Archive

FictionSachin BennyJune 20, 2025

In this issue's debut of The Librarians series, Sachin presents fictional narratives based on real documentation from Summer of Protocols' long-term scenario planning workshops, beginning with 'The Crystal Reading Ceremony,' set in a futuristic underground archive where knowledge is stored on quartz discs. The story explores how institutional memory and archival practices might evolve in a post-AI world through the rituals and tensions surrounding the curation of pre-AI human knowledge.

Topics

archive fiction memory protocols

Related resources

Talk

Jubilee: Meta-protocols against Entrenchment

Mike Travers traces the Biblical Jubilee and ancient Mesopotamian debt-cancellation traditions (drawing on Michael Hudson's research) as early 'meta-protocols' designed to periodically reverse the entrenchment effects of economic systems, examining patches like the prosbul that undermined these resets. He then generalizes this into a framework for forgiveness in protocol design, covering dimensions like timing, coverage, and depth of forgiveness events, and drawing parallels to game-theoretic forgiving strategies, exception handling in programming, and the tension between protocol 'hardness' and 'softness'.

Mike Travers

Article

Archives of Discontinuity

This issue examines California's wildfire management through the lens of prescribed and wild fires at the wildland-urban interface, tracing how 20th-century fire suppression policies fundamentally contradicted ecological understanding of fire's necessary role in ecosystems. The case study explores combustion as a memory practice and investigates how new tools reshape our epistemological relationship with fire management.

Nathalia Scherer, Jiordi Rosales

Talk

Researcher Salon with Sarah Friend | Good Death

Sarah Friend presents her Summer of Protocols research 'Good Death,' arguing that protocols and digital worlds (MMOs, blockchains, NFT projects) don't have a binary alive/dead state but undergo a liminal 'dying' process followed by a social decision of death, analogous to the historical evolution of medical death diagnosis (heart death vs. brain death) and anthropological rites of passage. She introduces Venkatesh Rao's concept of 'world' as what grows atop a protocol, examines memorials embedded in blockchains (e.g., Hal Finney-style tributes), dead-blockchain lists, and Ethereum's difficulty bomb as a case of engineered protocol mortality, closing with questions about what archives or memorials are appropriate for dead digital worlds.

Sarah Friend