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The Dismantling

FictionElizabeth Maher

Elizabeth Maher's series concludes with a narrative about Janice Spurlock, who designs the Concord Settlement with deliberate impermanence—structures built to be completely dismantled and leave no trace. The story explores how one woman anticipated cultural collapse by engineering everything, from buildings to records, to vanish without archaeological evidence.

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Talk

Jubilee: Meta-protocols against Entrenchment

Mike Travers traces the Biblical Jubilee and ancient Mesopotamian debt-cancellation traditions (drawing on Michael Hudson's research) as early 'meta-protocols' designed to periodically reverse the entrenchment effects of economic systems, examining patches like the prosbul that undermined these resets. He then generalizes this into a framework for forgiveness in protocol design, covering dimensions like timing, coverage, and depth of forgiveness events, and drawing parallels to game-theoretic forgiving strategies, exception handling in programming, and the tension between protocol 'hardness' and 'softness'.

Mike Travers

Talk

Researcher Salon with Sarah Friend | Good Death

Sarah Friend presents her Summer of Protocols research 'Good Death,' arguing that protocols and digital worlds (MMOs, blockchains, NFT projects) don't have a binary alive/dead state but undergo a liminal 'dying' process followed by a social decision of death, analogous to the historical evolution of medical death diagnosis (heart death vs. brain death) and anthropological rites of passage. She introduces Venkatesh Rao's concept of 'world' as what grows atop a protocol, examines memorials embedded in blockchains (e.g., Hal Finney-style tributes), dead-blockchain lists, and Ethereum's difficulty bomb as a case of engineered protocol mortality, closing with questions about what archives or memorials are appropriate for dead digital worlds.

Sarah Friend

Paper

Founding Memorabilia from the Order of Protocological Death

This speculative document presents founding memorabilia from a fictional 2038 organization called the Order of Protocological Death, which administers end-of-life rites for collective entities and worlds through practices like ritual deletion and memorial compression. The text establishes a taxonomy of protocological deaths (stillbirth, death by success, ossification, mismanagement) and outlines the Order's core functions including world health assessment, funeral design, and protocol archive stewardship.

Summer of Protocols