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Necrophoresis

FictionSpencer Nitkey
researcherpractitioner
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Spencer Nitkey's speculative fiction imagines a virtualized world where death has been technologically hidden from view through time-dilation and shared virtual embodiment, forcing a new class of 'undertakers' to perform necrophoresis—sanitizing the digital afterlife of the dead without the rituals of grief that once accompanied burial. The story explores what happens to human mourning practices when the protocols for grieving are lost in technological systems designed to erase death itself.

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Talk

Seapunk: World Protocolizations On Reverse Imagineering as Method

Samuel Chua of Seapunk Studios presents 'reverse-imagineering,' a methodology for protocol studies that starts from speculative fiction worlds and works backward to infer the protocols that would need to exist to make them plausible. He illustrates this through three Seapunk worlds—South(east Asia) with neoanimist distributed AI and 'ghost machine' commons-hardening, SNOW Society's shanzhai-inspired peer-to-peer climate adaptation supply chains, and the 67th World's longevity/automation governance where immortality requires earning social legitimacy—arguing that building fiction first surfaces protocol ideas that direct present-to-future design work would miss.

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Don't Cross the Lines: Mazes as Minimal Protocols

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Daniel Schmidt, Venkatesh Rao

Game

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