Welcome to the beginning of my inquiry into the nature of contemporary societal technology. Alongside essays like this, I’ll publish investigations into various protocols—be they of the modern, technical kind, or architectural and biological kinds—in the interest of developing a rigorous pattern language with which to reinforce and ground my explorations.

Protocols have served as the tapestry for social coordination since language enabled the first societies. Although social technology seems like a fairly recent invention, through-lines from the earliest formations of society to modern social structures imply a set of sacrosanct principles necessary for human coordination in any form. Once, that technology was language, now it is becoming digital networks. We are in a unique moment where these innovations have transcended our prior understanding of socio-technical relations, and technologists now seek ways to reintegrate these tools into a praxis for future human coordination. Like the scientists and theorists who worked to understand the nature of social organisation until now, we need a systematic and analytical framework for understanding how these new affordances might influence our relations of power, space, belief, and identity. Here, I aim to find the irreducible construction of social technology, understand why networked technologies have largely failed to conform, and how recent advancements aim to bridge the gap.

The Beginning and End of History

In modern times, the word “protocol” evokes thoughts of the Internet, blockchains, and perhaps governance, yet necessarily, protocols have existed as long as humans could organise. Though anthropologists remain uncertain, this is likely to be between 50,000 to 200,000 years ago with the development of language—and the modern Homo sapien. For the first time, humans could share complex information about resources, threats, and opportunities. Knowledge of hunting strategies, water sources, and survival techniques could accumulate and disseminate throughout tribes and across generations. Language even enabled human identity itself to completely transform with the capacity to tell stories, establish culture, and more precisely delineate social conventions. In effect, “these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects.”¹ Joseph Reagle, while a research engineer for W3C, defined “social protocol” to mean technologies that “enable individuals and communities to express social capabilities,” including the “tools necessary for creating rich content, managing trust relationships… and enabling agent assisted decision making.”² Language was the first social protocol.

Proto-language, which began to develop some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, specifies the absolute minimum required for human coordination. It consisted of simple naming for objects, people, and places; basic references to past, present, and future; primitive social hierarchies based on verbal designations; and the formal designation of territories. As if the automaton for society, these four qualities were enough to systematically reference the material world, the objects in it, how they evolve, and how they relate. These are the fundamental principles for describing our ontology. With them, humans could band together into societies of fifteen to thirty individuals, each with specialised roles. Empowered with a new capacity for reference over immediacy, humans could communicate culture and inference.³

Proto-Coordination

• Simple and direct designations for physical objects, people, and locations
• Emphasis on the present moment with simple references to past events of collective importance, and recognition of cyclical patterns (e.g., seasons)
• Hierarchy established through vocal acknowledgement of leader and specialised roles assigned to each person
• Territory delineated via overt boundary marking and resource claiming

The full breadth of language emerged between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, and brought with it dramatic upheavals to human coordination. Complex familial relationships could be formed and maintained through expressions of love and kinship; centralised planning enabled multi-staged, coordinated projects; cultural norms emerged from the ability to describe behaviour; and referential language enabled abstract thinking and conceptualisation.⁴ These new abilities allowed humans to expand their tribes into larger, formal structures of 100 to 150 people—aligned with Dunbar’s number. Thus, not far from the most primitive form of social coordination, we find the theoretical limit of a group in which each person can maintain stable social relationships with each other.

Assyrian and Sumerian cuneiform scripts are among the earliest known recorded language.

Of course, language relentlessly evolved, developing ever more sophisticated ways of referencing time, places, objects, and relationships, yet the fundamental flywheels hardly changed. Society saw greater division of labour, dialogue over violence for conflict resolution, expansive and negotiated trade networks, and the elevation of shared cultural experiences into ritual and enshrined belief systems. Each of these advances were largely made possible by the increasing ability to construct and reference abstract ideals, track coordinated events across long periods of time, integrate disparate groups under shared cultural motifs, and efficiently track and exploit geographical space—direct extensions of our proto-coordination model.

Accelerating to 1992, the Cold War had just ended, the Soviet Union had dissolved, and Western economic and cultural hegemony was disseminating across the globe. The prehistoric flywheels of vertical hierarchical integration, territorial delineation, and expansion of cultural norms were still going, but something seemed amiss. The hierarchy, tested by the Soviet project, was monolithically combatted by the West. Through the latter’s success, the expected advancement of history was nullified. Western soft power had definitively solidified itself as the arbiter of international affairs. Similarly, efforts of territorial expansion initiated by either the Western liberals or the religious fundamentalists were suspended by proxy wars. Most of the world was realigning toward Western cultural norms and globalisation was affecting all corners of socio-political relations. It appeared that at last, there were few places left to go. The world was well acquainted with the most evolved social technology yet—liberal democracy.

The culmination of these events led American political scientist Francis Fukuyama to proclaim this was “not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”⁵ Fukuyama’s reasoning, largely inspired by Hegel and Marx’s own definitions of the “end of history,” is that human history is characterised by “the struggle for universal recognition” and that whatever system provides the maximal recognition will satisfy that desire.⁶ As Western soft power reached its limits, it was evident that the evolution of human relations to each other—and to themselves—was tapering off. It seemed, for a moment, that humanity’s latent desire to be seen had been met.

Clyfford Still’s PH-960, a major artistic figure in defining American culture during war time.

Of course, Fukuyama’s assessment is sorely deflated with the hindsight of the twenty-first century, yet the timing of his proclamation and its subsequent invalidation reveals a fundamental inflection in our understanding of socio-technical relations. When Fukuyama wrote The End of History in 1992, the prevailing understanding oriented around the belief in institutions as the central mediators of social relations, the nation-state framework as the primary unit of social organisation and power, and the advancement of technology as one of many forcing functions for optimising them. Reflecting on the general progression of history up to this point, it is a fair assessment. Language enabled the accumulation of knowledge and coordination necessary to bootstrap the next innovation, which in turn fuelled the next and so on. Centralised planning evolved with the growth of each community from tribe leader to village council, all the way to feudal systems, monarchies, and democracies. Geographic determinism also remained fairly unchallenged. Physical location and national boundaries dictated, to a large extent, the socio-political climate of any state. With this model, it comes as no surprise that globalised Western hegemony and slowing technological innovation foretold the conclusion of a process that until then had been the main driver of human development. The fault in this assessment is its neglect of a most consequential innovation—proliferated mass media and communication networks.

By allowing individuals greater freedom to connect and transmit information without central mediators, digital technologies enabled new forms of organisation and activism outside traditional liberal democratic frameworks. The Arab Spring protests in late 2010, for instance, demonstrate the efficacy of early social networks in facilitating the decentralised mobilisation of activists necessary for subverting the institutional surveillance tactics in place at the time. These networks opened new information channels that supported the memeification of ideology. The slogan “ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām” (الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام) meaning “the people want to topple the regime,” was quickly amplified through social networks despite centralised efforts to suppress it.⁷ More than a unified slogan for regime change, some researchers believe it represents a shift from “negative nationalism,” a rejection of foreign rule, to “positive nationalism,” in which the people view themselves as the source of legitimacy. The ability for protesters to coalesce behind their minor ideology and ignite geopolitical struggle gave them a greater sense of agency and effectively reversed how political authority was conceptualised in the region.⁸ While these communication channels led to great upheaval, lasting structural change was more elusive.

Networked technologies do not reinforce liberal democratic values and, in fact, are often antithetical. Rather, they opened spaces for previously unorganised latent ideologies to find each other and manifest into competing visions for reality. In the fallout of the Arab Spring protests, Egypt briefly flirted with democracy before falling into authoritarian rule. Libya collapsed into civil war. Syria entered prolonged conflict. Far from reinforcing Western liberalism, digital networks reduced the cost of organising and increased the capacity for minority voices to congeal other and amplify their reach. The immediacy, relatively low barrier to entry, and sensationalism of social networks make digital activism highly energetic and volatile, though difficult to find lasting material grounding. While social media has steadily increased politicised discourse online, real world organising such as unionisation has drastically fallen, a phenomenon well-tracked by Anton Jäger’s notion of hyperpolitics⁹ Unfortunately for Fukuyama, the unified ideological stability of liberal democracy was short-lived.

Toward a New Model

Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist, recognised the profound consequences of large-scale communication on our established model of social coordination. In the interest of building a more attuned understanding of contemporary social technology, he developed a new framework for examining socio-technical relations. He proposes that “networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social organisation has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure.”¹⁰ Networks now supersede hierarchical institutions and our world has become a “space of flows” over a “space of places”. Identity is formed through networks rather than institutions and that technology is inherently transformative, not just a tool. These principles have come to define Castells’ theory of the network society.

Castells’ model of the space of places and space of flows.

The shift from our well-established theory of socio-technical relations to a new one of network societies profoundly reorients how we understand the evolution of social coordination. Under our traditional framework, social coordination evolved linearly from kinship-based tribal structures to more complex but still hierarchical state formations, and finally to liberal democratic institutions. Our fundamental principles of relationships, norms, and abstractions were simply helped along through advances in technology. We progressed through a predictable dialectic of innovation that transcended the framework, and its subsequent consolidation back into it. Castells refutes this with a more complex evolutionary pattern. Instead of moving toward a fixed point through a progressive historical dialectic, he proposes a more non-teleological development in which coordination systems constantly reconfigure based on available technologies and social needs. He argues history repeatedly tried to produce networked organisations through the likes of trade networks and religious communities, yet they were hindered by the limitations of communications technologies.

Castells’ theory of network societies suggests that the consequences of recent innovations in social technologies actually aren’t entirely novel, but have instead amplified latent coordination potentials. The late 1980s and early 1990s was a significant inflection point because it was the first time where communication technologies could outpace centralised planning in the coordination of human beings. From this viewpoint, human coordination did not evolve linearly with the flywheels of societal growth, but instead grew rhizomatically with the multiplication of connections and nodes. As mass media and global communication systems connected individuals—not institutions—together, the number of connections increased exponentially and formed assemblages powerful enough to challenge established structures, as we saw during the Arab Spring. This resulted in multiple coexisting systems, effectively multiple worlds of “real virtuality”. These networked flows form assemblages that delineate cyberspace and develop a parallel construction of the world, attached not by geographic space but communication channels and the targeted dissemination of information. This is the first attempt at reintegrating novel social technologies into our ancient protocol for human coordination.

At the time of writing in 1989, Castells’ work was highly abstract and conceptual, though latent coordination systems quickly materialised. Indeed, the networks of which he was concerned were mainly those formed by financial institutions, news agencies, and the relationships formed between multinational corporations. However, with democratised access to the internet, much of the developed world began to understand what it might feel like to live in a networked society. Early decentralised discussion systems such as USENET evolved into the more centralised web forums of the 90s, where humans become “users” with “identities” and “profiles”. By the late 90s, real virtuality was evident on MySpace, where people constructed virtual identities, made friends, created shared vernacular, and developed a code of ethics for online engagement. How quickly the virtual world subsumed our original requirements for society!

Though people gleefully moved to the virtual sphere, some of our original principles failed to translate. Contemporary social networks are largely algorithm-driven with increased emphasis on visual or short-form content. This removes temporality and brings us back to a state of permanent immediacy. The content produced on social networks often lack grounding in some historical evolution. This is how we arrive at pastiche as the aesthetic of postmodernism, as defined by Frederic Jameson. We have also vertically integrated hierarchies, though they are so grotesque so as to remove any semblance of real social relations. Instead of reciprocal friendships, social networks exhibit extreme asymmetric followings in which the vast majority of users unrequitedly follow a select few. This stark contrast blurs the lines between personal communication and broadcast media, inviting para-social relationships and deep-rooted propaganda into the mass psyche. Beyond hierarchical social structures, user data is similarly captured by the totalising platform economy. Few people, let alone creatives, have full control over the information they produce online, having to succumb to rent extraction for the occupation of any digital space. Governments have also come to understand the power of networked culture, quickly developing means of control to subdue the next grassroots political mobilisation. Indeed, the latent desire for networked coordination in society was so propelled by communications technology that it has come to completely supplant any historical framework of human organisation.

Conceptual framework of para-social relationships as primarily engines for capital accretion.

So what do we make of a social technology that eschews temporality? How do we construct belief, culture, and collective understanding without a contextual element that until now has comprised every organisational framework? How might we regain sovereignty and agency in a suffocating Internet landscape? If we truly wish to move beyond vertically-integrated hierarchies and properly realise our latent desires for networked connection, we must find a way to constructively orient our information and culture over these networks. Multiple movements in the 21st century attempt to do just that.

Protocols and Permanence

In late 2013, Vitalik Buterin published the Ethereum whitepaper and with it, an expansive thesis for the future of networked society. While Bitcoin some years prior sought to build a censorship-resistant, decentralised, and sovereign digital currency, Ethereum positioned itself to expand that goal into a vision for the future of the internet and social institutions. Ethereum introduced smart contracts, programs that codify events and actions into immutable state and thereby eliminate the need for mediators, along with a programmable blockchain on which smart contracts could be used to build planetary-scale, deterministic, and composable decentralised applications. Similar to previous instances of communication networks subverting institutional control and amplifying minor voices, the Ethereum project aimed to empower “permisionless innovation”, or the capacity for anyone to build onchain without the limitations of traditional legislation, intermediaries, and politics.

Though Ethereum aims to find new constructions of social coordination—avoiding both totalising hierarchies and the ephemerality of networked culture—the project integrates many principles of traditional models. While networks collapse time into perpetual immediacy, blockchains provide their own structure with “block time”.¹¹ Traditional societies maintained continuity through oral traditions, written records, and institutional memory. Block time recreates the historical continuity that has since eroded post-Internet. Blockchains similarly respond to the ephemerality of digital space by providing an immutable, verifiable ledger to which all data is written. While hierarchies still exist, the vast majority of “law” is delegated to smart contracts, while power is exerted by protocol dynamics and the market logic of tokenomics.

Territorial delineation was crucial for proto-coordination, but digital networked disrupted geographical boundaries while creating deterritorialised flows that subverted traditional sovereignty. Blockchains attempt to reintroduce geographic delineation through cryptography. User-controlled access control and identity mechanisms seek to subdivide resources between individual entities without delegating power to overarching institutions. The source of truth is no longer managerial power, but transparent, participatory cryptographic hardness. In essence, Ethereum seeks to calcify the “virtual real” into a realpolitik of social coordination.

Notably, the movement has produced the concepts of DAOs and quadratic funding. A DAO, or decentralised autonomous organisation, is an entity largely managed by smart contracts and operated over a blockchain. They generally seek to make organisations more transparent, participatory, and aligned with stakeholder interests. For instance, Nouns DAO puts a pixelated avatar up for auction once a day, the proceeds of which are added to the DAO’s pool and used to fund promising projects. Auction winners buy the Noun itself, but also a vote in Nouns DAO governance. This way, those who contribute funds to the pool have a say in how it is delegated.¹² Gitcoin, a quadratic funding project, is a similar endeavour to fund meaningful projects. Crypto ecosystems are generally interested in growing their communities and influence over the technical landscape, so they designate a certain amount of money to go to grants funding. They then partner with Gitcoin to track contributions to their projects. Over time, the community assesses the relative impact of contributions and assigns the grant money proportionately. This model aims to incentivise meaningful contributions to a community and optimise for work that is likely to have the most meaningful impact to society in retrospect.¹³

Many experiments in decentralised governance are encoded with extreme techno-determinist and libertarian ethics. Peter Thiel-backed network state, Praxis, champions his brand of libertarianism and nostalgia for the aesthetics of the Western canon.

While inspiringly transgressive and futurist, the Ethereum project has largely failed to integrate into the broader social fabric. Many people in the community have made it their job to discover why, yet so much of the community is either impervious to or philosophically against integrating into the standard patterns of social organisation that to see actual assimilation would pose existential risk to the shared Ethereum vision. Ethereum does hold great promise for specific applications of capital allocation and social alignment, yet its raison d’être as a formalising layer for the more ephemeral networked cultures remains highly speculative. Blockchains, as planetary state machines, have no place for ethics, culture, and dialectic beyond the values which are enshrined in their contracts. Thus, any idea for what the Ethereum project or any other vision might become must arise from some alternative social sphere, one more capable of evolving collective intelligences. This is the intent of the burgeoning movement for decentralised social.

Fuelled by platform consolidation of the Internet and the promise of greater sovereignty, social networks are becoming increasingly protocolised. Bluesky is nearing 30 million users, Threads is testing ActivityPub, and web3 is experimenting with interoperable social graphs via the Lens Protocol and Friend.Tech. Research interests are also growing with projects such as the Summer of Protocols, 0xSalon, Other Internet, Solidarity Infrastructures, and Weird Economies. People are adopting decentralised social in droves in part because of the steady deterioration of platforms, but also because of the appeal for restoring delineated space, a more segmented virtual real. The space of flows is forming channels, restoring a sense of place. If the growth of alternative protocols continues at pace, we will soon choose various protocols as if choosing different rules of engagement, different ways of viewing the Internet. Yet, while history may imply that these new social technologies will contingently supplant the old model, we are not guaranteed a benevolent system.

Trevor Paglen, A Man (Corpus: The Humans) Adversarially Evolved Hallucination, 2017

Toward New Collectives

Through the invention of networked technologies, we have completely transgressed the traditional rules for societal engagement. As content becomes more ephemeral and unrooted from historical dialectics, the micropolitics of each engagement grow. The rising popularity of protocolised networks suggest we are at a turning point where networked culture is ossifying into formalised structures.

The Ethereum ecosystem largely serves as a major initiative to reintegrate the virtual and physical realms of social coordination. Traditional social technologies evolved within physical constraints and embodied practices. Digital networks created a virtual Other largely disconnected from physical reality and its constraints. Blockchain protocols use economic incentives, governance mechanisms, and access to real-world resources as an attempt to reconcile this gap, finding a synthesis between the contradiction of the spaces of flows and places.

However, protocol developers and the blockchain community at large have already demonstrated a consistent affinity for recklessness, exploitation, and deception. If we wish to systematise the correct models, we must become particularly adept as undestanding how elements such as identity management, data storage, access permissioning, and mediation influence the ways power, identity, belief, and progress manifest. As such, we must develop a precise, socio-technically conscious language for relating the architectures and design of these protocols with their impacts on the social organisations above them.

While studies of decentralisation and networked culture tend to be highly theoretical, I aim to develop a technical pattern language for describing the architectures of protocols up and down the ladder of abstraction in the interest of finding a union between theory and technology that might better lead us to the future of social organisation, and understand how the architecture of the virtual real affects the societies that live within it.