Mechanical Currents

ArticleTimber Stinson-SchroffSeptember 9, 2025

This issue explores AI adoption in businesses through the lens of protocol studies, examining how protocols constrain and coordinate infrastructure while AI systems generate and transform knowledge at massive scale. The Special Interest Group on Protocols for Business investigates the tensions between AI diffusion (700+ million weekly users of OpenAI tools) and organizational security, focusing on how employees use LLMs with sensitive business data.

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article organizations protocols technology

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Talk

Open Social Protocols: A Commons-Based Protocol Layer

Jose Leal (with Scott Clearwater) presents Open Social Protocols, a framework built on Needs (recurring coordination conditions) around which communities publish, fork, and adopt Protocols rather than collapsing into single fixed agreements. He describes 'bridging protocols' that let multiple competing protocols for the same need coexist and interoperate, built atop the AT Protocol and a 'Common Ground' layer, citing examples like Morning Star Farms and Buurtzorg as organizations already operating this way without naming it 'protocol'.

Jose Leal, Scott Clearwater

Talk

Building Psychohistory: An Infrastructure Field Report

Aneesh Sathe presents an infrastructure field report on 'World Machines Theory,' a framework for reading history as the interaction of long-cycle civilizational 'machines' (Modernity, Divergence, Liveness), and demonstrates the two systems built to operationalize it: the Oracle, a multi-agent RAG pipeline over a shared knowledge lake that generates oracular 'prophecies,' and the Prime Radiant, a typed knowledge graph of ~500 historical 'machine cards' that can be simulated forward to project future institutional ecologies. He frames this as an Asimov-inspired but decentralized, commons-based reimagining of psychohistory, contrasting it with Seldon's mathematical, control-oriented original. The talk opens with context from the Contraptions Book Club, introduced by its host.

Aneesh Sathe

Talk

The Nature of Trust: Weaving Identity, Relationship, and Place

Kaliya Young argues that hard technical protocols (like those governing the Linux kernel) depend on 'soft' relational protocols for trust, using the XZ backdoor incident—where a fabricated contributor nearly inserted malware—as proof that the failure was relational, not cryptographic. She traces digital identity through three generations (username/password, OAuth/OpenID, then DIDs/verifiable credentials) to a proposed third generation of 'digital trust graphs': peer-to-peer verifiable relationship credentials, verifiable membership credentials, and verifiable trust agents, developed through the Trust Over IP/Decentralized Trust Graph working group. Kevin Triplett discusses Project Weave's focus on adoption, emphasizing that groups—not individuals—should be the unit of reputation and AI alignment, and that these protocols can be applied locally, even to place-rooted neighborhood governance.

Kaliya Young, Kevin Triplett