# Protocol politics Every economic system is a computational process. It operates according to underlying rules – a formal interaction protocol that dictates how value is defined, recognized, measured, and coordinated. In other words, every economic protocol encodes a worldview. It defines who can act, what counts as value, how relationships are recognized, and how coordination happens. Like laws or institutions, protocols shape what can be done, by whom, and under what terms. They don’t merely facilitate transactions – they construct social reality. If we wish to change our economic reality we need to change our economic protocols, for our economy is bounded by the expressivity of its protocols. ## Why it matters now This is our core insight: Protocols are the heart of politics in a semiotically overloaded, meaning-saturated, trust-deficient world. They don’t work just at the level of competing meanings and interpretations, but at concretely defining the space of what is possible, i.e., the conditions of our action and thought. If we don’t intervene at the level of protocol design – how we value, relate, and coordinate – we’ve already handed over the political ground. We see protocol not just as a technical substrate, but as a field of intervention, expression, and struggle. It is about composing new conditions of our collective existence and becoming. Protocols are the politics of possibility. ## Formal politics In an age of arbitrary meaning, formality becomes a radical political tool. The political power of protocols lies not only in what they coordinate, but in how they do it. Protocols are formal systems: they create unambiguous rules, define clear boundaries, and enable shared state transitions without the need for centralized authority or ongoing interpretation. In an era of semiotic inflation -- when meanings drift and institutions lose trust -- formality becomes not only a constraint, but also a condition for freedom and autonomy. This is what we mean by formal politics: the capacity of protocols to organize the possibility space of social life through precise, interoperable, and composable forms. They allow networks to create boundaries and truths that are simple enough to hold, yet flexible enough to evolve. Unlike representational politics, which negotiates between meanings and interpretations, formal politics operates at the level of possibility space itself -- structuring what kinds of relations, actions, and values are even thinkable or executable. Protocol is a generative political form. But it is the formality of protocols that enables them to generate and scale. Formality is how trust can be embedded without consensus, how cooperation can persist across boundaries, and how autonomy and interdependence can coexist. In this sense, formal politics is not the opposite of politics-as-usual -- it is the missing infrastructure for political action in complex, distributed worlds. It does not mean the abstraction of life into code, but the composition of new ways of living together across difference. Protocols are not only technical -- they are epistemic, organizational, and existential. Their formality is what allows distributed networks to generate and sustain new truths, without collapsing into chaos or coercion. In a world where both meaning and governance are in crisis, this is not just a computational feature. We think it is a political necessity. Formality is not an escape from politics, but its expressive core in distributed systems. ## Political media What changes when we treat protocols and their formality as political media * Design becomes governance: every “if/then” in a protocol is a decision about what matters. * Possibility becomes programmable: Protocols define not just behavior, but the entire horizon of relation. * Power becomes infrastructural: the deepest forms of governance today are not laws -- they are defaults. * Agency becomes compositional: protocols allow us to recompose economic subjects, roles, and institutions from the inside out. This is why we think protocol work is political by design. We are building with the full understanding that economic coordination is an expressive medium -- and whoever defines the grammar defines the horizon of possibility. ## The next value creation layer In recent history, the value of tech has been captured by controlling the state of the network: For example HTTP gave rise to platform empires like Google (search state), Facebook (social state), and Amazon (commerce state). Their competitive advantage was in owning the data and the state layer. Yet with the development of decentralized storage and computation, that advantage is now eroding. So where will the next value layer, the next competitive advantage emerge? We think it will emerge from the protocols of economic coordination that mediate the ways people interact, govern, coordinate, and compose value together: * When features and data are replicable, what remains unique is how people belong and feel about participating. * An early paradigmatic example: Ethereum vs. Ethereum Classic? Their split wasn’t technical, but a divergence in political grammar. * In open, programmable environments, when the coming economic and financial forms become programmable, protocol politics becomes a value proposition. It is not just “governance”, but how it feels to interact, how relationships are structured, and how trust, risk, and opportunity flow. We call it the *economic space*. Our thesis is that the winners of this new economic paradigm won’t just write better contracts. They will compose better economic subjectivities: * That empower coordination over extraction * That give agency to the edge * That let participants become co-creators of value logic itself ### In a world that’s lost in its meanings, protocols write the conditions of the possible. We don’t just compute coordination. We compose the agency to reimagine it. That is why we talk about authoring futures. It means not just building tools, but developing an economic media for designing postcapitalist spaces of action. We are not only speculating on the coming change, but engineering the conditions under which it becomes inevitable.