This issue summarizes Bruno Latour's essay on the Berliner Doppelschlüssel, a real double-key used in 20th-century Berlin apartments that enforces a specific protocol: lock the door at night, leave it unlocked during the day. The double-key demonstrates how material objects can encode and delegate social rules, settling disputes between building owners and tenants through physical design rather than explicit agreement.
Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts (TAFs) are cryptic, haiku-like weather predictions produced continuously by meteorologists worldwide that directly inform pilot decisions and shape aviation operations at every scale. These terse textual protocols encode atmospheric phenomena and thresholds that determine individual actions, airport procedures, and global traffic patterns.
Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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.
Samuel Chua
Sachin Benny argues that AI modernity is reorganizing our relationship to the past the way industrial capitalism reorganized our relationship to the future, coining 'Archival Time' as a condition where traces of prior events become retrievable without recreating the event. He contrasts this with Bakhtin's 'Carnival Time,' bounded periods where accumulated traces lose authority and things get unmade and remade, drawing on William Sewell's eventfulness framework (path dependency, temporal heterogeneity, contingency) to argue eventful history requires a mix of both archival inheritance and carnivalesque rupture.
Sachin Benny