Protocol fiction functions as a navigational technology for readers entering unfamiliar narrative spaces, much like Poe's protagonist using rope to map his prison cell. The emerging genre uses structural constraints and impossible premises to help audiences understand and move through complex conceptual environments.
Protocolized launches Monstrous Times, a new publication dedicated to strange rules fiction, expanding on over two years of protocol fiction storytelling including 60+ stories and writing contests. The launch reflects the discovery and formalization of a new literary genre that explores how rules and protocols structure narratives and worlds.
Sachin Benny
Nicolás Madoery presents 'divergent protocols' as a counter-model to standard protocols that converge toward homogenization, arguing that AI and robotics now function as infrastructure (not tools) through which culture becomes 'liquid' and infinitely re-versioned. Drawing on examples like AI-generated Argentine folklore, a dancing folk robot, and his PIACH framework for cultural organizations, he proposes protocols that preserve diversity by naming what is lost, keeping source names, and leaving room for noise rather than optimizing transmission.
Nicolás Madoery
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