Protocols for Flourishing: Shaping Evolvability in Open-Ended Socio-Technical Systems
Protocols are rule systems that regularize interactions among human and non-human actors in socio-technical systems (STS). Documented in RFCs, standards, or laws—and ultimately instantiated in hardware and software—they create a landscape of affordances: an architectural substrate that serves as a new layer of reality upon which new worlds flourish. Once deployed, a protocol can catalyze the spontaneous emergence of higher STS layers and new protocols, forming a hierarchical socio-technical ecology. The Internet protocol, for instance, catalyzes applications, such as online commerce, virtual communities, and social media, while also hosting higher-order protocols such as blockchains. By governing how actors act within afforded possibilities, protocols determine the evolvability of everything built atop them—effective protocols remain open-ended, continually inviting innovations, while ineffective ones ossify, stifling further novelty. Crucially, protocols themselves evolve, as evidenced by successive Internet protocol upgrades, keeping the broader socio-technical ecology poised at the edge of chaos, where it retains the capacity for ongoing emergence of innovations. This position paper frames protocols as Artificial Life (ALife) systems, revealing their life cycle: genesis at self-organized criticality, open-ended aliveness, flourishing at the edge of chaos, adaptation through upgrades, evolution of evolvability, hierarchical self-organization into nested stacks, and eventual senescence or death through ossification or environmental change. We aim to elevate protocols as first-class research concepts in STS research and open a fertile dialogue connecting STS research through the lens of ALife theory.