, its god is communication, and consensus.