Bruce Sterling’s 1998 novel Distraction has a number of different aspects involving protocols:
- the opening scene is a flash mob swarming attack on a bank
- the main character is a political operative who is trying to resucitate failing social institutions by protocol-hacking them
- one of his clients is an architect/designer who developed a distributed, protocolized construction technology which figures in the plot
And his short story Maneki Neko is entirely about protocols, I just realized. A must read!