Summer of Protocols

Protocols as engineered arguments ==> protocols as rules of engagement (and disengagement)

“Good, clean fight”

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

This is not the same thing as a “fair fight”

You’re solving for continuing the game, not for winning it, and that sometimes looks like solving for “fair” outcomes or “fair opportunities” but that’s just coincidence/correlation.

For eg. Factory farming of is a set of protocols for raising and slaughtering animals, but it is entirely asymmetric and unfair, even though it is kinda sustainable as an infinite game. And it won’t be fair or symmetric no matter how humane you make the industry’s practices. One species systematically eating another is never going to fit any notion of fairness. But it can still be a protocolized activity; an engineered argument where the interests of the meat species are at least represented in the rules of engagement.

It’s sustainable for the eating species empirically. Been going on at some level for millennia though modern factory farming is only ~150 years old and starting to get unsustainable even on its own terms (ie if you ignore climate, human health, and cruelty it is still reaching limits of antibiotics, pandemic risk etc)

How is it “kinda sustainable”?

Feels like it doesn’t really solve for continuing the game given the health and environmental externalities, and cost of inputs continuing to increase (not to mention the deep unfairness to the “meat species”)