There is no simplistic swap of easy protocol for hard protocol. They move through different registers altogether, which is not to say that they do not interact. Soft protocol does not proselytize a return to a time before the hard protocols of technofeudalismy, coloniality, and anti-minoritarian cultural hegemony. There is no retreating but the retreading of exhausted, fearful, and protective mental paths open to the possibility of discovering a relation to those paths yet undetermined. It is only through cultivating our own singular relation to the unforeseeable that the conditions for autonomy emerge.
An easy protocol is a provisional proposition: what if we kissed at the intersection of art and technology? Never mimetic, it molecularizes the meme, steals away with its power, resingularizes it into a nascent relational force. Soft protocols exist and resonate in the interstices of hard protocols, in the canals they carve out of our capacity to become something else. A carving is not a loss, not a lack, but a de- and re-formation of the conditions for becoming something else. Or rather, becoming-something-else-doing. Doing, because soft protocols are verbial and adverbial, while a hard protocol must sort through objects. Soft protocols are risk-trophic while hard protocols and risk-atrophic. This is to say: a soft protocol is a relationality that nurtures risk, which risk demands of us. Hard protocols compute risks.