Summer of Protocols: Dangerous Protocols with Nadia Asparouhova

Transcript

foreign [Music] network podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and is published every Tuesday and Thursday if you want to learn more visit our website at greenpill.network where you can download the green pill book for free join the Discord and become a member of your local greenpill.network chapter my guest today is Nadia asparova Nadia is back on the podcast today we did an episode with her a few months ago she's a writer and thought leader in the space and uh has

been building in public it for the better part of a decade in web 2 and uh is now participating in the summer of protocols research program which was an 18-week program funded by the ethereum foundation as part of her participation in the summer of protocols she wrote a paper entitled dangerous protocols that will be released in the not too distant future I'm excited to have her back on the show to talk about her research and her upcoming essay on dangerous protocols we are doing a series of episodes on summer of protocols which has been spearheaded by venkatesh Rao and Tim bako of the ethereum foundation it's all about studying the field of protocol research what were What If instead of taking an agent or

institution-centric view on history on human coordination we were to look at protocols and how they affect human coordination and so I've got a slew of guests that have gone through the summer of protocol research program in 2023 which we think could be a foundational part of the establishment of protocol research as a field in the future and Nadia was a participant in this episode we talk about dangerous protocols so basically the idea of protocols can be bad or dangerous not just uh utopian or not just use for human coordination and I think that Nadia I just really appreciate the way that she think thanks I've been following Nadia ever since she wrote a seminal report on open source

sustainability back in the 2010s and for those of you who've been following my career for uh since the start of Bitcoin you know that bitcoin's original Mission was to grow and sustain open source software so Nadia has been an influential person for me getting into open source sustainability and she's gotten more interested in protocols and the ethereum space I've been following her work and it's just really such a pleasure to have her on on the podcast it's not an understatement to say that she's a hero to me and to many in the open source sustainability space so this episode with Nadia asparova talks about dangerous protocols and we are continuing our series on the summer of protocols so coordination I hope you enjoy this episode with Nadia ballet Dao

is an open Global Collective working to finance and democratize the governance of synthetic biology Technologies to protect the future of our planet research and progress into synthetic biology is critically constrained by the world of nation-state regulations and bureaucracy from middlemen but the potential that synthetic biology has for the world is massive it can produce a world in total harmony with nature we can grow stuff using cells like software it's awesome and the best part is we no longer have to pull carbon out of the ground to grow and maintain civilization don't you think we should be funding this Valley Dow does and that's what they're here to do to try and make the solar Punk World of Tomorrow a reality today so join Valley Dao right now and save the planet at valleydow.bio hey

Nadia how's it going good there you go pretty good really excited to enter the headspace of Summer protocols so tell me about your experience with Summer of protocols and what y'all were trying to do and how you think about the world within the summer of protocols when I first heard about it uh from I think Tim daiko um I thought it was just a really cool rare opportunity kind of on this like meta level for to have like a bunch of different independent researchers who've typically worked on the internet to come together and think about a shared theme so just the structure the program was pretty interesting to I think for a lot of people myself included not just sort of working alone on a new topic this time but actually like collaborating and talking to people in the way that you might um have a like you know an

academic campus or something like that so yeah I think everyone was touching on this topic of what our protocols what are they mean in the world today why are they significant where are they going but everyone kind of took a very different attack um and an approach and I think talking through our different approaches and interests is actually for someone like Queen who usually works a lot all the time that was actually enormously beneficial to get lots of different perspectives on on the same topic and I think made everyone's work better so as far as I understand it the headspace was instead of taking an agent-centric or institution-centric view of History what if we looked at history as through the lens of protocols protocol Centric history all the way

from handshakes to democracy to tcpip is that true reductionist or is that how would you how would you encapsulate the headspace of of some of our Protocols are we taking a protocol Centric view of of history and and human coordination Nick some people took a historical view I definitely do a lot of like historical background research for my piece I think like the way I sort of broadly described it was that I think in Tech in particular um Tech crypto wherever uh when we talk about protocols people have a pretty like technical association with what protocols are and so they think about like blockchains and think about pcpit or whatever there's a sort of like shared sense or desire from the researchers in the program that you know

there's like what are protocols really in terms of Beyond just being lines of code or there's some under discussed aspect of like how protocols actually affect society that um there's just there is no real body of research on that if you if you try to read about protocols most of it it's just like you know technical implementations facts things like that um so I wanted to create a body of research that is more about the social implications of like what these things really mean in our lives um I think there's a particular to sort of my project that summer um I think there's just like a lot of rhetoric that flies around about like the benefits of protocols or the harms of protocols and like is that even really consistent like I don't think

it's very I don't think that conversation is very um consistent and there isn't really a shared understanding of what protocols really are um especially in connection to how they've historically been used and applied so um so yeah I think the Mandate was very Broad in that way um and again people just took like very different um angles on it but that was my my interest in I think that was part of the goal of the program I wonder if you could um maybe grab the audience's experience in talking about protocols with a tangible example of a protocol um maybe a one way to ask this is what's your favorite protocol or what's an example of a protocol that you would love to bring up oh man um

uh gosh I don't I mean yeah I don't know if I have a favorite protocol but um I think like maybe someone like the disconnect that I I felt that that led me to my particular project was um seeing how people talk about protocols in crypto governance was something that's kind of like stuck in my mind for the last few years um I used to spend a little bit more time to get out that space and maybe less so now but um just hearing a lot of this conversation around like how protocols can help govern Us in this more I guess like prescriptive way that to me felt there are often feels just sort of like disconnected from how I think about certain Human Social governance and uh but there are you know there are

historical examples of protocols and and how they're using governance um uh diplomatic protocols I think are a good example of this so in international diplomacy you have you know set of customs and you have like literally like Chief critical officers that are like governing how heads of state will like interact with each other and what their Customs are you have protocols for international diplomacy and they are called protocols um but they're a very different type of protocol from say having sort of like these prescriptive ways of like enforcing governance between people that are um yeah maybe just more like grounded and like technology versus like social norms um and so examining maybe like some of that disparity was was interesting to me this is calling to mind for me I think that there was a two by two Matrix that was somewhere in the summer of

protocol's website at Summer of protocols.com and there's a spectrum between I think it was small protocols so something like handshakes uh to to learn larger protocols that are something like International diplomacy which are you know like a suite of of different combined protocols and then another axis in the two by two Matrix was soft protocols things that are kind of squishy and then protocols that are immutable and and so you know in this in this Matrix I'm kind of thinking about crypto protocols as being like hard and contained by um you know a mutable blockchain based protocols they make the human form around the computer whereas it feels like traditional International protocols might be a little bit more soft um and malleable is that is that a fair

wave categorizing it I ended up landing on the assertion that um I think like Protocols are fundamentally social in nature so maybe all true protocols quote unquote at least the way I Define them um and and by the way I think like one of the things that really came out this summer was it we could not come up with a single definition of protocols like it's it is a very fuzzy concept um yeah and it sounds like a failure but actually I think it's weirdly a success um but anyway in the way that like I I've sort of thought about protocols I think of them as um being primarily social nature and so um technology is maybe what like codifies a protocol or makes a protocol more explicit or visible um but uh in the end it's you know what is actually like driving the behavior

and the participation in a protocol is something else entirely um I think we especially see this with this tension between social media platforms and protocols right now and people sort of attempting to constantly reinvent new um social platforms but in the end falling into like the same the same uh yeah you know pitfalls every time because there's like these underlying social protocols that are not really tied to the technology that really tied to any specific platform or instantiation of it um that we just keep repeating over and over again if we don't change something well I'm wondering if you could talk uh I want to ask about your paper that you wrote about dangerous protocol but first before we get into that I have one more question about the summer of protocols program itself which is um what do you think the meta of the research program

is you know what effect do you want to have on the world and what were you all trying to do by by being there together yeah I think um I'm leaving that more to sort of like the vision of the the um folks that are running the program but um My Hope for coming to it was that um that we can do like a little bit of field building I guess and so for other people that had these questions around you know hey like you know this there seems to be a lacking dialogue around how protocols actually influence Society or I'm noticing these sort of inconsistencies and how people talk about protocols or just like looking for that kind of language um I think for everyone that is purchased that did participate in it it felt like there was just very little out there and now hopefully for future

people they can kind of say oh here's a body of research that you know actually tackled this topic um and yeah hopefully just create more conversation around that if we were looking back at this from 2030 2023 summer of protocols could be the point in time in which the protocol research field the study of protocols was actually established like this could be a new field that's studied from an academic perspective and increases the body of human knowledge about protocols and the way they help humans coordinate interact process things Yeah we actually had a lot of really healthy uh debates about should protocol protocol studies or something like that be a field should this be something that is descended or

more like rooted in Academia or should it live in the land of independent research or whatever but I think like wherever that goes like yeah my personal opinions there absolutely could be an entire field around it that doesn't exist today okay so let's dive deep on dangerous protocols so why did you choose This research topic and if you could give us a broad Strokes overview of of the paper on dangerous protocols that you wrote that'd be great I started out with a different topic um when I first joined um and then just end up sort of converging on on these questions around how noticing this tension in the conversation about protocols especially I think in the realm of yeah both crypto and maybe like Tech more broadly people are always talking about protocols as this like

tool for Liberation and how it's going to free us from platforms it's going to free us on control and then trying to reconcile that with my sort of like longer historical View and understanding of protocols as a way of simplifying decision making and several finding um you know the amount of individual control that anyone can actually exert and so yeah I had this question in my mind of like our protocols actually meant to be tools for Liberation are they tools for control and and yeah what would we sort of like do with that information so um so I ended up kind of trying to put some more structure around what that really means and talking about how Protocols are this sort of fundamentally social concept rather than a technical

concept and how they might initially be created by an by a specific entity or they might initially need um you know specified by these like hard technical constraints like code um or you know even like your physical build environment but then like in the end they become really you know they kind of Escape these hard constraints and become internalized into our own identities um and so we become our own enforces of protocols um uh where we feel that like complying with a protocol or a social protocol is like it's just like sort of like part of Who We Are uh and then kind of taking that and applying that to in particular I think just sort of like how like online discourse has

evolved in in recent years and how we've sort of all become victims of this like protocolized type thinking where we're kind of spitting out these views and opinions that um we think are unlikely truly believe are on um individual forms of self-expression but are actually reflecting this like protocolized mindset um criticalization of ideas and so I talked initially about how you know we think about this early industrialized age of protocolized thinking that was much more closely associated with like a bureaucratic mindset and now today the modern version of the bureaucratic mindset is the crisis mindset where we're all being governed by these like crises that are um yeah protocolized versions of ideas

well maybe let's step through some of these ideas one by one um I'm interested in this dual nature of protocols specifically simplifying complexity versus exerting control and um you know I'm wondering if you have an example of something in each of those each of those categories a protocol for simplifying complexity and also a protocol for exerting control sure um yeah I need like one of the examples I used about simplifying and I think like really like any one protocol can kind of be used in both directions in a good or a bad way so one example that I used was um standardized testing or like aptitude testing or getting into a school or getting into um or applying for a job and um in in the one sense it is a useful like the

practice of using aptitude testing is a useful protocol because it does simplify complexity around um you know trying to evaluate every candidate on their own terms would just be a lot of paperwork and a lot of context um especially if you're talking about you know like school admissions and you have plant the candidates you're looking at so um it's it makes sense to manage all that information by having um you know by using some sort of like standardized test um but then the flip side of it and we've seen some of these debates in the past year or two in particular is well you know if everyone can kind of be reduced to this like very simple score like is that really uh giving us a complete picture of like who the applicant is um and and does it become like does it become possible to uh just

like end up end up gaining the system so so then protocols start to become this sort of like constraint of agency where the the fullest version of yourself is not really being expressed yeah it feels like along with simplifying complexity there's sort of a risk of being true reductionist if you take a multi-dimensional and dimensional human intelligence and bring it down to a single uni-dimensional score by definition you're reducing it's not only complexity but also some of the beauty of of an individual human into into that score I'm wondering if we could move on into control mechanisms of protocols so uh what are the mechanisms of control for protocols and what are the different types of them and and how do they relate to each other

I started out by thinking about the origins of protocols and how they're initially enforced by these more like external authorities so you it could be um you know like a a central regulatory body that creates a set of Standards or regulations or API docs or whatever um that sort of like sets the protocol for everyone else um it could be uh these like physical constraints like as I mentioned earlier like code um code is a type of physical constraint that you know creates the terms for a protocol that needs to be followed or it could be something that is socially enforced among your peers where you know we follow this protocol because it's

something that we ought to do and so there's like all these sort of like external forces that are suggesting that you comply with the protocol um but I think like over time and this doesn't happen to every protocol but eventually for some of the strongest protocols the locus of authority moves from being this like external force that is telling you to comply with something and you're doing it because you feel like you're you ought to see where you have to to the protocol just becomes this like a virtuous part of who you are and you're you're the one who is now championing it and you believe that is like part of your own beliefs and it's like a sort of trivial example but I think an illustrative one of speed bumps as an example of like they are a physical constraint that tells you to slow down

right so like yeah yeah you have no choice when you hit this rebound they need to slow down but like eventually it's it's not really like you know why do the speed bumps continue to persist over time even though like theoretically we could remove them if we didn't want to or whatever um and they persist because people believe those feedbacks are really good for you know good for traffic good for safety good for your neighborhoods um and so they become this like virtuous thing that we then um you know Advocate should exist even though there's actually like this whole body of evidence that speed bumps end up reducing the number of overall I've lost because like they also in addition to slow down cars they're slowing down emergency vehicles um and you know people on crisis are now getting to the hospital later than they

could um so it's not clear that speed bumps actually save lives but uh everyone is sort of just like over time and just trained to play but it is a good thing um you might say yeah I don't know maybe like a lot of like security Theater falls into this as well or um Public Health kind of theater around it's a thing that you're initially told to do we were told to put you know a restaurant or told to um take off your shoes when they go through TSA or whatever but like eventually becomes this thing where like I think you know younger people today don't even know why we take off our shoes at TSA they just do it because that's what you're supposed to do um people uh yeah like wearing masks has become like a very like virtuous thing that people do

um so even though it initially started with someone else telling you what to do eventually becomes something that you are have internalized and are evangelizing yourself well there's a lot there and I think there's there's really some profound profound points to me made here um one one that comes to mind for me is is control mechanisms of protocols that have lags in their enforcement versus those who don't so basically a speed bump is immediately physically enforced on cars and emergency vehicles that go over it um by the laws of physics it's enforced but a cop that's hiding behind a bush and is going to pull you over uh there's a lag time and they're only fractionally enforced the speed limit is only

fractionally enforced if there's if there's a law uh a police officer around and so just like the difference between protocols that are enforced within the constraints of our everyday life versus those that are enforced by outside uh authorities is kind of um interesting to me and specifically since this is a crypto podcast I'll mention that I think I feel like there's a difference between um filing a lawsuit against someone and then waiting 18 months in order to get heard and then there's another six months in order to uh enforce the actual the actual law versus smart contracts which are just immediately enforceable by calling a RPC on on a blockchain node and so the lag time between the actual

action that the agents take in the system and the enforcement and uh and how that changes the perceptions of oh this law isn't really enforced in practice versus oh this is enforced immediately by the constraints of the environment creates different Behavior within the age and I think that that's that's kind of interesting to me I don't know if you have any riffs on on top of that yeah um I think that plays into sort of these questions around like what does good or bad protocol design look like which I yeah end up touching on and that was one of the things that I talked about was um when there is this like long lag time between I do something and then like it's not even clear whether it is being enforced maybe it's in force inconsistently so you know again like taking your stuff through TSA sometimes

you get something prohibited you get your bottle of water through where you get your like pocket knife through and you're just like well now I feel like I don't know whether this protocol really works or not um so yeah inconsistency and how it's enforced and then also just like long lag times and enforcing can it's regardless of whether the protocol is serving a useful purpose or not is is like a form of bad design right so um yeah I would definitely share that be that like a faster reinforced word response time is like quite a bit goods and then Okay so we've got control mechanisms of protocols and I've got these divided into three different categories physical constraints centralized Authority and peer enforcement uh the next point that I've got in my notes Here is moving from explicit to implicit over time so I'm

wondering if we could pinch and zoom on on that this is one of my guiding questions over the summer of you know just trying to like ground all this work in something tangible uh was you know if you're going to write a 50-year or 100 Year history of protocols and you're trying to describe like how is you know protocols as a concept how how is it evolved or changed over time um like where protocols going next and I think like that's a it's kind of a thorny question answer versus I think that's like persistent concept um and so that was where I was thinking about okay in the like protocolization 1.0 era or mindset um you know Protocols of obviously should probably like

forever since we've had human civilization or need for coordination but um I think there was this sort of like Doom that happened with the industrial era because suddenly you had this explosion of information um that needed to be managed somehow and that's where you started seeing this interest in a bureaucratic mindset um and interest in like standardization and this strong emphasis on institutions as an enforcement mechanism and that that was sort of when we think of the you know industrial era or the early um you know going from probably like late 1800s to like mid mid 1900s mid to late 1900s um that was sort of how that was the role that that protocols served they were they were um the sort of like

bureaucratic mechanisms um but then things started to like change a little bit and what started changed I think was the internet and everything sort of before and after it where you suddenly have you know this again explosion of information but it's not just information in the sense in in the sort of like manufacturing industrial kind of sense but it's it's an explosion of ideas um and and that that was sort of like Foster the internet and now there's this question of oh we have all these like unorganized ideas floating around the internet how do we cleanly package those up and standardize them and that's sort of the like protocolization 2.0 kind of mindset that um that I think we're just starting to enter into now

um and so we're in the past like what we think about Protocols are much more like explicitly defined by um yeah by some sort of Authority or some you know laws or regulations their um protocols that like are our peers enforce among each other and can like very explicitly State um now the the weird thing about protocols is like they're sort of just like internalized to us and we can't tell like what is it when I'm expressing a view or I'm sharing an idea like is it really my idea or is it something that's kind of been neatly packaged up and served up to me um that I'm just sort of like internalizing as my own um so I think implicit criticals are a much more difficult to identify than um the next ones are ones but they're

now sort of like governing all of our behavior and what we choose to do for work and how we choose a better time um and so yeah I think that's kind of like where we're where we're going now yeah I think it's sort of interesting to to see how different Generations react to protocols one that might have been explicit to the Baby Boomers is maybe just implicit to someone in gen Z and um you know there's sort of like it in that manifested in a generational divide in in values in the why behind people following different protocols so um just just seeing the evolution of of protocols from explicit to implicit is is um is sort of an interesting trend for me to see now I'm wondering if we

can move on into protocols as systems of social control to basically enabling levels of of agency versus hindering human agency how do you see that that Spectrum um yeah I mean actually probably maybe more curious about like how you think about it yeah yeah I think I I I just consistently felt this tension in particular uh how we I'd say specifically how people talk about the meditations of social platforms today and how I've only you know we had protocols to replace these centralized platforms everything would be better and uh and then I also seeing it a lot in sort of like crypto governance um experience and in all of these situations I hear This Promise

constantly that like we will be more in control of Our Lives if we only had more protocols but then I sort of look at all these historical examples outside of technology and it doesn't feel like protocols necessarily uh you know liberate us or make us more individual they work because they standardize and reduce um complexity and so I think yeah there's um there's just some sort of of tension there where sometimes that's really good sometimes we need protocols to reduce complexity if we had to you know come at every single situation Our Lives cold and have to make an individual decision about that would be exhausting so I don't I don't think particles are bad that's why I called her um this topic like dangerous protocols

because they're not they're not good they're not bad it's just that there's this sort of nuance around there right um but I don't think that you know I yeah I don't I don't think that protocols offer us more complexity or more customizability or um yeah just like the ability to they don't they don't really give us more Agency on their lives so that that's sort of the the inconsistency that I've sort of identified in um conversations today yeah well maybe if I can take your invitation uh to say what I think um maybe we could dive in on the social the social media portion of maybe the social media debate about about social media platforms versus protocols the point of hindering

of human agency that I see a critique of say Twitter or Facebook is uh is with respect to D platforming um so basically you do something that might be against the terms of service of of a platform and then without any due process your D platform so your entire social life on that platform The Social Network that you created the identity that you created is now removed and you have no due process uh in order to challenge that like you would in a um you know in a court system in public life if uh if there's a sanctioned actions taken against you then you have due process and and you can you're innocent until proven guilty um and so the move to protocols web 3 protocols I think is meant to be a way

of of codifying the locus of control within social media to not be some Department that's not accountable to you but to be a credibly neutral protocol that can't de-platform you in in maybe it depends on the protocol design but the the Deep platforming of of someone in a protocol that has implemented due process may have several points of appeals and checks of balances of power um and so you know to me that's that's sort of an interesting difference between a company that that may have been a bunch of total socially enforced protocols versus a blockchain based protocol for for social media and so you know I'd be curious if that sort of

meets your criteria of protocols as a system of of social control and how they live in different places and decentralized crypto based protocols versus warweb to Tech Giant based companies yeah I mean that's like a very very thorny topic obviously yeah that's in it but um yeah and and it's hard to step around you know the the question of like platforms versus criticals and like centralization versus decentralization or whatever but I think I think yeah um when people talk about what makes protocols better than the platforms there is some aspect of this like ability to sort of set the rules that you want to have and this yeah I think it is often intertwined with this notion

of like a decentralized Authority like there's no one single person in control it's kind of just this is similar way of doing things I find at least for myself when I kind of drill into some of the like trickier you know content moderation questions or governance questions neither solution is perfect but like a sort of like decentralized governance raises just as many questions to me as centralized ones as well and this issue at some point I remember with um internet archive where I wanted to Implement sort of like a you know a no follow rule for I just like categorically did you know want to be archived um and and trying to it turned into this whole thing where you know there's

there should be a convention set for it um and there was once upon a time there was a convention but the convention had now expired um this is you know many years ago now I'm rehashing old uh old uh grievances but um but I remember uh you know trying to figure out like how like how do I get this thing to stop doing a thing that I don't want it to do um and you know trying to like email the people there but because there's you know there just isn't that much support um you know no one was really responding to me they were responding very consistently um yeah there was there was just nothing that I could do about it and I remember thinking at the time I was like man if this was like Google or something it would honestly be a lot easier to like

they would definitely have a way to just yeah press a button and like make this fix this problem for me yeah and so I think like in a yeah when we talk about the governance clashes of being a user on a centralized um social platform that's being managed by a big Tech Giant You Feel The Clash when there's something that you as the user want and that the um the company can't provide you or is denying you um and those clashes are obviously very like visible and and it's really felt um but there's also you know on the flip side I think there are you can run to those same issues with decentralized authorities or with protocols that are sort of where there's no there's no there's no one to really appeal to if uh

this thing is controlling you there's no way to really Escape it um and I find that at least as concerning as um and and maybe even more so because you know who do you really fight like who is the bill on there um and I think that social platforms tend to be more visible villains are punching bags because we can at least like say oh you know this thing is driving me crazy but um but I think Protocols are actually kind of weirdly more controlling and harder to pin down when you do have these inevitable clashes you know what one vector to look at this is company versus protocol but another Vector is um basically governance structures so you can have a company or a protocol that's designed to be governed by the

people that it serves and so you kind of have a closed loop between um consumer to company protocol that it serves and then who are the managers or who is the protocol governed by if it's the same participants then as the people that it serves then you have this consent of the governed Loop that that exists um whereas like with with traditional corporations or for-profit companies you have their shareholders on one side of you as a manager and you have your users on the other side and you have a fiduciary duty to extract from your users to give to your to your shareholders um or I guess the crypto equivalent of this would be that uh if the users of the protocol are different from the

people who hold the tokens then you're gonna have a bifurcation of of um of of people who who the protocol serves and so for me it's it's all about preserving that Loop of the consent of the governed the users should be actually governing the company or the the protocol that they serve and that will lead us away from Bad protocols or bad companies I don't know if that resonates with you at all but that's just another Vector to splice it along instead of just company and protocol yeah and I think like um it does resonate I think it's just again this it's not that Protocols are good or bad they're just like fundamentally different and I don't think they're this yeah you know Universal Panacea for all the problems

that we face today and I was mostly interested in exploring with this project you know okay let's take for granted that we are being governed by protocols what are the like how do we know whether we're in a good or a bad protocol how do we if we are in a situation that we're not enjoying like how do we actually subvert that or work through it or around it um like one of the one of the points that I ended up making was that I think it's very hard to just sort of exit a protocol when you're you know because it's so closely tied to a network that you're a part of um so how do you subvert a protocol or work through a protocol and I think like we see that happening a lot right now and even in um social media use today where people

don't just like quit swearing a study but maybe they'll use it in a different way they'll get an ALT or something um so they can continue to say what they want but not have it be tied to their identity so I think there's um yeah there are a lot of ways to sort of work through the governance instead of just sort of explicitly resisting it or throwing it away um but that's a yeah different set of rules entirely well um there's a bunch more I want to get through for your paper but we only have seven minutes left so maybe we'll we'll speed through some of these last points I wonder if you could tell me about the fog of War problem in bad protocol uh basically where participants are trapped in sub-optimal systems uh but they have a fog of War yeah um I

think we touch this a little bit earlier as well uh in talking about that lag time between you know um a Virgo being enforced and and taking action um so I was trying to sort of identify a bunch of different criteria which I called the Kafka index uh because you know you're being attached to this sort of um disorienting these uh when you're wearing a bad protocol um uh so yeah just you know different types of criteria around like how do you know when you're in a bad protocol and and so when I was you know lack of lack of feedback loop um no way to sort of like measure how things are going um and I think all this sort of contributes to this yeah sense of like if I were

um where the protocol might technically be functioning um uh and so we'll see this in you know like the Health Care system or um academic science publishing how you know it does technically all work and everyone continues to participate in it and so it's sort of like stable in a way um but it's also just unsatisfying somehow to be part of these protocols um and so that's like yeah I think there's that that's sort of like fine where you can't you can't quite see how to get out of it but you're also like in you're you're also in it yeah I actually flew out to the summer protocols for one day um and you and I were in a group together in which we had to design a

what we called a kafka-esque protocol and ended up designing I think it was like an insurance company claims tree where you could never actually really get through to a human to actually submit your claim um it is like a life or death thing you have to get reimbursed for some healthcare expense you have but you keep on getting routed to new different agents and different mechanisms that are never really uh inputting your concerns and uh that was a fun exercise for me because I think we all have experience with phone trees and with insurance companies uh as as kafka's protocols but um yeah and anything more to say about that as we were sort of drawing out getting stuck in these like whirlpools where you're you're like you know kind

of going around the circles and everyone's had this experience on a phone tree where you just you know no matter what button you press you kind of end up back at the same start and it's uh yeah that's sort of like you're in it you're progressing but you're like where are you actually going fun as an intellectual exercise but frustrating as hell to be to be in not can you tell me about the three the three archetypes of protocol goodness again what's the story was trying to say okay you know you're all spent all the time talking about the bad things about protocols but like you know what is a good protocol actually look like um what purpose are they really trying to serve and um was trying to identify the the balance between I think like ideally you know in a perfect world a protocol

balances power between taking away the decisions that you don't want to be making um reducing again reducing unnecessary decision making reducing complexity so that you can go off and like be more agentic in the world and and focus on the things that you actually want to focus on like that that is what a good protocol should do so it has this like balance of power between the two um and so yeah they call that sort of like the Whitehead archetype um after this this quote from Whitehead about how um you're gonna have to read it off for me um but about you know the that uh human civilization advances by um you know the number of things that we can kind of automate away to all these different

um different processes and then the flip side of that being um you know the Kafka version where the the protocol is far too powerful and you're being trapped and that's kind of amazed as the individual um feeling that you you're you're being actually like very like constrained by by the protocol um and then the other flip side of that being uh the sort of Broadway archetype that I I mentioned there that um which is either uh name came from this short story of uh this this guy who's like you know working and um decides to sort of like explicitly stop really doing any work and his colleagues ask him to do stuff and he's just sort of like I'd prefer not to um and so this is like the archetypal

person that is highly eugenic but like too agentic right eventually this guy in the story Stars the national and yeah guys um because he just doesn't want to do anything and so uh so if you have a sort of like you know balanced version of between a balance of power between the protocol the participant you could either kind of skew on the side of have the protocol having too much power and you're trapped in those maze or the participant having too much power is also bad where you know we do need protocols to make our lives move faster um you can't just like opt out of everything uh but if you opt out of too many things and you end up kind of shooting yourself in the foot and not being able to do as many things in the world as you want to that's so neat um

okay so there's kafkas protocols which is when you're kind of Trapped in a maze and you can't get out of it there's Bartleby uh protocols where the individual agents are too agentic and they're not actually able to adhere to the protocol so it's kind of like the opposite of the kafkas protocols and then there's the Whitehead protocols which is basically the idea that human civilization advances when we can process more operations together and so basically um the more protocols that we have that are serving the needs of the participants human civilization advances and I guess like tcpip would be an example of this we can now process more information than we can before or maybe

ethereum uh if we're being generous to the crypto ecosystem is a whitehead Advance because we can now process more financial uh operations than we could before uh I think that we're getting towards the bottom of the hour and I'm just so thankful to you for doing this interview with me I think that um your essay dangerous protocols really opened my my mind in in many ways to the different ways that protocols can be good or dangerous and um you know I just really enjoyed reading it so as I understand it the essays from Summer of Protocols are not yet available but as I understand it they will eventually be made available and The Listener can find them at Summer of protocols.com when they are made available yeah in the

meantime how can people find you online and um and uh and read what you've been up to um either on Twitter um my username is not ifia n-a-y-i-f-i-a or just my website nadia.xyz well um thanks so much for coming on the green pillow podcast and keep up the great work Nadia this has been a lot of fun thanks for having me cheers [Music] what a fun episode we just heard from Nadia asparova about dangerous protocols thanks again for listening to the greenpill.network podcast we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers

and doers focused on using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world like Nadia and the whole summer of protocols cohort is a great example of this establishing a field of protocol research and propagating forward a body of knowledge about positive some protocols in the world if you value our work please remember to subscribe rate in review peace and love I will see you next time