My highlights:
[Protocols’] purpose has always been to simplify coordination and communication. With enough time, protocols converge upon conformity. They do not liberate us, but rather seek to control us completely.
[They demand] relinquishing our decision-making power to a formless entity. Escape is not as “easy” as switching platforms.
Because they make our lives simpler, it is always tempting to outsource more decisions to protocol. When left unchecked, protocols threaten to subsume human agency.
The social protocols that govern our behavior are becoming increasingly implicit, or embedded into our consciousness, and therefore harder to detect or resist.
Definition of protocols: procedural systems of social control that simplify communication between actors. They:
- Reduce the number of decisions that need to be made. Reason is outsourced to the protocol.
- Gain legitimacy from participation. Protocols persist because they have persisted. The more we use them, the stronger they get. We then find ways to justify their legitimacy because we participate in them.
- Resist central management. It becomes increasingly difficult to influence.
- Accomplish a function, but not a purpose. As they mature it becomes increasingly difficult to identify an agenda that derives their persistence.
Protocols derive their initial authority from external mechanisms, but as they become more entrenched, are unconsciously internalized by the self. Participants believe that following the protocol is a form of self-expression, and the protocol’s legitimacy becomes indistinguishable from their own beliefs.
Because protocols abstract away complexity, they’re most effective when we don’t think about them. Explicit protocols frequently arise in connection with social institutions. Implicit protocols are fully internalized by participants who are unaware that they are operating by protocol. There is no visible authority. The protocolization of identity represents an internalized drive to conform.
A growing and widespread obsession with organizing information reflected an internalized bureaucratic mindset which led to the rise of protocolized thinking. Protocolization 2.0 is defined not by the protocolization of data, but of ideas.
The prevalence of freely available ideas, for most people, cheapens the value of original thinking. Instead of having to reason about our own beliefs, we can simply borrow other’s ideas and share them as our own, aided by recommender systems that automate curation.
We don’t perceive ourselves as living in a filtered world; instead, each of us are in the truest and most important world. Because these ideas are so personally cherished, yet spread so quickly, they feel urgent.
While natural panics, especially in the realm of technology, are nothing new, a difference in recent years is how much these fears have been legitimized and codified into industries. Today’s crisis mindset is paradoxically stable. Working dutifully towards the prevention of a major crisis – real or imagined – is seen as a laudable choice. Multiple crises coexist alongside one another. The Protocolization 2.0 crisis mindset is a form of self-expression.
By bringing awareness to its existence and to the extent to which it governs our lives, we might consider how to use this way of thinking to accomplish big social goals of our own choosing, rather than those determined by passive participation.
Subverting protocols is difficult without exiting the network the protocol belongs to. If one remains within the network, explicit resistance to protocols tends to be ineffective, because there is no clear authority to overthrow.
Tricksters can help participants get “unstuck” from a protocol. As outside observer, tricksters bring awareness to protocols.
Protocol subversion looks more commonly like tai chi.
Memes are cultural information the mind perceives, coupled with an urge to replicate them. Vibes are cultural “exformation” the body receives, coupled with a choice to experience them. Vibes govern our public behavior, but participants feel they are the ones curating and discerning culture, rather than passively consuming or spreading it.
Being trapped in protocols dictated by a functional-yet-suboptimal system feels eerily calm, yet unsatisfying. Everything works, sort of, but participants feel a curious lack of fulfillment.