Protocol InstituteReading map
This map shows 400 readings. Readings about similar ideas sit close together. The blue dots are this year’s reading plan. Point at a theme to see its readings. Select an area name, or click anywhere on the map, to look closer at that part.
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All readings by area
Firms, measurement and governance
- Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies
- Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
- Agentic Commerce Protocol
- Aggregation Theory
- AI Kitcraft workshop, 21–22 Sep 2026
- Announcing the Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)
- Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change
- Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems
- But Who Will Guard the Guardians?
- California water rate data
- Case Study: Ghosts in the System
- Durable AI Adoption guide (v0.5)
- Form 8-K: General Instructions
- Goodhart's Law and Why Measurement is Hard
- In the Matter of Knight Capital Americas LLC (SEC order)
- Job Market Signaling
- Learning from Schelling's Strategy of Conflict
- Liquid Services and Runtime Procurement
- Lost in between Speed and Scale
- Non-Contractual Relations in Business
- On Consensus and Humming in the IETF (RFC 7282)
- PDF Hell. Long-live the PDF.
- Rudiments of Numeracy
- Standard Setting Committees: Consensus Governance for Shared Technology Platforms
- The Blackboard Model of Problem Solving and the Evolution of Blackboard Architectures
- The Filing Cabinet
- The Nature of the Firm
- The Problem with Perfect Rules
- The Reading Machine and the Inversion of the Standards Stack
- The Vertical Integration of Production: Market Failure Considerations
- Understanding Simpson's Paradox
- User-Generated Software is User-Generated Content
- What is an Agent is not an Instrument
- Your AI Product Needs Evals
- Protocol Review 7: Auctions
Science, learning and knowledge
- A City is Not a Tree
- A Mathematician's Lament
- A Theory of Human Motivation
- Analogy as the Core of Cognition
- Before Memex
- Cogito ergo sumus
- Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks
- Computer Criticism vs. Technocentric Thinking
- Counter Culture, Towards a History of Greek Numeracy
- From Work to Text
- How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds
- Human Problem Solving, The State of the Theory in 1970
- Interview (Lui)
- Interview (Schleicher)
- Interview (Tasar)
- Man, A Course of Study
- Mathematical Discovery, Hadamard Resurected
- Mathematical Education
- Mathematics on a Distant Planet
- Modeling Software for learning and doing physics
- Notes for a Modeling Theory of Science, Cognition and Instruction
- On Proof and Progress in Mathematics
- On Teaching Mathematics
- On the Mechanization of Creative Processes
- Operationalism, An Interpretation of the Philosophy of Ancient Greek Geometry
- Pretense and Representation
- Representations in Distributed Cognitive Tasks
- Resistance by Scientists to Scientific Discovery
- Secrets of Genius
- Six views of embodied cognition
- Some cognitive tools of literacy
- Strange Knowledgeability
- The Center of Why
- The Consequences of Literacy
- The Mind's Eye, Nonverbal Thought in Technology
- The Process of Education
- The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory
- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
- Toward a Modeling Theory of Physics Instruction
- Visualisation and Cognition
- What is mathematics
- Whats the Big Idea, Toward a Pedagogy of Idea Power
Protocols and agents
- [INTERNAL DRAFT] Protocol-First Operations Management
- A Phenomenology of Protocols
- A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 1 of 7
- A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 2 of 7
- A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 3 of 7
- A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 4 of 7
- A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 6 of 7
- A Protocol Pattern Language for Urban Space [serialized], part 7 of 7
- Addressable Space Appendix [serialized], part 6 of 6
- After the Swarm: We are Blooming
- Agent-Shaped Problems
- Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains
- Birdwatch: Crowd Wisdom and Bridging Algorithms can Inform Understanding and Reduce the Spread of Misinformation
- Blockchain networks as constitutional and competitive polycentric orders
- Brackish Strategy
- Can Permissionless Blockchains Avoid Governance and the Law?
- CEO Memorandum: A Summary of NPC Inc. "Management Theory"
- Challenges: Trivial, Grand, and Whitehead
- Constitutions and Blockchains: Competitive Governance of Fundamental Rule Sets
- Dangerous Protocols
- Dangerous Protocols, part 1 of 2
- Eisenstein’s Spine and Technology Stabilization
- Exit to Protocol
- Exit to Protocol, part 1 of 2
- Finding Fault Lines within the Firm
- Governance as Conflict
- How the Protocol Institute is Adopting AI
- How to Protocol Watch
- In Search of Hardness
- Intro to the Protocol Reader
- Introducing the Model Context Protocol
- Introducing the Protocol Institute
- Jamverse Jam
- Killswitch Protocols, or On Engineering Recursive System Death
- Legal and Technological Normativity: more (and less) than twin sisters
- Managing the Water, Not the Ship
- Mechanical Currents
- Model Context Protocol Specification
- Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
- New Time Machines, part 1 of 6
- Norms, institutions, and digital veils of uncertainty: Do network protocols need trust anyway?
- One Tension to Rule Them All (Issue #2: Beyond Trade-Offs)
- Protocol Bicorder
- Protocol Field Guide v1.1
- Protocol Institute brand kit
- Protocol Reader
- Protocol Review 6: Public-Key Cryptography
- Protocol Symposium 2026 Registration Open
- Protocols Don't Build Pyramids
- Reconceptualizing Organizational Routines as a Source of Flexibility and Change
- Safe New World, part 2 of 3
- Securing Stigmergic Systems
- Security incident disclosure — July 2026
- SIGP4B Update 4: Drift Stacking
- SoP 2025: Accelerating Order
- Standards Make the World
- Stigmergy as a generic mechanism for coordination
- The Ethnography of Infrastructure
- The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
- The Kafka Index
- The Protocol System Experience
- The Swarm and the Formation
- The Swarm and the Formation, part 1 of 4
- The Swarm and the Formation, part 4 of 4
- The Tupperware Analogy
- The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols
- Theorizing Protocolization I: New Nature
- Unprotocolized Knowledge
- Welcome to the Swarm
- What Constitutes a Constitution?
Biology and information
- Abstract Machines of Systems Biology
- Activities and Classroom Demonstrations in Biological Physics
- Clearing up Mysteries
- Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks
- Games That Teach the Fundamentals of Computer Operation
- Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process
- Neuromorphic Engineering, In Memory of Misha Mahowald
- Notes on Present Status and Future Progress
- Quorum Sensing in Bacteria
- Reverse Engineering of Biological Complexity
- review of Visual Complex Functions
- Robustness in bacterial chemotaxis
- Tacit Knowledge, Trust, and the Q of Sapphire
- The physical nature of information
- The Tyranny of the Clock
- The Tyranny of the Clock (short)
- Zig-Zag Path to Understanding
Systems, logs and failures
- An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents
- Architectural Considerations for a New Generation of Protocols
- Distributed Simulation and the Time Warp Operating System
- End-to-End Arguments in System Design
- External Technical Root Cause Analysis: Channel File 291
- Hints for Computer System Design
- RSS 2.0 Specification
- Summary of the Amazon S3 Service Disruption in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region
- The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols
- The Information Bus: An Architecture for Extensible Distributed Systems
- The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction
- Virtual Time
Programming and coordination languages
- A History of Haskell, Being Lazy With Class
- A New Approach to the Functional Design of a New Computer
- A Structural View of the Cedar Programming Environment
- A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence
- Abstraction in Technical Computing
- Alternative Programming Interfaces for Alternative Programmers
- Building Robust Systems
- Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style
- Contracts: Events
- Conversational Access to a 2048-Word Machine
- Coordination Languages and their Significance
- Croquet, A Collaboration System Architecture
- Dynamic Program Building
- Fabrik, A Visual Programming Environment
- Genera Concepts
- Graphical Editing by Example
- Heuretics, Theoretical and Experimental Study of Heuristic Rules
- Inform 7, The Program
- Korz Simple, Symmetric, Subjective, Context-Oriented Programming
- Linda in Context
- Out of the Tar Pit
- Playground, An Object Oriented Simulation System with Agent Rules for Children of All Ages
- Programming and Programming Languages
- Project Oberon
- Propagation Networks
- Recursive Interfaces for Reactive Objects
- Robust Composition
- Robust Design through Diversity
- Self (HOPL)
- STEPS 2012 Progress and Final NSF Report
- Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence
- The Connection Machine
- The Education of a Computer
- The Interrelation Between Programming Languages and Machine Organization
- The New Culture of Software Development
- The Next 700 Programming Languages
- The operating system, should there be one
- The Programming Language Aspects of ThingLab
- The Smalltalk-76 Programming System
- The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution
- The Structure of Cedar
- Tools for the New Culture
- Venture, a higher-order probabilistic programming platform with programmable inference
- Why AM and Eurisko Appear to Work
- Why Functional Programming Matters
Scaling, automation and coordination
- A Camera, Not an Engine II
- A Jury of Mirrors
- A New Composite Sovereign: The Model (LLM) Against the Historical Archetypes of Authority
- A Tale of Two Theories (of Coordination)
- Agents are actors
- Archimedes' Curse
- Beyond Leverage
- Beyond Szabo Scaling
- Can the (Social) Oobleck Dance?
- Cascade of Singularities
- Cognitive Ergonomics
- Cognitive Farmsteading
- Computational Kindness
- Coordination Headwinds
- Death of the Owner's Manual
- Designing Freedom
- Durable AI Adoption
- EA Safety
- Ethical AI Monogamy…?
- Everyone Is On Something
- Human Cumulative Cultural Evolution as a Form of Distributed Computation
- Humanism without (All) Humans
- I Have No Words and I Must Design
- Ironies of Automation
- Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
- LLMs Pre-Commodify Ideas
- Maintaining Everything That Matters
- Massed Muddler Intelligence
- Mesolomania
- Methods, Madness, Monsters and Magic in New Nature
- Miscellanea + Housekeeping Notes
- Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
- Patterns and problems in multiagent systems
- Phreaks, Packets and Prompts
- Pond brains and GPT-4
- Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate
- Software Acceleration and Desynchronization
- Stop Treating Your Problems with Insecticide
- Substack note on p(doom) and real risk management
- Substrate-Mediated Convergence and the Loss of Epistemic Self-Correction
- Systems Thinking is Brain Rot for Analysts
- Tag Yourself: NPCs, Punks, Sheep, and Schizos
- The Accelerationist Case for Frontier Pacing
- The Crooked Timber of AI
- The Curiously Playable Universe
- The need for basic research in industry
- The Use of Knowledge in Society
- Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI
- Voice of the Turtle
- Walter Mitty Effects in AI Incident Analyses
- We Just Have to Set Up the Planetary Dev Environment
- Why Does AI Development Look Like 1980s Software Planning?
Safety, reporting and oversight
- 14 CFR 121.542, flight crewmember duties (the "sterile cockpit" rule)
- 14 CFR Part 5, Safety Management Systems
- Aviation Safety Reporting System: program summary
- Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Volume One
- Coordinate Leadership
- Deming's 14 Points
- DOE-HDBK-1028-2009, Human Performance Improvement Handbook, Vol. 1
- Final Report on the accident on 1st June 2009 to the Airbus A330-203, flight AF 447
- How Complex Systems Fail
- Infrastructure of Firm Control
- INPO: Our History
- INSAG-4, Safety Culture
- Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies
- Organization Design: An Information Processing View
- Out Front on Airline Safety: Two Decades of Continuous Evolution
- Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
- Report of the President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (Kemeny Report)
- Resource Management on the Flight Deck (NASA CP-2120)
- Safe New World
- Safe New World, part 1 of 3
- The Self-Designing High-Reliability Organization: Aircraft Carrier Flight Operations at Sea
- The Tragedy-Fueled Step Function
- Toyota Production System
- WHO Surgical Safety Checklist, with Haynes et al., NEJM 2009
- Working in Practice but Not in Theory: Theoretical Challenges of "High-Reliability Organizations"
Computing and human augmentation
- A Laboratory For Teaching Object-Oriented Thinking
- A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages
- A Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut-Copy-Paste
- Augmenting Human Intellect (typeset)
- Beyond Being There
- Boxer, A Reconstructible Computational Medium
- Characterizing the Software Process: A Maturity Framework
- Chronicle of the Death of a Laboratory
- Collaborative Diffusion, Programming Antiobjects
- Conversation With and Through Computers
- Direct Manipulation Interfaces
- Direct Manipulation, A Step Beyond Programming Languages
- Experiences With The Alternate Reality Kit, An Example of the Tension Between Literalism and Magic
- Grounding in Communication
- How Bodies Matter
- How Do Committees Invent?
- Immutable Skills
- Improving Our Ability to Improve
- Inbox Zero versus Flow Laminar
- Interaction at Lincoln Laboratory in the 1960
- Interactive Information Processing, Retrieval, and Transfer
- J.C.R. Licklider's Vision for the IPTO
- Man-Computer Symbiosis
- Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network
- Microelectronics and the Personal Computer
- Narrascope 2020 talk
- Natural Language, Semantic Analysis and Interactive Fiction
- No Silver Bullet
- Noncommand User Interfaces
- Oral History (Laws)
- Oral History (McJones)
- Oral History (Spicer)
- OSI: The Internet That Wasn't
- Personal Computing
- Programming as Theory Building
- Programming with Agents
- Prompter, A Domain-Specific Language for Versu
- Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution
- STEPS proposal
- Systems Software Research is Irrelevant
- Technology and Courage
- The Benefit of Hindsight in Turkle’s Life on the Screen
- The Computer as Communication Device
- The Emperors Old Clothes
- The Future of Computing, Logic or Biology
- The Grounding Problem in Conversations With and Through Computers
- The Open Society and Its Media
- The Xerox Star, a Retrospective
- Tracing the Dynabook
- Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer
- Vision and Reality of Hypertext
- What is a Dynabook
- Why programming is a good medium for expressing poorly understood and sloppily-formulated ideas
- Zooids, Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces
Culture, time and soft technologies
- A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
- Annealing of Exuberance
- Anti-Yuppies & Abundance
- Be Kind to Your Local NPCs
- Body Politic Keeps The Score
- Bots in the Beerlight
- Carnival Time, Hardness, and the Machines That Process Excess
- Chat, Is This Bloodsport?
- Content Is the New Dirt
- Crying in the Casino
- Dead Forest Theory
- Designing for the Pleasures of Disputation
- Devices For The Crafty
- Don't Be Evil
- Geeks and Recursive Publics: How the Internet and Free Software Make Things Public
- General-Purpose Technologies as Annealing Agents
- Good Death, part 2 of 2
- Gramsci Theme Parks
- Here Comes a Regular
- How Not to Create Tigers
- How the World Forgot to End
- Interview (Playboy)
- Knowledge Chronotopes
- Manufactured Present
- Metabolizing Monsters
- Minimum Viable Soul
- Our Eukaryotic Moment
- Outsider Trading
- Prophetic Soft Technologies
- Rat Information Portal
- Remembering Some Guys
- Search, Discovery, Pills, and Portals
- Should “Technological History” Be a Part of Psych Intakes? (Yes.)
- Silence is a Commons
- Situationgooning
- Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay
- The arts at Facebook
- The Ductus of Protocol Fiction
- The Eternal Now
- The Principles of Collective Animal Behaviour
- The Sex Organs of the Machine World
- The Sexual Revolution of the Imagination
- The Two Memories
- The Tyranny of Structurelessness
- Thermal Memory
- Touching Time
- Treasure Hunting in Latent Space
- Work-Hardened Archetypes