A Lighthouse in the Widening Gyre
I’m putting The Protocolist on hold for a few months. Fall is going to be busy – I’ll be focused full-time on the Summer of Protocols program, especially its partnerships track. It’s been a weird eighteen months since I got a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to study workplace safety in depth.
Going into that fellowship, I was feeling frustrated with the state of the art in occupational health and safety (OHS). It’s a swamp primarily populated by bureaucrats and armchair quarterback consultants. Which is too bad, because there’s still a lot of opportunity.
In Canada and the United States, work is a big part of our lives. “What do you do?” is the default conversation starter. For many, a job isn’t just a job – it’s also a form of competition, creative expression, or experimentation. Or it’s just a job, and that’s good too.
So, it’s a shame that occupational health and safety teams have become so ruthlessly unimaginative. Work can, and should, generate health. We’re in a privileged position to experiment with this, having already reduced accidents to almost zero. Anyway…
The nature of safety continues to be one of my chief brainworms. Safety comes up constantly. People complaining about “safetyism”, the Boeing scandals, lingering phobias about nuclear power, AI safety, security problems in retail stores, wildfire management, international climate accords, etc.
To get it off my mind for a bit, I wrote a mock table of contents for a book:
If that sounds at all interesting to you, please seek help (but also let me know). Before I retreat into Substack hibernation, I’m going to dump a few miscellaneous thoughts.
WD-Forte
We’re developing more of a romantic perception of maintenance, because it’s a more soulful form of overhead cost. When you own something, you must take care of it in order to preserve value – both aesthetic and functional. When you rent something, which is the new default model (“You will own nothing and you will be happy.”), the new form of overhead is paperwork. Every time you use something, paperwork. Soulless, maybe even soul-sucking, paperwork.
From writing like The Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance to Stewart Brand’s The Maintenance of Everything to Jocko Willink’s Discipline is Freedom, there are plenty of ways to reframe the mundane as virtuous. I’m partial to all of this, even if I’m not a great handyman. There is something satisfying about accumulating even modest physical skills.
That said, paperwork acumen probably has a better payoff these days. Access to elite protocol experiences like NEXUS, 401k’s, a family doctor, TSA precheck, etc. takes the edge off. Reducing the Kafka density in your life has been proven to reduce the risk of ulcers*.
New Rules for the Garbage Heap
Between AI, junkification, and adverse selection dynamics, there’s a lot of bullshit out there.
Realistic fakes are becoming increasingly common and getting better.
SEO farms and bots are clogging the arteries of the internet with unpalatable walls of text.
Sociopaths are really good at getting into positions of power and reach.
All in all, the “digital village” is an absolute freakin’ mess.
Like the chimpanzees that live next to dumps and gorge on all-inclusive scraps, we’re getting a bit chunky on an information diet full of bad news and misleads. Eating moldy grapefruit sounds bad, but it’s better than getting swept up in a misinformed swarm. Makes one want to turn it all off. More likely, we’ll just have to rely on trustworthy 1:1 or 1:few connections to verify things and maintain our sanity as distrust becomes the default.
Stockfish, a Straussian Mentor
Magnus Carlsen, one of the best chess players in history (up there with Kasparov, Fischer, Morphy) is pretty much unbeatable. But compared to chess engines like Stockish, Magnus is a chump. The world’s most powerful bots are truly impossible for humans to beat. They are impersonal, lack expression and language, but are masters of the game.
Despite Stockfish and friends being unable to explain themselves, they’ve “taught” chess players a lot about the game. Patterns of play begin to emerge, such as sacrificing pieces for more activity (measured by how many squares a piece has access to or how close to the center of the board it is). King safety (basically keeping your king in the corner with lots of pawns close by) is also something that engines prioritize.
These aren’t pieces of advice that got passed on. Rather, savvy players looked at how computers do stuff, read between the lines, and tried it out. There’s a kind of dance happening here. We initiated it by giving computers data, but now they’re taking the lead.
A Lighthouse in the Widening Gyre
The way diplomats use protocol to facilitate international and interorganizational relations is a lot like how software engineers use protocols to exchange data between computers. And digital protocols are evolving much faster than political ones. This is one reason why programs like SoP add value – almost no one breaks out of their silo to find new patterns.
Protocols are a particularly important thing to get right, because there is no We. You cannot scale unity to 100% of the human population, let alone “Gaia”. Individual components of our geopolitical, economic, and environmental systems have to coordinate laterally through protocols. Metainstitutions fracture under their own weight. Protocols limit domain-specific behavior to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes in an adjacent, but also specific, domain.
Unity isn’t coming any time soon. We’re in the Widening Gyre. People are drifting apart, good ideas are drowning in bad ones, and collective action problems are rampant. That’s not a doomsday prophecy. It’s just reality. Being protocol literate is immensely valuable in times of political divide.
There is no We – there is only Us, Them, and Protocol.
The Unexamined Life
In Matte Therapy, I explained how we introspect too much. The simple life doesn’t require reflection. One does as one does, adapting behavior based on environmental feedback. The self-improvement process is a black box. Development is on autopilot. A permanent flow state. Sound too good to be true?
Well, we live in a world of endless abstraction. This guy on Substack posted a photo of his breakfast in defiance to the navelgazing zeitgeist. A protein shake, a banana, some coffee – hold the pontification. Tres bien, mon frère. Excellent protein-to-philosophy ratio.
This retvrn might speed up. Like an AI that decomposes into alphabet soup after being trained on its own outputs, we’ve spent too much time analyzing our analyses. How do I feel today? Do I feel that way because society is telling me to? DoI feel like the words I use bias me to feel that my feelings are feeling feeblish?
John Gray and his cats argue that the unexamined life is, indeed, worth living.
He Was a Gamer Boy
Thirty-seven. The number of times I’ve fallen asleep reading Homo Ludens, a book making the case that play is what makes us a species worth naming. Even somnabulating through this book has inspired me, though. Humans do play a lot of games. My brother and I are “gamers” – I like soccer, chess, and Warzone; he rips Fortnite, D&D, and word puzzles. There’s a definite class system when it comes to games, which is unfortunate. Chess doesn’t prepare you any better for life than does Fortnite. In fact, the latter probably emulates real-world dynamics much more accurately than chess. Resource management and planning games with a competitive element are, in my opinion, the closest match.
But what’s more important than the type of game you play is your ability to turn what you’re doing into a game. Making something fun. Leveling up. Finding new challenges. Banning trolls and hackers. Yada yada… You get the idea. Being playful is a lovely human quality. Too bad the word “gamification” got ruined like five years ago.
C’est tout a ce moment. I might post updates here periodically for important stuff. If you wanna jam, the best place to do that will be on Discourse. :-)
Lovely set of thoughts, all the best with the upcoming work!