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.
Easy protocols refuse scalar transformation; they are not merely local as opposed to global but sui generis — situated relationality that proceeds at the speed of trust. Soft protocol is semantically shallow, as Sha Xin Wei would say. It is a programmer’s “worst practices”. brittle and fragile relation, which never attempts to scale, but to engender other relations which carry the world further and afresh. While hard protocols live to create spaces for recognition of the same, soft protocols live for the immediate and die to create space for novelty.