A short conversation between 50% of the Protocolized editors about the journey so far, what we’ve learned, past contests, and how to get involved in voting and BOUNTY HUNTING.
Learn about our most recent contest and join the Discord to cast your vote on the shortlisted stories.
Raw Transcript
Okay, connecting. And subscribers get a push notification in the app. There we go. And we are live with protocolized and editors talking about memeing a new genre. So I think people will start to trickle in here. Uh, we've got one live. I think we'll get more soon. Last time, if I recall correctly, we had like 150 people.
So. Oh, wow. Okay.
Should be a, let's see how many people are still interested in protocol fiction. Yeah.
It's, uh, yeah, I'm excited to talk about it. And yeah, maybe we can just start. What was a runner up before we spoil it with your top two? Did you ever runner up for your third favorite story that we've published so far?
Oh, uh, Yeah, so that was actually the winner, Noise Ordnance, which I thought was the best story overall. But thematically, I liked the second and third ones better. I think I ended up picking number two and three for my picks here, yes.
Yeah, Noise Ordnance was good. I saw that thing that you tweeted that was like, this is a dystopia if I was in charge.
Yeah. Yeah, so... I guess the contest was kind of interesting. I think we came up with a really good prompt. So terminological twists, I think, got people thinking about words and phrases that usually recede into the background. So I think that's... common to both my two favorite stories from the contest, which are fine print and DHCP, right?
So fine print, I mean, it's literally become a meme that you'd never read terms of service and you just click access and then you get sucked into like ever more ridiculous entanglements with infrastructure. So using that protocols term, it's like a the idea of a Kafka protocol comes with a terms of service that you accept without thinking.
So FinePrint, I think, was a really good story that kind of went nuts with that premise a little bit. And the other one was DHCP. So I think that's dynamic host...
configuration protocol.
So for those who don't know, DHCP is the protocol that your computer uses when it assigns on to Wi-Fi connection. So what it does is it kind of handshakes with the router and the rest of the internet and gets itself assigned an IP address. And this is usually dynamic, so you don't get to keep the IP address.
Only really important computers get to keep your IP address. And it's very much in the background. You don't think about it unless you're like a technologist. You never actually think about that handshaking process. But the interesting thing about DHCP is it relates to, I think, one of the big conversations on internet technology in the last decade,
which is the shift from IPv4 to IPv6. So for those of you who don't know, this is going from a smaller address space where there are not that many numbers available and the numbers were running out to IPv6 was now there's like plenty of IP addresses and you can basically have like billions of devices around.
So we solved the addressing problem. And I saw a comment on Twitter about this story that, hey, this is an unrealistic premise because scarce address space is not actually a thing. And it got solved in this particular case. But I think that comment is interesting, but kind of misses the point.
So for those who haven't read the story, I recommend reading it DHCP. We'll share all the links after the chat. But the premise is a future where you kind of have like brain interfaces and you have addresses for parts of your brain and so forth. And the same address scarcity dynamic applies.
But the reason I think it's still relevant is we seem to keep running into address-based scarcity issues with every new technology. Sometimes it's like, you know, branded namespaces, like domain names now are no longer a hot thing. But yeah, when I got started on the internet, everybody wanted a .com address. At some point,
that sort of became uncool. And lately when people buy domain names, they usually buy like weird top level domains and stuff. So that represents kind of like mainstream culture fragmenting into smaller TLDs. But address space scarcity never quite goes away and I can kind of see that between a
mix of like technical constraints and just humans loving scarce names there is always going to be an issue of like not enough names and then cultures fragment along address space lines so that was DHCP so yeah those were my two favorite
stories what were your favorite stories so far just a quick comment on DHCP too because I thought that was a really interesting about this shortage and people had to share it in these different identities and the same you actually see this same thing with accounts a
lot of the time like people will just share accounts because you know they're expensive and you get some weird interactions especially with um with like llms which kind of have memory so if you have two different people using it it starts to kind of split into this weird uh schizophrenic mind
yeah that's actually happening with my wife and myself we have very different usage patterns so chan gpt is very confused and at one point i actually tried to train it to recognize us just based on the different topics we talk about um but it still messes up like occasionally it like misinterprets things based on like crossing the
streams so to speak yeah crossing the streams is a good metaphor for and just space or namespace collisions and confusions, right? This might be too old a reference for people who haven't watched the original Ghostbusters, but crossing the streams is when they have these weird plasma cannon guns to take
down ghosts and you're not supposed to cross the streams of the cannons. Bad things happen. So I think they're crossing streams with AI a lot now.
yeah but um back to your question my two favorite stories i'll start with an old one which was actually in issue three which was haven taylor's and that was talking about this like post medicinal well not post medicinal but this world that was after the introduction of zempic and these other like
GLP agonist drugs which really help people like lose weight they suppress appetite so it was this city that people had to go to if they were like ex gamblers ex addicts ex whatever because these drugs also help suppress like these compulsive disorders
So if you're in the city, you had to take the stuff, but it doesn't work for everybody. So there was this insurance market that emerged for people that didn't take to the drugs so that if their clothes would stop to fit, they would also have to go back to the insurance place, which was also the tailors.
And then people would cash in and bet on who would and who wouldn't make it. It's just kind of this strange blend between polymarket, early insurance companies, saline, and then Finally, the introduction of drugs like Ozempic. I've been pushing Satchin to write a sequel to this because there's been this new round of drugs and protocols introduced,
which is a pairing between Ozempic and these new... What is it? myostatin inhibitor drugs. And if you've ever seen an animal with a myostatin gene knockout, they're just like enormous jacked animals that looks like they're on steroids. So now we're having these for people and it's like, it's going to be like not Haven Taylor's,
but like the Arnold, like Olympia competition, bodybuilding city. Um, And then the second one, which I'm a fan of, is the one that we just published, which is necrophoresis, which is talking about the metaverse and kind of what it's like to grieve. And it's very interesting to think about death in that setting.
We actually had an essay from the first Summer of Protocols talking about death and death protocols. When do you know if something's dead? What are the thresholds that we establish? And to think about a world where people are hooked up to machines and meet space and then living their lives digitally is like really fascinating to think about
what death means in that situation. And some people would say that we're not actually that far from that future, like given how good technology is. It's the explicit mission of some companies like Meta to make the Metaverse happen. And if it does, this is definitely one of the traffic jams in the story,
which I won't spoil because we just released it an hour ago. But yeah, definitely go read that, issue 35. I'll go ahead and drop some links here in the chat. And then I believe that we were going to talk about... What was it? Oh yeah, the journey so far. So how's it been?
So we started this and this newsletter's been going on for two years. I started helping write it about a year and a half ago. And at that point, it was just like a newsletter. Updates from the program, research, introductions to researchers, opportunities to get involved. But now it's become also a protocol fiction publishing outlet.
So what's the journey been like so far? Six months in, see this ambitious experiment.
It's been fascinating. I think from the beginning of the program, I had a hankering to somehow model the output on classic science fiction magazines, like astounding. That was purely a personal fetish because I had like, I think, a thing for the, you know, Asimov Heinlein era of golden age science fiction. And I really liked the
meta story of how after World War II, with lots of new complex late industrial technologies coming on board, it almost created a new kind of human, right? So the organization man or the bureaucratic competent man, they were inhabiting new technology infrastructures and living out stories that were very different.
And this magazine was creating the meta-narrative that not only created those stories and storytellers, it also kind of like imagined the world of the future and taught a literacy of how to live in a world with space travel, cold wars, nuclear technology, and so forth.
In a way, it sort of updated the very idea of what it means to be human. And I think it started a process of that science fiction, I think, is the only thing that ever does, which is to challenge the hero's journey understanding of storytelling, right? Like this has been our,
this was our starting sort of true north, which was, which we've called Chiang's Law, which is fantasy is about the special people. So special people, meaning like chosen ones or stories about people that the universe sees as, in a unique individual way, right? The universe recognizes that Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker is some way a special
person and treats that person as an exception to the laws of the universe. It's kind of like not quite a monarchial above-the-law type privilege, but that's for the laws of nature, right? Like emperors and kings are above the law, that's human law, but chosen people in hero's journeys tend to be above natural law,
so they're seen as special. And science fiction is about special rules. And I think we saw the beginnings of this with like classic science fiction. Like often in old Asimovian stories, the hero is not like a cowboy or an outsider maverick who's like attacking or like challenging the system from the outside. It's often like a
seasoned professional inside the system who's like a powerful bureaucrat or somebody who has titles and is within the system. And I think as science fiction evolved, this turned into the core tension. So when we had... like, you know, cyberpunk had the classic hero of, what is it? High tech and low life.
So somebody who was outside the system, but not in the sense of an outlaw who was living under wild rules. So it was not like wilderness versus civilization. It was more like, outside the system, but able to hack it. So very literate in its grammar and capabilities. And I think what we're seeing,
so this is like six months in kind of realization, I think protocol fiction is the next stage of that evolution. And I think in the introduction to the protocol reader, I called it something like... the protocol punk hero, which is a very clumsy phrase, but I think gets at it. So you had organization man,
then you had like the cyberpunk hero, and then maybe cypherpunk hero of the 90s can be in between. But the protocol punk hero is somebody who's not really an outsider or an insider because the protocolized world does not really have an inside or an outside, right? Like if you think of a traditional bureaucracy,
like whether it's ancient China's bureaucracy or modern bureaucracies, It's a contained space. There's a boundary. You need a badge to get in. There are people inside with more authority than you. So there is a distinction between outside and inside, and you go in, right?
I think protocol punk is more a situation of there are these vast systems that are globe-spanning. Everybody is kind of inside them, but they don't really have an inside or an outside, right? Take Google. Google, if something goes wrong with Gmail, it's actually impossible to find a person to talk to and get it fixed because there
is no real inside. You're interfacing with these technological systems and as you get even more decentralized like you know blockchains and stuff ultimately there is no other side right there is no customer service to bitcoin that you can call up and complain about there are experts and hackers who can help you recover
your lost bitcoin or ethereum in some cases but fundamentally there's no insight to protocolized systems and i think protocol heroes are people who learn to navigate these spaces without inside and outside. So the consequence of that, just to kind of finish this longer train of thought, is the hero's journey is often a story about leaving one world,
going to another world, and going through like an adventurous arc, and then returning to the original world, right? What do you do when there are no two worlds? There's only one vast infinite world that's full of protocol systems. There's nowhere to leave from and nowhere to return to. Everywhere you go is part of the same great continuum.
And I think the... challenge is to tell stories like that that still have like dramatic tension and so forth but don't have this hero's journey sense of like leaving a world and returning to it and they don't have this sense of specialness as you are allowed to
cross the boundaries between worlds because you're a special person right that tends to be the premise of a classic hero's journey like you know And Frodo gets picked out to be the ring bearer because he's not like other people in the Shire. He's seen by the universe as capable of bearing the ring.
And therefore, he's allowed to go to the adventure in the other world, which is like Mordor. So that's kind of my thinking now. And I'm thinking in the 20, 25 stories we've published so far. People are, of course, struggling to some extent. Many of our contributors are new to storytelling.
So, of course, they're struggling with acquiring basic storytelling skills. They're also struggling to make sense of just the technologies we're writing stories about. But I think once they're past those hurdles which apply to all kinds of storytelling the hurdles that are unique to protocol fiction is learning to tell these kinds of stories where it's like there's
this vast space of like all sorts of rules and there's no leaving one world and going to another world and coming back it's like you might move from like it's like it's like la la is a good example like people say every neighborhood in la has a
different feel and subculture to it so you go two blocks you're in a different neighborhood a different subculture and It's like that. So yes, there are new rules, but it's not two big universes with like different rules in the two universes. And then you're like an alien in one and a native in another.
You're like a half alien everywhere you go because everywhere there's something slightly different about the rules. So that's, I think, the challenge that we are now at.
Yeah, it's funny. The two things that came to mind immediately when you were talking about that, first of all, to be ambitious here about what we're trying to do, the golden age of sci-fi was Asimov and those guys. And then you had what you might call, you might call it the Gilded Age.
And if I wanted to riff on that, I'd say what we're trying to do is come up with the welded age of science fiction, where you're really blending these two types of stories together, like the great heroes and the great bureaucrats. these things to these worlds that you were talking about remind me of a mobius
strip where it's like it looks like you're going around the back but it's all just one side somehow um yeah i think it's it's a good challenge and you probably have
more insight into so the trench level of how our contributors are dealing with this particular challenge so yeah but what are some patterns you're seeing in all the both the Things we've published and the things we've said no to, what are the patterns you've seen? What are people struggling with?
How are they solving the storytelling problems they're dealing with?
yeah well like you said um it's not an entry-level problem to solve like thinking about protocols as a protagonist in the story or like putting the system as the hero um i think that people are drawn to it because it's challenging but when you're trying to navigate both like traditional prose problems and style and like
coming together with a good story plus this big wrench where it's like the center of the story shouldn't necessarily be a special person it should be the rule set uh it makes it super challenging one thing we've seen is people tend towards describing the world as just a series of like and then and then and then to
riff on the um kind of tip that the south park guys give they're like your story should not be this and then this happened and then this happened because that's boring it's just a series of things that happen it's not a plot And people definitely tend towards that because they're like exploring a sense of rules.
And they're like, this could happen in the world. And this could happen in the world. They don't think, oh, okay, this is the world that's going to come out of these rules. And here's the complication. Here's where the traffic jam happens. People default to just describing it.
And I think that the best stories we publish do focus a lot on the traffic jam. But you have to think about it like... describing the traffic jam from the perspective of a normal person and not a hero when we're very used to writing these stories about heroes and about main
characters i would say the best stories we have so far the person in the center of the story is fungible you could just take them out and replace them with somebody else there's nothing special about them And that's kind of the beauty of protocol fiction is this ego death of an experience to read because you're like, okay,
this isn't a special person. They're like kind of at the mercy of this thing. And if they're doing well, maybe it's because it's a lottery system that there's something strange going on with. But you do have the opportunity to exercise some superpowers, which is that protocol awareness. So if somebody does know the rules of the system,
it's not like they're above it or below it, but or fighting against it directly, we don't see a lot of that. That's another thing. just briefly that people do wrong is they post the system is the enemy or the hero of the story when really it's just like people need to work through the system not
against it and that's what you're trying to describe it's like what's that journey actually like to be in the system simultaneously and aware that you're in the system so you have an external view it's kind of like when you dissociate you're like oh i'm sitting at this table see me in a third person like you're just trying
to tell the story from a weird perspective I mean, nobody's tried to write anything in second person narrative yet, but maybe we'll see some of that. It's very challenging. I would say, though, that the biggest thing that people are doing well is... On top of navigating this challenge and becoming better writers,
they're also making excellent use of the new tools available with the LLMs, both in terms of generating first drafts, improving things, spot checking for spelling and prose, and generally upgrading the vibe of things. We're seeing a lot of progress with that because we are taking risks where other people aren't.
I want to pick up on a couple of things you mentioned here. So for those just joining, we're doing like a retrospective review of our attempts to basically meme this genre of protocol science fiction into existence. So it's six months since we've been publishing protocol science fiction in the Protocolized magazine.
And we started off kind of like trying to learn from the legacy of... classic science fiction, and we started with Chung's Law, which we attribute to Ted Chung. It's the idea that science fiction should be about special rules, not special people. So that's been our starting point.
And the phrase that Timber was using in the last couple of minutes, which is traffic jams, that's another of our principles, which is Fred Pohl, who was the editor of Fighting Galaxy back in the day, he had this principle that the job of the science fiction writer is to... predict the traffic jam, not the automobile. Right.
So that tells you, like, you know, that's the sense of like science fiction, like classic narrative is also about conflict, but it's not the conflict between a special hero person and a special villain person. It's not Harry Potter versus the dark Lord. It's traffic jams, jams in the sense of, um,
two contradictory implications of the system of rules that's governing the world kind of coming into collision, right, in some sense. So, for example, like a traffic system, it has, I guess, the contradictory design principle of trying to get everybody from point A to point B as quickly and smoothly as possible.
But on the other hand, it's also trying to design the cheapest, most compact systems road system with the minimum number of miles and expense to actually build it. And that creates these conflicts, which is why we have traffic jams, right? So there's something there. The conflict works differently in protocol fiction. And I've been thinking about that.
Some of the stories we were talking about, like my favorites of DHCP and terms of service and noise ordinance, all those one of the things they do is they pick out an element of the background that doesn't change. And this is an important point. I remember this is actually a line from, I think,
Jeff Bezos in his Amazon Management Principles, which is that most people, they are very attuned to thinking about what has changed. AI is new. What has changed? How do we live differently? So humans are very attuned to deviation excursions of the system from nominal to some exceptional state and so
forth but a lot of the universe is just the same old same old just chugging along doing its thing but what does change is often the system will enter regimes that you yourself in your lived experience have not entered into, right? So when the city traffic system gets into a very unusual configuration with new
kinds of traffic jams, it's fundamentally exhibiting a property it's always been capable of. It's not that something new has entered the system. It's not that Godzilla has arrived and is blocking traffic. It's not that there's necessarily an earthquake or something exceptional has happened. The system is so complex that its history so far hasn't expressed all its potentialities,
and now you're seeing some new phenomena. So I think this actually causes an interesting challenge because, to your point, if you try to write a story where you're either trying To win against the system, and winning in the classic finite game sense means you come out on top and the enemy is vanquished. In this case,
if you're fighting the traffic system, the absurd logical outcome would be the traffic system gets killed and now everybody gets to drive around with no roads. That's ridiculous. Maybe that would make a fun, absurd story, but there is no such thing as winning against the traffic system. It's just that you learn to adapt to its...
to elements of its behavior that you didn't realize it was capable of. You now realize that, hey, after a big flood or snow event, traffic behaves a certain way that's different, right? So this goes to our, I think, finite infinite game angle. So things that don't change are typically part of the infinite game layer of the
world you inhabit. And the infinite game is not necessarily a sort of like boring, limited game that just repeats boringly endlessly. It's just an extraordinarily complex system that can basically go on forever and keep showing you new layers of itself. And the only way to inhabit such systems is
is to kind of manage your presence in them rather than like, you know, try to kill something. So I think Ursula, again, in her famous essay, The Carrier Back Theory, she talks about how the hero's journey is often about the hero going off with a sword and trying to kill something, right?
Kill a dragon, kill the dark lord or something. And we've talked about it in our work on tensions as a way to understand complex systems, which is like, you know, when you're managing a national park, we can share that link. If there's a troublesome species,
you can either manage your relationship with it or you can try to exterminate that species. And we've had experiences with both in wildlife management. And it turns out, no surprise, that trying to exterminate a species is in general a very bad idea if you're trying to manage an ecology.
Protocol fiction stories are about conflicts that emerge from the latent potential of a system and therefore are part of its infinite game that you must learn to manage, and therefore there's no winning. You grow as a person and learn to manage the conflict better. And these traffic jam-type systems, I think, are that kind of manifestation.
And this is reminding me of a connection here. So there's a great book on storytelling by David Mamet, the playwright who wrote movies like Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. It's called Three Users of a Knife. I think actually it was Sachin, one of our contributors, who put me onto it. In that, he talks about...
Basically what we've been talking about, which is great stories never actually resolve the conflict. They just kind of like elevate the literacy of the participants in the argument so that you enter the conflict kind of not... resolved in a sense but now you have like a deeper entanglement and understanding
of it and he contrasts this with what what i think he calls the problem story or issue story which is often like a really bad sort of like preachy and sermonizing story where you want to like say write a story showing that corporations are evil
and climate change is um the problem and therefore we must solve climate change and good should win over evil that's kind of like you know uh a problem story that tries to preach an ideology. I think protocol stories fundamentally are like David Mamet's surface, ongoing, eternal tension kind of stories.
So I would highly recommend that book, by the way, David Mamet's Three Users of a Knife.
Yeah, this gets at something really important about what we're talking about here. I think it's that hidden thing like these these uh ongoing aspects of the world that will last a long time and they're also somewhat invisible so one of the problems is finding a good
one to write about bringing attention to it in a way that's not cheesy and i think one way that people can kind of get a sense for this is by rereading things with that perspective so things that you've already read You could go back and read the foundation trilogy with this idea of like, okay,
what are the great systems here? The rules that define this world and make it interesting. And one thing that I've been doing as a challenge to myself is rereading the Iliad and thinking about it like, oh, is this a protocol fiction? Because If you think about the Iliad, of course, it's about great men going to war,
killing each other, trying to win the girl, all of this. There are also the great bureaucrats like the advisor to Agamemnon or the advisor to Achilles or the advisor in Troy who are really wise. They understand systems of people and the politics. I think people typically identify with one or the other there.
You're either an Agamemnon or you're like one of the people that advises them. But there's also the element all of homer's stories about ritual and sacrifice and like appeasing the gods and this sort of like other layer of a system that's going on and then if you
if you don't do those things which are just ridiculous it's like why would you burn half of a cow you know for the gods it's just this totally unreasonable part of the story but it's that level of stuff where it's like oh this is so benign and like
once you start to pay attention to it you're like that's actually what's important in this arena that um homer set up is like there's this broader set of rules at play that all the actors need to adhere to or else there will be bigger
consequences that happen there so that's one way to develop the skills to be a protocol fiction writer is like focus on the protocols in stories that you like think about how to tease those out the things that you see and we kind of set that up for ghosts and machines and
the photos that we selected for that to be like okay look at look at a real life situation what are the protocols here like and with the prompt like what are the ghosts in these machines in a sense kind of what protocols are like the uh the
water cooler the guy drew it's like that's a ghost in a machine that's an instantiation of a protocol in the real world the
Yeah, the Iliad is interesting to think about. I'm trying to think of it in the context of modern extended universe-type storytelling as well. So one of the things about the Iliad is it didn't exhaust the storytelling potential of the universe that got set up, which is why we have the Odyssey as part two.
It has a sequel, right? Yeah. And it's kind of interesting that if you look at it from the protocol fiction lens, obviously you like maybe identify with the bureaucrats and maybe you kind of like see the whole tragedy as senseless. Like one way to read the idea is everybody there could have had a much better
outcome if they hadn't tried to be great men at all. And they had tried to be like, you know, more ordinary people. That's actually maybe an interesting lens with which to... look at not just great stories, but even actually it might be more revealing to look at terrible stories and look
at why did these classic but terrible stories fail because they were trying to tell a protocol story without realizing it and fell into the traps of great person storytelling. So one that I'm reminded of is... the movie Crash, which I think won the 2000 Best Picture Oscar,
and it's almost universally amongst movie fans regarded as the absolute worst best picture ever. It is a terrible movie, by the way. But its fundamental conceit is actually kind of interesting, and I can see it having been treated differently, turning out to be quite epic. It could be a modern-day Iliad if it had been treated differently,
with more sensitivity to the ironies and stuff. So it ends up, it's like, you know, certain actual literal traffic in LA, there is an actual crash somewhere in the plotline, but it has a very modern type of storytelling, which is dozens of characters on parallel plot lines. So it's not just A plot and B plot.
It's lots of intersecting plot lines that can intersect, which I think is very protocolish. Like, you know, the internet is like millions of people at any given time doing their own things like we're on Substack Live right now and randomly we have 100 people watching us but we've kind of inserted ourselves into the middle of like
a very busy traffic hub and so a bunch of people are stopping to rubberneck at our conversation right so Crash was that kind of story but I think the reason it failed was it tried to make everybody a special person. And this was at the start of the culture wars and identity politics and things like that.
But I think the larger the story you tell, the more ridiculous it gets as you try to make everybody special. And you see this, by the way, in... This is not a new problem. It's a problem in, actually, it's a problem in the epic era as well. So you mentioned the Iliad.
The Mahabharata is from a similar era, and it has actually this exact problem, which is it probably originally began as like a, random human war between a fairly content set of tribes fighting each other. But then as it became famous and civilization and defining, everybody else wanted to write themselves into the story.
So as the epic grew up with like, you know, Creep, Lots and lots of other small dynasties wrote themselves into it. It spread to Southeast Asia and they wrote themselves into the story. So it began to sprawl. And not only did everybody write themselves into it, so this is like modern extended universe phenomena of Mary Seuss, right?
So you love a science fiction franchise and you write yourself into it as a particularly perfect character. And it's like totally unconvincing. So the Mahabharata is in some ways very full of Mary Sue type characters. And the interesting thing is not only do they write themselves into it, they give themselves a divine backstory.
Like the main characters in the Mahabharata are all like, you know, um, half human, half gods. They're like descended from a human parent and a godly parent. So that's the main, um, five to ten characters of the Mahamarta. But as the epic crept, everybody gets a special person backstory like that, and everybody's kind of perfect.
And I think we keep running into this problem in modern storytelling as well. And I think that might be one of the reasons Crash, the movie, failed. And you look at, actually, you look at, say, the Marvel Universe versus the DC Universe. I think the Marvel Universe works better for many reasons,
including just plain competence and basic storytelling. But one of the reasons the DC Universe fails is all the characters are way too godly. There's nothing human about them, right? Like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, they're all godlike characters. There's nothing humanizing about them. Whereas the Marvel Universe,
they're humanized enough that you can kind of see them working within... Like, you know, in the current phase they're in, they're doing a lot of multiverse storytelling. Like, they're all subject to the weird rules of multiverse crap happening. And that doesn't happen in DC. And I think that's why the DC Extended Universe kind of fails.
So one other franchise I want to mention that I think does a really good job is Star Wars. The Extended Star Wars Universe. So the main Star Wars 9 movie epic arc is very much special person. It's about like, you know, Luke Skywalker type people who are very special. But all the infill storytelling they're doing,
one of the reasons I enjoyed so much, like the Mandalorian, for example, he's not a special person. He belongs to a weird ritualistic cult, but he's not a particularly special person. Um... He adopts Baby Yoda, who actually gives up being a special person, which is like, you know, a Jedi Knight, and becomes a Mandalorian, which is,
I think, one of the most interesting kind of slips of values in the Star Wars universe. So I think we are actually, so I think the TLDR from this little rant is, I think protocol fiction, what we're doing here is on the cusp of a broader shift in storytelling at large.
We're shifting to this culture across all of storytelling, not just our storytelling, which is focused specifically on exploring the world of protocols.
Yeah, I think that we tell the stories that we tell out of necessity because we don't know how to tell these other stories, despite the fact that I think that the way that modern life works is probably significantly different than it was when most of our classic literature was written.
and like the story mechanisms we have today do work in some ways but they also miss huge things like i think that the um vast majority of who we would call great men and great bureaucrats today aren't that they're just the symptom of a distribution
and they got to that position because there are a certain number of people and a certain number of people need to be in in those roles of great power and responsibility. It's not because they have something innately better about them. It's just that this is how it works. There are mechanisms in place to do sorting.
And if you start telling stories about the sorting mechanisms in those systems, it's going to be more realistic. The moral of that story is going to be more accurate and helpful to the people reading it. I mean, that's not the only function of literature, but certainly one of them.
um but maybe we could talk a little bit about the science fiction contest that we just ran i put a link to the discord in the chat one of the things that we'll ask people to do if they want to is help with the judging this time around so we've got
a little bit of a folder set up with the stories i've redacted the names of the authors people go and read them they're all open and And then we'll have a forum where people can go vote for their top 10 and their top two, as well as provide an explanation. But like, how did the story go?
And what was your thought process going into designing the prompt for the story?
Yeah, so the first few stories, I think when we wrote them, we were doing two things at once. One was experimenting with LLMs because we ourselves are not like exceptional storytellers, with the exception of Stanley Chen, who's our advising editor and a published science fiction author.
So we were fucking around and learning how to use LLMs and finding out how good we were actually at storytelling. So I think that's one learning track that we have where it helps to like crowdsource and get a lot more people trying various things with LLMs and this other stuff of like just
developing a sense for the aesthetics and meta rules of protocol fiction as a game, that too, I think it has benefited a lot from a lot of people trying to write such stories. And I think it similarly is going to benefit from a lot of people trying to read
and judge the stories because we are still developing the right standards for how to tell good and bad protocol stories apart. So not just the rules of good storytelling, many of which we'd have to actually break because protocol fiction is so different. So you have to learn traditional storytelling and then decide which one rules to break.
But also like, what are the principles of good protocol storytelling? And I think if we have many people judging, it's going to be better. So I think we're doing two things on that front. One is, for this contest, Ghosts and Machines, so for those of you joining late, the contest we just ran, Ghosts and Machines,
The idea is to look at the world of distributed AI and blockchains and other types of protocols and look at a world where there's lots of devices and places where intelligence could be. It won't just be centralized big intelligences. And then ask, how do they interact with each other and with humans?
So in a way, we are inhabiting a landscape that's full of ghosts all over. Your Amazon Alexa device has a little ghost in it that answers your questions. Your chat GPT chat session is another ghost in the machine. So you've got all these ghosts haunting our world right now.
And we discussed this in a workshop in Thailand a couple of months ago. So there's real depth to this topic. But yeah, we asked people to write a bunch of stories imagining interesting stories in this world of distributed AI and protocols where there's like a sense of the landscaping haunted by multiple ghosts.
So yeah, we're going to include readers in the evaluation process. Like Timber said, we're going to, it's open access. You can read the folder stories and vote in the contest form, which ones are your favorite. But there's another thing we are doing, which is on the, uh, Summer Protocols Discord,
where we do a lot of the back-end work for this magazine, where we are starting to run hackathon-style prompt response efforts. So I just did the first one where I posted a prompt, where I posted a picture of optic fiber cables leftovers from drone warfare in Ukraine.
So there's these tethered drones that use trailing optic fiber cables, and they get left behind when the drones blow up on their target. So there's these fields full of optic fiber cables, and it seems very futuristic and, well, dystopian, but it seemed like a good premise for a story.
And what we did was we asked people to openly post their story ideas hackathon style in a channel thread, and they could steal from each other's ideas and try to top them and update their prompts. So it went pretty well. So we had three people trying to like top each other with their story ideas.
And we awarded the bounty for this particular concept to one person. We'll see how it goes. But I want to do more of this because I fundamentally think Developing a new genre involves both increasingly reader literacy and writer literacy, and it's easier to do that in collaboration. So writer literacy,
you can see as how it happened like 50, 70 years ago with Astounding Magazine, right? Asimo wasn't writing his stories in isolation. So Asimo and other famous writers of the time, they were like meeting with John Campbell and like discussing and riffing off each other. We were trying to replicate the process, you in an online context.
So our Discord is where we hope a lot of the people trying to pioneer protocol fiction will sort of riff off each other, learn from each other, compete, healthy competition, maybe steal from each other. And we're trying to create the right scaffolding where they can do that and produce better stories.
And on the reader's side, it's kind of interesting. Like if you look at classic science fiction, it's not clear now. If you look at the old magazine issues, there was literal paper-based social media evolving around that. Like in the letters to the editor columns of astounding magazines and things like that,
people would write about their responses to stories, but also actually share their contact information, start up pen pal relationships, start up local, what people call meetups today. That's how the science fiction fandom scene emerged. And I think the way to do that is... for readers to kind of cultivate tastes in the same way, right?
So what we're trying here is an experiment at getting readers to raise their tastes and literacies in consuming protocol fiction in collaboration. So actually, one thing we can do, Timber, besides the folder of our anonymized drafts plus the form for voting, let's create a channel on Discord where anybody who's participating in this evaluation process can just
chat with each other and they can argue about, hey, I like this story. Like, try to actually influence each other to change your vote. Like, if somebody says they liked one story and you didn't like it, try to convince them that they should vote for your candidate instead.
So that might get a little obesian, but it might be fun. So let's try that as an experiment. But I think this is actually how the previous ages of science fiction developed as a scene, right? Not only were writers riffing off each other to develop better techniques and tropes and methods, but
readers were riffing off each other to kind of really understand what made stories work, what made it work for them, and what allowed them to connect and bond and find meaning through stories, right? Because ultimately, the value of science fiction is not writers talking to readers,
but readers talking to each other and learning to navigate the new world they're in. So that's really what we're hoping to do here. Oh. Timber, I can't hear you. Are you muted or something?
There we go. It's kind of a step aside. But the biggest YouTuber today, Mr. Beast, the reason that he's so popular is that his origin story was like he was an avid YouTube watcher. And he's like, I'm going to find out what makes these special.
And he got in a room with his buddies and went through video after video after video after. like thousands if not tens of thousands of videos noting down what made them work and then just implementing that and that's probably what readers did it's like we
want to figure out what makes these work what makes the good ones good so that we can get more of them because if you crack that formula as a consumer it's like of course you're going to get better stuff so you have like more of an incentive even
as a reader than you would as a writer to figure that out
That's a good point. It reminds me of how Will Smith became a huge star. Apparently, he did this very early in his career, where he was coming off, I think, Fresh Prince, the TV show, where he was a minor star, but he wanted to be the biggest crossover black star in the world.
And it was like, that's not an easy problem to crack when he was starting out. Apparently, he did a spreadsheet level analysis of what works and why, and he decided that science fiction with slight comedic elements is, uh, how you go big and, um, famous. And he pulled it off.
Like he pulled off a string of like famous, uh, uh, science fiction lead roles. Of course he blew it all up with that stupid Oscars blow up where he ended up, um, slapping what's his name? Chris Rock. Uh, but yeah, I think, um, there's a good chance that we might find the, you know,
Asimo or Ursula Le Guin of, uh, protocol fiction among our readers rather than the people trying to write right now, which would be funny.
Yeah, and that'd be a great outcome. But this is definitely... you know a and maybe you won't maybe it'll be an llm maybe it'll be some crazy agent or like prompt that the community develops that uh generates awesome stories on a bi-weekly basis um but yeah i think that was kind of it's the topics that we
had today but there's a link to the discord in the chat um also the protocolized magazine has these favorites we were talking about and a link to the discord um But yeah, we want your input on the recent contest. I think there are about a few dozen stories to review for that, and you can make your mark.
And if you vote for the winning story, you've got bragging rights at the community, so you have better taste. This is a chance to prove your taste in front of all fiction.
Yep. I see people still were trickling in in the last 10 minutes. So just to summarize for those who are joining in these last five minutes, what we've been doing for the last hour is tracing our journey, trying to basically meme a new science fiction genre into existence, which we call Protocol Science Fiction.
We publish it on Protocolized Magazine. So... It's been an interesting journey, starting with the tradition of existing classic sci-fi, trying to unpack what are the principles and subtle meta rules of writing protocol fiction. And we run two contests. The second contest just finished, and we're about to begin judging.
And you can join the judging process and the links that Timber will share. But I think this is the kind of closing part I wanted to leave with people is, Science fiction is important. Like every wave of science fiction has helped people really adapt to and learn how to live in like a fundamentally new world.
Because in the last century, we seem to keep reinventing the world every 20 years or so. So you kind of have to reinvent who you are as a human and learn to live in it again. Like I'm 50 and I think I've reinvented myself twice to live in this world.
And I'm having to do that again this time. So I think protocol science fiction is... We're going to create how we live in this world that we're shaping right now. So yeah, that's what we've been doing for the last hour. So these recordings get saved, right? They're going to send it?
Yeah, we'll post this and people can catch up on it. So if you're catching up on it now, thanks for watching in the future. That's kind of cool. But yeah, we post twice a week in Protocolized. We've got a very active Discord. We're actively trying to make this a big thing.
both in terms of how it's going to help folks and just an entertaining new genre that we're trying to meme into existence, as you put it. But yeah, I'll talk to everybody soon. And thanks for tuning in. Bye now.
See you guys.
