In this editorial issue, Protocolized introduces Tongzhou Yu's protocol fiction story about a couple whose relationship is mediated by communication protocols, exploring what domesticity feels like when conflict resolution systems optimize away human friction. The opening depicts a mundane argument over soy sauce that escalates into questions about whether perfectly coordinated communication actually enhances or diminishes intimate partnership.
The Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group convened to explore how protocol fiction functions as a tool for observing how rules, standards, and institutions shape experience and constrain narrative possibilities. Rather than focusing on individual characters, the group examined stories that distribute agency across environments, procedures, and interfaces to make visible the background logic of systems.
Sachin Benny
The Protocol Fiction Special Interest Group explores what protocol fiction is as a genre, moving beyond the tautological definition of science fiction focused on protocols to foundational concepts like Chiang's Law, which positions protocol fiction in the science fiction camp where 'strange rules' (protocols) serve as world-shaping technologies. The group examines genre from multiple angles including reader-writer contracts, discourse modes, and commercial publishing categories.
Spencer Nitkey
A meditation on a post-industrial city hollowed out by economic decline, where the replacement of manufacturing with speculative digital work leaves residents producing 'vapor' in innovation quarters while the physical infrastructure of past productivity becomes merely aesthetic monuments. The piece explores the psychological toll of living in a place stripped of momentum and purpose, where economic abstraction has replaced tangible material production.
Sachin Benny