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Citizen Infrastructure

Protocol

We tend to think of a “protocol” as something technical and dull — an internet standard, a piece of plumbing. Nathan Schneider argues it’s much bigger than that: protocol is one of the central, and most overlooked, forms of human organization, and relearning how to use it matters more now than ever.

More than internet plumbing

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The word protocol carries surprisingly deep meanings across very different worlds:

  • In many indigenous contexts, protocol names sovereign practices, rituals, and traditions — ways of knowing who you are even under colonisation — and also the membrane between a community and the state (in parts of Latin America and Canada, “protocol” is the word for the proper relationship between governments and indigenous communities).
  • There are climate protocols, internet protocols, and now protocols being written as guardrails for AI.

What links them is that a protocol coordinates behaviour without a central ruler — it’s a shared, repeatable pattern that lets independent parties act together. That makes it a powerful, under-appreciated alternative to top-down control, for organising both human communities and our relationship with our environment.

Why it matters

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For citizen infrastructure, protocols are a reminder that governing together doesn’t always mean building an institution or an app. Sometimes it means agreeing on a protocol — a shared way of relating that many different groups can adopt and adapt. It’s a complement to the more platform-centric idea of modular politics.

Patterns of interaction, not just control

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Schneider defines a protocol broadly as a pattern of interaction — wide enough to hold internet standards, religious rituals, and a region’s dialect all at once, so the useful work is in the distinctions you draw within. He pushes back on an influential older view (Alexander Galloway’s 2004 Protocol) that cast protocol mainly as a hidden form of control: protocols are also sites of creativity. Two ideas from that work travel well:

  • Vernacular protocols — not only the rule-sets elites design and impose from the top down, but the ones communities outside institutional power build all the time (a local dialect is itself a vernacular protocol). Trans and other marginalised communities, for instance, develop rich protocols for care and survival.
  • Protocol sovereignty — a protocol controlled by no single entity (like the internet’s TCP/IP) can take on a power of its own. Getting there means entangling many stakeholders, which is also what creates the risk of capture by corporate or state power.

Schneider also argues protocols were the dominant form of human organisation long before the nation-state — which itself he reads as just one “protocol of stateness,” historically an aberration — and that, since no single state can govern the climate or the internet, protocols are becoming central again.

Sources

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