The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols
Metadata
Highlights
- A protocol is a relatively simple and codified set of behaviors that, when adopted by a sufficient number of participants (human and/or artificial) in a situation, reliably leads to good-enough outcomes for all. (View Highlight)
- Surprisingly often, protocols herd collective problem-solving behaviors away from tragedies of commons into regimes of serendipity. As they evolve, good protocols tend to rise to the standard articulated by Milton Friedman:[1] they “make it profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.” Rather than relying on exceptional levels of virtue or intelligence, protocols bring workable solutions within the reach of individuals with ordinary, fallible levels of those qualities, while also containing the effects of extraordinary levels of vice or stupidity. (View Highlight)
- Such formalization of key insights, with or without technological enablement, is often at the heart of protocols that are “good” both in the sense of being desirable to participants, and being adaptive in their evolutionary environments. (View Highlight)
- Good protocols, in short, are the embodiments of A. N. Whitehead’s famous assertion that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” Not only do good protocols deliver civilizational advances, they do so in sustainable ways. “Stability without stagnation” (a guiding principle of the Rust programming language[3]) is the condition good protocols aspire to, and surprisingly often, manage to achieve and sustain for long enough to produce and consolidate significant civilizational advances. (View Highlight)
- The title of this essay is inspired by that of Eugene Wigner’s classic 1960 article, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.[4] The article established not just a resonant headline template that has inspired many snowclones,[5] but established a heuristic for identifying engines of serendipity: unreasonable performance relative to naive expectations. (View Highlight)
- As a result, despite the ritual moaning that is invariably part of the cultures surrounding established protocols, they inspire just enough voluntary commitment and participation to overcome the centripetal forces of defection and exit, and establish a locus of continuity and history. Good protocols tend to form persistent Schelling points in spaces of problems worth solving, around solutions good enough to live with – for a while. And surprisingly often, they manage to induce more complex patterns of voluntary commitment and participation than are achieved by competing systems of centralized coordination. (View Highlight)
- In our discussions, we explored many questions that a satisfying account must aim to answer. We list a few of the more fertile ones below:
• 1.
What is the structural relationship between small-p protocols, in the sense of specific atomic behaviors like handshakes, and big-P protocols in the sense of entire behavior complexes, such as the one governing diplomatic relations among countries?
• 2.
What is the relationship between protocols and agency? Do protocols assume or require a set of participating agents with autonomy or free-will?
• 3.
How do protocols mutate, and what are the limits on the mutability of a protocol beyond which it begins to lose coherence, identity, and utility?
• 4.
Protocols often mediate evolving relationships, especially ones with a natural adversarial element and endemic potential for conflict. These relationships often involve agents with long-term memories, creating an evolving historical context the protocol must handle. How do protocols accomplish such complex mediation?
• 5.
Protocols often serve as boundaries between related spaces, separating regimes of behavior via soft or hard rules of engagement. What is the nature of such boundaries? (View Highlight)
- In our conversations, we noted several preliminary ideas:
• 1.
Protocols are richer and more dynamic than typical social conventions and industry standards, and exhibit some evolutionary tendencies driven by an internal logic.
• 2.
APIs embody part of the design of protocols, but do not define them.
• 3.
Unlike stacks and platforms, protocols tend to define and regulate flows of codified behaviors rather than stocks of technological artifacts. (View Highlight)
- This characteristic yin-yang feature of successful protocols is at the root of their unreasonable sufficiency. Good protocols seem to strike a robust balance between ensuring order at some loci, and inducing serendipitous creative chaos at adjacent loci. As a result, within their sphere of influence, they create conditions of exceptional serendipity, or at least significantly reduced malevolence, as in the example of public health protocols. (View Highlight)
- While real protocols often do not meet utopian standards of decentralization, democracy, equality, or justice, surprisingly often, they do well enough that they enjoy sufficient legitimacy to continue existing politically. Voluntary participation, even if with grudgingly given consent, is preferred by enough potential participants that they are sustainably politically viable. (View Highlight)
- In computer-mediated protocols, this normative tendency is often explicitly articulated as an explicit value. For example, The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) operates by the principle,[14] “We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” (View Highlight)
- Historically, however, successful protocols have bootstrapped powerful literacies around themselves, and educational mechanisms to sustain them. They are sufficiently learnable to sustain their cultures. Even without formal teaching institutions (they need not be sufficiently teachable), they allow for learning to occur. Perhaps most importantly, the learning cultures around protocols can be partly or wholly permissionless, allowing them to accumulate learning outside of traditional teaching institutions, and beyond the supervision of authority figures like teachers and certifying authorities. Good protocols are not just sufficiently learnable, they are sufficiently hackable to do without formal educational institutions, especially early in their histories. (View Highlight)
- A further particular feature of modern technologies making protocols sufficiently learnable through kits is the strong ethos of interchangeable parts, interoperable systems, and composability. A large fraction of the substance of modern protocols is devoted to these aspects of the underlying technology.
While kit cultures are harder to create in digital media, “software development kits” are a familiar construct in the emergence of new software technologies. (View Highlight)
- Key Question: What makes for a strong culture of literacy around a protocol, and how can one be created around a new protocol? (View Highlight)
- Good protocols offer problem-solving contexts that resist the anomie of both oppressively coercive and bureaucratic order on the one hand, and anarchic bleakness on the other. As a side-effect, they appear to serve as engines of meaning-making. This side effect can be so valuable, the primary functions of protocols are sometimes even abandoned, while the meaning-making functions are preserved.[18]
It is possible to be too serious, as high-modernist bureaucracies often are, and too playful, as overwrought “gamified” corporate platforms, suffused with artificial cheer and contrived affects, often are.
Good protocols, arguably, are sufficiently ludic to serve as engines of meaning-making beyond their nominal functions, while also fulfilling their nominal functions (View Highlight)
- What infirmities, fragilities and vulnerabilities naturally and inevitably emerge in a protocol with age? If a protocol is not killed by an environmental threat, what kinds of death-by-aging are possible? What determines the rate of obsolescence of a protocol relative to the problems it addresses? What determines whether a given protocol ages gracefully, eventually yielding to a worthy successor via a smooth transition, or collapses in a crisis, leading to a costly and painful transition to a successor? (View Highlight)
- Economic factors are also driving the interest in protocols. The decline of the managerial class, and its gradual replacement by protocols comprising a hodge-podge of SaaS tools for businesses, is lending the entire economy an increasingly protocol-ish flavor. The rise of the gig economy, and the emergence of the “API” as a boundary condition for the labor market, “sharing economy,” and “creator economy,” all serve as tailwinds for the development of the protocol economy. (View Highlight)
- Subtle cultural factors appear to be at work too. As more people become “terminally online,” participating in cultural production mediated by subcultural social graphs governed by subtle social signaling and shibboleths, general levels of protocol literacy are on the rise. Highly legible status markers, such as suits and educational credentials, associated with industrial institutions, are increasingly being replaced by a mix of illegible markers, such as knowledge of memes and shibboleths gating entry into desirable subcultures, and post-industrial protocol-based formal mechanisms, such as blockchain-based identity systems. (View Highlight)
title: “The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols”
author: “gitbook.io”
url: ”https://venkatesh-rao.gitbook.io/summer-of-protocols/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols
Metadata
Highlights
- A protocol is a relatively simple and codified set of behaviors that, when adopted by a sufficient number of participants (human and/or artificial) in a situation, reliably leads to good-enough outcomes for all. (View Highlight)
- Surprisingly often, protocols herd collective problem-solving behaviors away from tragedies of commons into regimes of serendipity. As they evolve, good protocols tend to rise to the standard articulated by Milton Friedman:[1] they “make it profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.” Rather than relying on exceptional levels of virtue or intelligence, protocols bring workable solutions within the reach of individuals with ordinary, fallible levels of those qualities, while also containing the effects of extraordinary levels of vice or stupidity. (View Highlight)
- Such formalization of key insights, with or without technological enablement, is often at the heart of protocols that are “good” both in the sense of being desirable to participants, and being adaptive in their evolutionary environments. (View Highlight)
- Good protocols, in short, are the embodiments of A. N. Whitehead’s famous assertion that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” Not only do good protocols deliver civilizational advances, they do so in sustainable ways. “Stability without stagnation” (a guiding principle of the Rust programming language[3]) is the condition good protocols aspire to, and surprisingly often, manage to achieve and sustain for long enough to produce and consolidate significant civilizational advances. (View Highlight)
- The title of this essay is inspired by that of Eugene Wigner’s classic 1960 article, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.[4] The article established not just a resonant headline template that has inspired many snowclones,[5] but established a heuristic for identifying engines of serendipity: unreasonable performance relative to naive expectations. (View Highlight)
- As a result, despite the ritual moaning that is invariably part of the cultures surrounding established protocols, they inspire just enough voluntary commitment and participation to overcome the centripetal forces of defection and exit, and establish a locus of continuity and history. Good protocols tend to form persistent Schelling points in spaces of problems worth solving, around solutions good enough to live with – for a while. And surprisingly often, they manage to induce more complex patterns of voluntary commitment and participation than are achieved by competing systems of centralized coordination. (View Highlight)
- In our discussions, we explored many questions that a satisfying account must aim to answer. We list a few of the more fertile ones below:
• 1.
What is the structural relationship between small-p protocols, in the sense of specific atomic behaviors like handshakes, and big-P protocols in the sense of entire behavior complexes, such as the one governing diplomatic relations among countries?
• 2.
What is the relationship between protocols and agency? Do protocols assume or require a set of participating agents with autonomy or free-will?
• 3.
How do protocols mutate, and what are the limits on the mutability of a protocol beyond which it begins to lose coherence, identity, and utility?
• 4.
Protocols often mediate evolving relationships, especially ones with a natural adversarial element and endemic potential for conflict. These relationships often involve agents with long-term memories, creating an evolving historical context the protocol must handle. How do protocols accomplish such complex mediation?
• 5.
Protocols often serve as boundaries between related spaces, separating regimes of behavior via soft or hard rules of engagement. What is the nature of such boundaries? (View Highlight)
- In our conversations, we noted several preliminary ideas:
• 1.
Protocols are richer and more dynamic than typical social conventions and industry standards, and exhibit some evolutionary tendencies driven by an internal logic.
• 2.
APIs embody part of the design of protocols, but do not define them.
• 3.
Unlike stacks and platforms, protocols tend to define and regulate flows of codified behaviors rather than stocks of technological artifacts. (View Highlight)
- This characteristic yin-yang feature of successful protocols is at the root of their unreasonable sufficiency. Good protocols seem to strike a robust balance between ensuring order at some loci, and inducing serendipitous creative chaos at adjacent loci. As a result, within their sphere of influence, they create conditions of exceptional serendipity, or at least significantly reduced malevolence, as in the example of public health protocols. (View Highlight)
- While real protocols often do not meet utopian standards of decentralization, democracy, equality, or justice, surprisingly often, they do well enough that they enjoy sufficient legitimacy to continue existing politically. Voluntary participation, even if with grudgingly given consent, is preferred by enough potential participants that they are sustainably politically viable. (View Highlight)
- In computer-mediated protocols, this normative tendency is often explicitly articulated as an explicit value. For example, The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) operates by the principle,[14] “We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.” (View Highlight)
- Historically, however, successful protocols have bootstrapped powerful literacies around themselves, and educational mechanisms to sustain them. They are sufficiently learnable to sustain their cultures. Even without formal teaching institutions (they need not be sufficiently teachable), they allow for learning to occur. Perhaps most importantly, the learning cultures around protocols can be partly or wholly permissionless, allowing them to accumulate learning outside of traditional teaching institutions, and beyond the supervision of authority figures like teachers and certifying authorities. Good protocols are not just sufficiently learnable, they are sufficiently hackable to do without formal educational institutions, especially early in their histories. (View Highlight)
- A further particular feature of modern technologies making protocols sufficiently learnable through kits is the strong ethos of interchangeable parts, interoperable systems, and composability. A large fraction of the substance of modern protocols is devoted to these aspects of the underlying technology.
While kit cultures are harder to create in digital media, “software development kits” are a familiar construct in the emergence of new software technologies. (View Highlight)
- Key Question: What makes for a strong culture of literacy around a protocol, and how can one be created around a new protocol? (View Highlight)
- Good protocols offer problem-solving contexts that resist the anomie of both oppressively coercive and bureaucratic order on the one hand, and anarchic bleakness on the other. As a side-effect, they appear to serve as engines of meaning-making. This side effect can be so valuable, the primary functions of protocols are sometimes even abandoned, while the meaning-making functions are preserved.[18]
It is possible to be too serious, as high-modernist bureaucracies often are, and too playful, as overwrought “gamified” corporate platforms, suffused with artificial cheer and contrived affects, often are.
Good protocols, arguably, are sufficiently ludic to serve as engines of meaning-making beyond their nominal functions, while also fulfilling their nominal functions (View Highlight)
- What infirmities, fragilities and vulnerabilities naturally and inevitably emerge in a protocol with age? If a protocol is not killed by an environmental threat, what kinds of death-by-aging are possible? What determines the rate of obsolescence of a protocol relative to the problems it addresses? What determines whether a given protocol ages gracefully, eventually yielding to a worthy successor via a smooth transition, or collapses in a crisis, leading to a costly and painful transition to a successor? (View Highlight)
- Economic factors are also driving the interest in protocols. The decline of the managerial class, and its gradual replacement by protocols comprising a hodge-podge of SaaS tools for businesses, is lending the entire economy an increasingly protocol-ish flavor. The rise of the gig economy, and the emergence of the “API” as a boundary condition for the labor market, “sharing economy,” and “creator economy,” all serve as tailwinds for the development of the protocol economy. (View Highlight)
- Subtle cultural factors appear to be at work too. As more people become “terminally online,” participating in cultural production mediated by subcultural social graphs governed by subtle social signaling and shibboleths, general levels of protocol literacy are on the rise. Highly legible status markers, such as suits and educational credentials, associated with industrial institutions, are increasingly being replaced by a mix of illegible markers, such as knowledge of memes and shibboleths gating entry into desirable subcultures, and post-industrial protocol-based formal mechanisms, such as blockchain-based identity systems. (View Highlight)