2023 Retrospectus

Over the summer of 2023, a group of 33 researchers participated in the inaugural Summer of Protocols program, convened by the Ethereum Foundation. They were tasked with exploring protocols, broadly construed, from various angles and across a range of different domains. The program kicked off with a pilot study titled The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols: an initial exploratory survey of the major themes in the study of protocols that seemed particularly salient from the perspective of the Ethereum project. Some of these concerns, while seemingly narrow—such as the prospect of “ossification” of Ethereum— nevertheless turned out to have deep philosophical implications and relevance to protocols more broadly. The researchers, with backgrounds spanning architecture, law, game design, technology, media, art, workplace safety, and more, each attempted to tackle an open question around protocols. Their findings comprise a variety of textual and non-textual artifacts (including art works, game designs, and software), organized around a set of research themes: built environments, danger and safety, dense hypermedia, technical standards, web content addressability, authorship, swarms, protocol death, and (artificial) memory. The program output will be published over the next 6 to 8 months in the form of a Protocol Kit which will be available both as free and open-access materials online and as a print subscription. This summary document, which we are calling a retrospectus, is meant to convey an overall sense of the research output…