On protocols & infrastructure

"The silence about purpose was not the absence of politics but a politics of non-interference, and its beneficiaries were predictable: whichever actors had the resources to build in the space the protocols left ungoverned." -Laurens Hof, the purpose of protocols

• Protocols are infrastructure for many, possibly unrelated and uncoordinated parties, to do things together. They encode some amount of coordination on behalf of interested parties.
• "Infrastructure" more broadly in the industry plays a similar role: it refers to all the invisible (unless you know where to look!) hardware, software, computing resources, frameworks that allows things to actually run. Oftentimes, infrastructure teams at companies provide the necessary scaffolding to allow product teams to do things, without coordination with humans!

A carrier bag theory of software (an unpublished essay)

• what were the first tools? the carrier bag or the spear? is technology for conquest or for culture?
• the story of humanity is the story of technology. there is a direct line from who we consider ourselves to be, to what we build and define as 'technology'
• Reframing our idea of technology from that which makes convenient, makes faster, makes anew, to that which holds human culture is necessary if the tech industry is ever to make good on its promise to ‘make the world a better place’. To recenter this act of holding is to value software’s ability to sustain that which makes us human, rather than its ability to render humans obsolete. It is to value collective knowledge and flourishing rather than the opportunistic creations of boy geniuses, which alternately either save us all or kill us all.

Further ~infrastructural~ reading

• critical infrastructures lab; roots & routers reading group
• UC Berkeley TCS + STS reading group; link