Skip to content

Salon V: Autonomous Realities - 2024 Protocol Symposium

TalkAmber Hu
researcheracademic
Salon V: Autonomous Realities - 2024 Protocol Symposium
Watch on YouTube →

Amber Hu presents research on 'autonomous realities,' the fragmentation of shared experience as personalized mixed-reality (AR/VR) devices proliferate, and proposes a 'decentralized digital chemistry' framework using self-sovereign identity (DIDs) and object capabilities to let people merge disparate mixed-reality worlds when they physically encounter each other. The talk also introduces multi-party computation and private set intersection as a protocol for detecting mutual interest in merging realities before an encounter, illustrated by a planned art piece called 'Quantum Masquerade' for Defcon. Attendees including Dorian and others raise engineering concerns about decentralized access control and cultural parallels to etiquette-based reality negotiation.

Topics

decentralized-identifiers-did-and-self-sovereign-identitydigital-chemistry-metaphor-for-merging-autonomous-realitiesfictionmixed-reality-metaverse-interoperability-standardsmulti-party-computation-and-private-set-intersection-for-intent-matchingobject-capabilities-access-control-listsprotocolsresearchsymposium-2024technology

Related resources

Talk

Divergent Protocols: A Speculative Protocol for Cultural Convergence Zones

Nicolás Madoery presents 'divergent protocols' as a counter-model to standard protocols that converge toward homogenization, arguing that AI and robotics now function as infrastructure (not tools) through which culture becomes 'liquid' and infinitely re-versioned. Drawing on examples like AI-generated Argentine folklore, a dancing folk robot, and his PIACH framework for cultural organizations, he proposes protocols that preserve diversity by naming what is lost, keeping source names, and leaving room for noise rather than optimizing transmission.

Nicolás Madoery

Talk

Beyond Consensus: Protocols as Digital Institutions

Martin Harrahan (a teaching fellow at Southeast Technological University in Ireland) presents a protocol school workshop demonstrating an LLM-powered pipeline that transcribes and clusters the Summer of Protocols YouTube corpus into 'foundational' and 'aggregated' ideas, which can then be loaded as context to get chatbots to answer in protocol-studies terms rather than narrow computer-science definitions. He then walks participants through using an LLM persona ('Kevin the dinner host') to roleplay a chosen protocol and test it against the ten properties from Josh Stark's 'Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols' framework (e.g. defensibility, mortality, hardness), showing how conversational steering can reveal whether a protocol resists capture or can gracefully die out.

Martin Harrahan

Talk

Salon I: End-to-End Encryption in ActivityPub - 2024 Protocol Symposium

Evan Prodromou and Tom Coates present their Summer of Protocols research on integrating end-to-end encryption into ActivityPub, arguing that the fediverse's low-trust server operators and high-risk user base (LGBTQ users, activists, infosec community) make E2E encryption necessary despite the protocol's original email-like trust assumptions. They explain why they chose Messaging Layer Security (MLS) over alternatives like PGP, Signal's protocol, or OTR—citing MLS's royalty-free IETF standard status and scalability—and propose a new ActivityPub extension adding a key store and groups mechanism, while Coates details UI challenges around key management, archive restoration, and segregating encrypted from unencrypted messages.

Evan Prodromou, Tom Coates