Virtues for a Protocol Society

TalkNathan SchneiderSeptember 25, 2026

Nathan Schneider presents preliminary research, drawn from a forthcoming book, that treats protocols as a political order requiring its own set of civic virtues, analyzing text from 'The Protocol Reader' and 'For Protocols' (a mix of LLM-assisted and manual coding of 73 candidate terms) to find that adaptability, tension management, accessibility, temporal awareness, and design emerge as the most frequent and central virtues. He argues protocol societies uniquely demand tolerance for tension and co-design participation (rather than top-down implementation), and closes by questioning how such virtues get inculcated—pointing to practices like protocol fiction, protocol watching, and symposium pedagogy itself as mechanisms, while cautioning against uncritically embedding incentive-alignment as a default virtue.

Topics

adaptability-and-tension-management formal-vs-vernacular-protocols governance plurality-as-a-protocol-specific-virtue protocol-society-virtues protocols research symposium-2026 virtue-pedagogy-protocol-fictionwatching

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