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The Headless Empire

FictionSachin Benny
researcherpractitioner
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In part three of Sachin Benny's serialized world-building project, a secretive corporation operates beyond traditional legal jurisdiction through a transcontinental rail line, with protagonist Felix Lim observing his CEO's unusual behavior while navigating the sophisticated protocols that govern movement across multiple state borders. The narrative explores how compliance infrastructure and state surveillance become normalized within a self-contained mobile space that exists in jurisdictional limbo.

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fictionprotocol-watchingprotocols

Related resources

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.

Samuel Chua

Talk

Don't Cross the Lines: Mazes as Minimal Protocols

Daniel Schmidt argues that mazes are a minimal formal instantiation of protocols, not just a metaphor, using his own maze-drawing history and games to illustrate concepts like hard vs. soft protocols (physical walls vs. crossable paper lines), scale-entangled vs. scale-lined navigation, and stigmergic memory. He demonstrates an ant colony pheromone simulation, a multiplayer infinite maze with shareable 'pebble' markers, a maze-design platform separating protocol-author from protocol-navigator with heatmaps of friction points, and an art-gallery maze as medium. Venkatesh Rao joins to explain his 'clockless clock' maze, a topological map of thought-space (rat/goat/crow vertices) designed by Schmidt to represent arrested development and spiraling toward nirvana.

Daniel Schmidt, Venkatesh Rao

Game

Protocol Cards by Waqar

Protocol Cards is a card-based game designed by Waqar and Mashal that uses archetypes like Outsider, Heretic, Sage, and Maintainer to explore protocol dynamics and social roles. The game serves as a playable framework for understanding how different character types interact within protocol-based systems.

Summer of Protocols