Protocollege

Cross-posting from Discord, from Fotis

Hey gang! With the occasion of the symposium, I will shill my own indie intellectual community-building effort around protocol studies, The Protocollege (not to be confused with the Seapunk protocollege - a happy coincidence). The group formed in Spring 2025, by a group interdisicplinary philosophers and sociologists, out of a realization that we have all been independently researching protocols in the wild and we need to coaslesce.

It’s goals are similar to the Formal Protocol theory SIG in developing a generalizable and integral theory of protocols, but more philosophical in nature and more based on (Mostly) ethnographic investigation of protocol practices. We started with life sciences as our domain of focus (bio-tech, genomics, animal experiments, develeopmental., ecology, agronomy), since most of us have done science ethnography and we ammaseed a library of resources and case studies.

My own aspirations with the group is to expand to all practice domains in general, bringing in knowledge from engineering, managerial and artistic practice, as well as being the liason for connecting the underground study of protocols (here in PI) with the academic study of protocol practice.

I anticipate that protocol discourse will keep on increasing in pop culture and might even supruse the AI hype soon and I want to be well positioned to anticipate the unintended consequences long before they are the new normal. I hope for a Protocol Ethics that is not as institutionally captured and dumbed-down as “AI Ethics”.

I am open to ideas on how our project could interface with PI in the present and future 🙂

Sources: website: https://proto.college/ zotero: https://www.zotero.org/groups/6024559/protocollege/library video recordings: https://archive.org/details/@the_protocollege crowdfunding: https://artizen.fund/index/p/the-protocollege-1?season=7