Circadia explores a world where sleep is perfectly regulated by wearable technology that monitors and controls dreams, following protagonist Kemi as she experiences an anomalous recurring dream that breaks the system's design—a dream that shouldn't be remembered but is, suggesting something unexpected in the protocol. The issue also announces a guest talk on poetry, protocols, and infinite games with Robert Peake.
This issue explores identity verification protocols and their societal implications while featuring a guest talk on alignment protocols for AI agents, which propose using purpose-driven roles and swarm-like dynamics to coordinate collective intelligences. The alignment protocol approach draws from nature-inspired swarm behavior and classical economic division of labor to solve the coordination problem of distributed AI agents.
Marie-Hélène Lebeault
Botao Amber Hu presents 'Protocoling HCI,' an early-stage design theory arguing that HCI must shift from designing moments of use to designing protocols as infrastructural material that shapes local action spaces while enabling emergent collective behavior. Drawing on Michael Levine's work on agential material, bioelectric morphogenesis, and 'cognitive glue,' plus concepts like emergent engineering and reverse game theory, Hu proposes that protocols act as 'trust compressors' that let bounded agents coordinate without full mutual knowledge, illustrated through the NFT art piece Merge as a 'protocol art' example.
Botao Amber Hu
Sean Stevenson argues that AI is undergoing a 'descent' through Stewart Brand's pace layers—moving from fast fashion/commerce layers down through governance and culture toward nature itself—becoming less dramatic and less contestable as it sinks, following a pattern he traces via Clayton Christensen's theory of attractive profits migrating to the least-optimized layer of a value chain. He proposes a four-stage model (integrate, coordinate, embed, inherit) for this descent and introduces 'appeal foreclosure' versus 'ossification' as a way to distinguish genuine new nature from captured systems, while drawing on Spinoza's natura naturans/naturata and Philippe Descola's ontological framework (naturalism, animism, totemism, analogism) to speculate how AI-plus-protocols might shift human categories of inner life and matter.
Sean Stevenson