Summer of Protocols

Thesis: Protocols have a fundamental bias towards decentralization and distribution of agency and authority, even when they structure interactions with centralized and/or monolithic things (eg royalty interactions protocol). Because codifying procedure tends to empower the weak and constrain the strong.

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

So for eg a barbarian royal court can have an unchecked power monarch who can capriciously go “off with his head”

A protocolized court checks monarchical power and protects commoners who might appeal

Modern example: healthcare protocols weaken arbitrariness and negligence moral hazard of doctors, empower patients

AT&T and Standard Oil were less monolithic than FAANG. It’s easy to see how to unbundle a large telephone network into small regional ones without much loss. Harder to see how to unbundle Google or Facebook.

I’m using centralized and monolithic interchangeably here because:

Thesis 2: Centralization tends to create monoliths, defined as structures that are hard or impossible to unbundle without losing much of the value. So mainframes are monoliths but equivalent server clusters are centralized without being as monolithic