I always looked at the world around me and wondered how it worked. My father was a mechanical engineer, and we were always talking about the unseen — how things work underneath, how things connect. When I got to college in the fall of 1995 the web was really just in its infancy but spreading rapidly, and somehow that early exposure made me understand that protocols were the critical glue of the digital world. When I met the folks in the Planetwork community who had worked on the Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet — their effort to create protocols for people, with a civil society orientation to the design — it made total intuitive sense to me.
In 2005 I was at Strand Books in New York and I found a book that would solidify this intuition and the critical importance that protocols play in shaping the whole world: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization by Alexander Galloway. This book really spoke to me and I have read it many times since. It affirmed my choice to work on the protocol level to shape the future. This piece is written for those of you who may not yet “get” protocols — to show why they are fundamental to how the world operates and for protocols humans actually create a critical leverage point for shaping the future.
You already know what a protocol is. You just don’t call it that.
If you’ve ever sat in a circle where a talking piece moves from hand to hand — where no one speaks out of turn, where silence is welcome, where the holder of the piece has the floor and everyone else has the practice of listening — you’ve been inside a protocol. The circle didn’t need a moderator with a mute button. It didn’t need an algorithm deciding who speaks next. The form itself organized participation. That’s what a protocol does.
If you’ve participated in an event run as Open Space Technology — where the agenda is co-created in an opening circle by the participants, anyone can convene a session, and the Law of Two Feet means you’re free to leave any conversation that isn’t serving you — you’ve been inside a protocol. Open Space doesn’t work because someone runs it. It works because the principles are simple, shared, and self-enforcing.
Consensus process is a protocol. Sociocracy is a protocol. Robert’s Rules of Order is a protocol. Each one encodes different assumptions about power, participation, and voice. Each one makes certain things possible and other things impossible. You can’t do emergent self-organization in Robert’s Rules. You can’t run rapid parliamentary procedure in a consensus circle. The protocol shapes what happens — not by dictating what people say, but by structuring how they relate.
Indigenous communities have been running protocols for millennia. Seasonal ceremonies, water-sharing agreements, fire management, protocols for welcoming visitors and for protecting sacred knowledge. These aren’t quaint customs. They are sophisticated coordination systems — tested across generations, adapted to specific landscapes, encoding relationships between people and between people and land.
We have been designing, choosing, and debating protocols our whole lives. We called them practices, processes, frameworks, governance structures, or ways of doing things. The word protocol makes visible what they all share: they are agreements about how to coordinate without anyone being in charge of everyone else.
Life Runs on Protocols
This is not a metaphor. This is literally how living systems work.
When a tree under attack by bark beetles releases volatile chemicals into the air, and neighboring trees respond by producing defensive resins before the beetles arrive — that’s a protocol. A chemical signal, a shared receptor, a coordinated response. No central authority. No tree in charge. The protocol is the coordination.
When mycorrhizal fungi shuttle phosphorus from a mature Douglas fir to a struggling seedling in exchange for carbon — that’s a protocol. The wood wide web is not a poetic image. It is a distributed coordination network running chemical signaling protocols: resource sharing, threat alerts, nutrient exchange, with no central server and no terms of service. It has been running for roughly 450 million years.
DNA is a protocol — a universal encoding scheme shared by all life on earth for nearly four billion years. Every cell reads it the same way. It is the most successful open standard in the history of the planet. Hormones are signaling protocols. Neurotransmitters are protocols. Immune recognition — self versus not-self — is a protocol.
And every living cell has a membrane — not a wall, but a selective protocol for what enters and what exits. The membrane is what lets a cell maintain its own coherence while participating in a larger organism. Without a membrane, the cell dissolves into its environment. Without exchange across the membrane, the cell dies. The membrane is what makes it possible to be sovereign and connected at the same time. This is the question every community faces: how to be part of a larger network without being dissolved by it.
When we talk about protocols for human coordination, we are not borrowing a concept from computer science and applying it to nature. We are recognizing the oldest organizing principle in the living world.
The Protocols We Can’t See Are the Ones Running Us
Here is the problem: most of us can see social protocols. We can debate consensus versus sociocracy, critique how a funder’s reporting requirements distort the work, name the difference between Council process and Robert’s Rules. But we cannot see the technical protocols we’re running on — and those protocols are shaping us just as powerfully.
Keller Easterling, in Extrastatecraft, calls this disposition — the inherent but undeclared tendencies of infrastructure. Infrastructure doesn’t just carry things. It shapes behavior, creates governance effects, determines what’s easy and what’s hard — all without explicit political mandates. ISO standards, trade-zone agreements, broadband network architecture: these are governance systems operating below the threshold of visibility. They have, as Easterling puts it, “the power and currency of software.”
Tiziana Terranova makes the same point about digital networks: protocols function as governance mechanisms without appearing as such. They don’t dictate what people say or do. They shape what communication becomes possible, what coordination is easy, what relationships can form. Protocols are, in her words, “sites of political struggle disguised as technical neutrality.”
This is the move that matters: a tool choice is a “protocol choice”. When a movement adopts Slack, that is a protocol choice. When a community runs on Google Docs, that is a protocol choice. When a neighborhood organizes on Nextdoor, that is a protocol choice. Each one comes with built-in dispositions about who owns the data, who can leave, who can connect to whom, whose attention gets monetized. None of them are technical neutrality. All of them are governance — chosen, mostly, by product teams in San Francisco optimizing for growth metrics.
Technical Protocols Are the Same Kind of Thing
The internet itself runs on protocols. SMTP routes email. HTTP carries the web. DNS resolves names. TCP/IP moves packets. These are not platforms. Nobody owns them. They are shared agreements — the same kind of thing as a circle’s talking piece, just expressed in code instead of practice.
This is why email still works the way it does. You can use Gmail, Protonmail, Fastmail, or run your own server. You can switch between them without losing the ability to reach anyone. SMTP — the protocol — is the substrate. No company owns it. No company can enshittify it.
The web works the same way. HTTP and HTML are open. You can read this article on any browser, any device, any operating system, without asking permission from anyone. The web isn’t good because of any one company. It’s good because the protocol is a commons.
The technical protocols and the social protocols are the same kind of thing. Both are agreements that let autonomous participants coordinate. Both shape what’s possible without dictating what happens. Both can be designed for openness or for capture. The grammar is the same; only the medium is different.
Why This Matters Right Now
Every group we belong to is running on protocols. Some are protocols we chose deliberately — the way we open and close meetings, how we make decisions, how we welcome newcomers. Others are protocols we inherited without noticing — the platform the group lives in, the rules the platform enforces, the data the platform keeps.
The first kind — the visible ones — get talked about, debated, refined. The second kind — the invisible ones — govern the conditions of all the work the first kind tries to do.
That asymmetry is the problem. The protocols we can’t see are doing the most to shape what’s possible. They are choosing the conditions of our relationships, our coordination, our collective memory. And they are mostly choosing in ways that are not in our interest.
The first move is to see them. To recognize that the digital tools every group is adopting are protocols — and that they govern us as surely as Robert’s Rules ever did.
This is the first in a series of posts that will be linked below as they are published.
Kaliya Young has been working at the intersection of digital identity, community infrastructure, and face-to-face organizing since 1999. She is co-founder of Project Weave.
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