Cross-domain Analogies

I don’t know much about computers or diplomacy, but protocols seem to share a consistent structure in a few domains:

  • In politics, protocol facilitates nation-nation exchanges
  • In computing, protocol facilitates machine-machine exchanges
  • In society, protocol facilitates agent-agent exchanges
  • In climate, protocol facilitates industry-ecosystem exchanges

It’s like no matter how hard we try to achieve unity (like making calculated species-scale or planetary-scale decisions) there’s too much inconsistency between actors. Unless an omnipotent dictator come along, protocols will be a permanent Band-Aid layer in the coordination stack

Which renews my confidence that there are plenty of protocol best practices to share between domains, like applying principles from computing to diplomacy.

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