Using Protocols: Considerations

Charlene Sequeira

In this follow-up essay, Charlene challenges the anthropocentric ideologies that often underpin our protocols. She argues that for protocols to be effective in a world marked by unprecedented complexity and ecological crises, they must pass rigorous “pressure tests.” Read Part 1 at Using Protocols: Getting Started. 

Protocols are most often built on anthropogenic, technocratic, and capitalistic ideologies that lie in opposition to our hope for planetarity.¹ For protocols to be successful in the large world context of increasing uncertainty, expanded complexity, and equitable attention to non-human entities, there are certain pressure tests that protocols need to be put through in order for us to build a new world-ecology.²

Speed and Scale

When the speed and scale of our systems fluctuate in unprecedented ways, when any false sense of balance and control are swiftly ripped away by fires and war, how do our protocols cope? What embedded power structures are conceding to small world views and fan a function of irrelevance? How can we identify pathways of agency and action that can help us evolve at the unprecedented pace of anthropogenic calamities? How can protocols be catapulted into generative-value lead action at speeds and scales that match our undefined times?

Language and Learning

Achieving an increase in scale requires shared language that not only helps communicate and inspire a shared vision but also helps build novel conceptual frameworks for new futures that are yet to be named. Speed would rely heavily on an autonomous decentralized peer-to-peer learning structure that is not only based on trust and ethics, but a vibrant sense of imagination and experimentation. The era of discontinuity³ leaves us with few to no frameworks to lean on, no precedents of success, and a blurry at best definition of what flourishing futures may look like. How then, do we design legible protocols within crumbling systems? When current epistemologies fail us, how do we co-create new language for the futures we want? What is needed to completely re-imagine the future we want, and build pathways, language, and mechanisms that steer us collectively in that direction?

Expanded Ecological Ethics and Large-World Views

Creating new futures free from problematic structures of the past requires a level of epistemological humility that redraws the boundaries between “us” and “them.” In doing so protocols need to expand beyond individualistic and capitalistic models, foregoing human-centered design principles to make way for a more polycentric Life-Centered Systems Thinking⁴ method. If this multiplicity is what we are steering towards, how will future protocols equitably distribute value across human and non-human stakeholders? How then do protocols embed mechanisms to capture and equally consider non-human feedback loops that do not conform to human-scale boundaries?

Hospicing Power Structures to Stewardship

Protocols were built to maintain a certain status quo of power dynamics and meet a predetermined outcome relatively successfully. In times of planetary scale instability, institutions that have assumed authority often fail to achieve almost any level of success, fail to maintain trust, fail to chart a course for the unknown that all leads to an almost deafening sense of friction and fear. But instead of trying to maintain hierarchy and rebuild obsolete pathways and mechanisms, how can we build healing and stewardship from the rubble? How can protocols be consciously malleable enough to take on a completely new avatar that meets these unprecedented times? In doing so, how can we build safety and care in moments of collective transition?

Plurality and Complexity

Systems that do not consider imperative planetary perspectives will collapse under the weight of their naïvety. It is crucial for protocols to recognise and apply the multiple coexisting realities and worldviews in its codified patterns. How do we design protocols that can successfully generate decentralized and self-governing value-cycles? And how can these value-cycles consider the importance of diverse cultural, epistemological, and ecological perspectives?

No-Externalities and the Unknown

We design systems and protocols to have clear boundaries to enable some form of comprehension and consequent actions. These boundaries can change, shift, blur, overlap, and even break—but they still exist. Our boundaries draw an imaginary line between what should be considered and what is disregarded. In reality, these boundaries are created around quantifiable and self-serving “knowns.” Choosing to ignore the rest of reality limits possibilities, and transfers the responsibilities of otherwise-avoidable harms—by design. Externalities are a product of anthropogenic rationale. How do we expand our sense of self to include the previously ignored and unconsidered? What scaffolding can be built to allow for genuine consideration of the role and impact of interdependent entities? How do we do this while making peace with the limits of our perspectives and capabilities?

In this humble attempt to unpack protocols in the polycrisis, we try to decipher what is—in ways that are useful and applicable—and invite you to imagine what could be. A taxonomy of sorts has been offered with an invitation of open dialogue and collaborative imaginaries, for if we can truly lay down the protocols and taxonomies of an extractive past, we can focus on co-creating a different strategic pathway to a flourishing future.