Skip to content

Creating New Genres for New Nature

PresentationSpencer Nitkey, Sachin Benny

Walter Benjamin wrote that 'All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.' In this interactive session, participants will learn the components and theories of genre — including a brief survey of Protocol Fiction — and then experiment with creating their own sub-genre using a scaffolded interactive genre-building process. Using the 4 Jamverse founding worlds as examples, participants will wield the skills gained in the first two talks to outline their own 'PF subgenre' set in the Jamverse. Contributions from the session may even be installed into the Jamverse or lay the…

Event: Protocol Symposium 2026, Thursday, September 24, 2026

Slides and papers

Shared by the speakers for the symposium. Email addresses have been removed.

Related resources

Talk

A Common Protocol for Composable, Modular Organizations

Simone Cicero of Boundaryless presents O2A (Open Organisation Alliance), a proposed open standard for making organizations 'composable' by replacing implicit coordination mechanisms like hierarchy and meetings with an explicit, machine-readable contract graph of units, offerings, and relationships. He argues the protocol's compact grammar—three economic primitives (purchase, revenue split, investment) plus composition mechanisms—can represent bespoke institutional arrangements like Haier's Rendanheyi model or joint ventures as 'sentences' in a common organizational language, becoming essential as AI agents enter firms and transaction costs collapse.

Simone Cicero

Talk

Closing Session

Venkatesh Rao delivers a closing synthesis of the five-day symposium, highlighting recurring themes like 'new nature' (Sean Stevenson's test: a system is new nature when there's nobody to appeal to), the interiority/exteriority tension in AI discourse, and the balance between playable protocols and grinding enterprise IT work. Timber Stinson-Schroff co-hosts a town hall where attendees share standout moments, Rao announces the Protocol Institute's transition to fiscal sponsorship under David Lang's Experiment Foundation following the end of Ethereum Foundation funding, and the group plugs the Monstrous Times fiction magazine spinoff led by Sachin Benny and Spencer Nitkey plus an upcoming November 'book writing month.'</summary>

Venkatesh Rao, Timber Stinson-Schroff

Presentation

Continuity Infrastructure

Continuity is related to memory, but it is something else: a substantial relationship between the past and present of some thing, greater than its persistence or its identity. A rite can persist in texts long after anyone performs it. It is continued only when it is taken up again and its significance to the present is renewed. Continuity in this sense is never simply given. It has to be instituted, against a natural drift towards fragmentation. This is most explicit where there has been a temporal break: in the revival of a language, a culture or a national identity, where a present must…

Ruthvik Peddawandla