After spending 15 days in China (Shanghai and Chengdu) after an absence of 18 years, while my body was entranced and absorbed in its physical environment and my soul nourished by friends old and new, my mind was… discombobulated, questioning a lot about what I thought I knew about empire, autarkey, networking, and scale. The way I can see myself in your journey and descriptions… freaky! I’ll chalk it down to being Singaporean too and with an adjacency to the institutions we are both familiar with.
So I think you're both misscoping and underestimating the protocol world reductively as the decentralized blockchainy periphery and network-statey larps. Much of what you're attributing to empire is actually protocol. Empire proper presumes emperors, and the history of the last 1000 years is the steady decline and retreat of both. Vast empires broke up at the tail end of the colonial era, and emperors slowly retreated as the rule of law constrained them more and more.
Trump may be called a "bad emperor" but his authority pales in comparison to what imperial power actually looked like pre the era of revolutions 1848 etc. He wields more absolute power by virtue of there being more absolute power to wield, thanks to technology, but in relative terms, he has much less share of available power.
Xi might have more relative power than Trump, but his power too pales in comparison to historic emperors I think. And analyzed properly, both late-stage US and early-stage China "empires" are much more protocolish than their formal structures suggest. Even Trump's America has to chafe against the reluctance of NATO and other alliance problems to say "how high" when he says "jump."
The rules based international order was clearly protocolish, and even though Mark Carney may have declared it dead, it's actually pretty alive and load-bearing. I think the right way to analyze things is to view protocolishness as an embodied quality, not as a "type of guy" meme inventory. It's not a protocol because it checks off a list of items like formal decentralization, use of encryption etc. Or to look at it another way, Farrell and Newman called American an _underground_ empire, not a plain one. The fact that it had to wield power and influence stealthily rather than overtly already indicates the degree to which the "message of the medium" of protocolish infrastructures like payment networks or the internet reshapes the will-to-power of hegemons individual and state. Ditto China's BRI.
Understood that way, "protocol" is actually a post-end-of-history permaweird state that is both natural and inevitable because the technological environment simply does not allow as much control and autocratic governance as it used to. And protocols are not necessarily archipelagic. That's just the easy to understand archetypes. Protocols end up mirroring natural topographies, and represent some sort of minimal distortion of that by coercive power. What you're calling "empire" I think can be modeled as a "coercive power surplus" -- what can China or the US make their spheres of influence do that is not natural to the topography of that sphere of influence? Do they enjoy some sort of centralization premium?
Protocols, understood in their full-scope way are not precious little marginal larps, but the ascending planetarity. Obscured by imperial larps that are thin theatrical fictions modeled on nostalgic reactionary sentiment rather than real power. Russia and the US have already learned that in Ukraine and Iran. China will learn that too, soon enough.
I think you are right that I made protocol too archipelagic and peripheral. But I think you stretch protocol too far in the other direction. If protocol names everything from NATO to SWIFT to BRI to the internet to sanctions, it becomes almost coextensive with modern coordination itself. I’d now put it differently: stack and protocol are instrumented by empire mind. The stack is the body; protocol is the regenerative grammar; empire mind is the appetite to bend both toward central advantage.
Protocol projects are small only in the way stem cells are small. They are not marginal because they lack mass. They matter because, when the main body weakens, they can differentiate into new institutional tissue. That is why they attract both utopians and foxes. The protocol world is not the opposite of empire mind. It is where empire mind now goes looking for its next body.
Di is not an old imperial nostalgist. He is a strategist of protocol capture: cheap AI, installed base, data/cashflow from the middle zone, industrial-chain editing, parallel systems, monetary workarounds. That is not emperor power. It is empire mind learning to operate through protocol.
For me the test is our definition: A protocol is an engineered argument. Ie a structure for disagreeing with rules of engagement that embody some engineering logic as opposed to being the free-for-all of either total war or schmittian sovereign exceptionalism. So yeah, the moment total war and/or sovereigns become rule-bound you’re in protocol-land. After that it’s a question of degree, not kind. So yep. I do think protocolization is co-extensive with modern coordination. You don’t need flat power gradients or entity size distributions to be narrow. Stacks are just a complementary structural description of the same entity not a different entity, tcp/ip is a protocol AND a stack. I’d characterize empire entirely differently — exceptionalism narratives. So a sufficiently long line of monarchs and nobility “above the law” in a schmittian sovereign exceptionalism sense makes the narrative of the system itself exceptionalist, the more the exceptionalism is curtailed by protocols, the weaker its imperial authority. Empire and protocol are true duals. The oldest form is what Fukuyama called rule of law (protocol) vs rule by law (empire). Rule by law implies a class formally above the law. But whether de jure or de facto, the limits on the exceptionalism tendency *are* protocol. Everything else — blockchains, tab,e manners, coronation rituals… those are just the UX of protocols.
Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻 created “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains” 愚公移山, an oil painting, when he was visiting India in 1939-1940 at the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore. It was at the height of the Sino-Japanese War and the painting, inspired by a parable in Liezi 列子, an ancient text, reflected the artist’s confidence that dedication and hard work would win out in the end. In July 1945, Mao Zedong gave a famous speech inspired by the same story. Geremie
After spending 15 days in China (Shanghai and Chengdu) after an absence of 18 years, while my body was entranced and absorbed in its physical environment and my soul nourished by friends old and new, my mind was… discombobulated, questioning a lot about what I thought I knew about empire, autarkey, networking, and scale. The way I can see myself in your journey and descriptions… freaky! I’ll chalk it down to being Singaporean too and with an adjacency to the institutions we are both familiar with.
So I think you're both misscoping and underestimating the protocol world reductively as the decentralized blockchainy periphery and network-statey larps. Much of what you're attributing to empire is actually protocol. Empire proper presumes emperors, and the history of the last 1000 years is the steady decline and retreat of both. Vast empires broke up at the tail end of the colonial era, and emperors slowly retreated as the rule of law constrained them more and more.
Trump may be called a "bad emperor" but his authority pales in comparison to what imperial power actually looked like pre the era of revolutions 1848 etc. He wields more absolute power by virtue of there being more absolute power to wield, thanks to technology, but in relative terms, he has much less share of available power.
Xi might have more relative power than Trump, but his power too pales in comparison to historic emperors I think. And analyzed properly, both late-stage US and early-stage China "empires" are much more protocolish than their formal structures suggest. Even Trump's America has to chafe against the reluctance of NATO and other alliance problems to say "how high" when he says "jump."
The rules based international order was clearly protocolish, and even though Mark Carney may have declared it dead, it's actually pretty alive and load-bearing. I think the right way to analyze things is to view protocolishness as an embodied quality, not as a "type of guy" meme inventory. It's not a protocol because it checks off a list of items like formal decentralization, use of encryption etc. Or to look at it another way, Farrell and Newman called American an _underground_ empire, not a plain one. The fact that it had to wield power and influence stealthily rather than overtly already indicates the degree to which the "message of the medium" of protocolish infrastructures like payment networks or the internet reshapes the will-to-power of hegemons individual and state. Ditto China's BRI.
Understood that way, "protocol" is actually a post-end-of-history permaweird state that is both natural and inevitable because the technological environment simply does not allow as much control and autocratic governance as it used to. And protocols are not necessarily archipelagic. That's just the easy to understand archetypes. Protocols end up mirroring natural topographies, and represent some sort of minimal distortion of that by coercive power. What you're calling "empire" I think can be modeled as a "coercive power surplus" -- what can China or the US make their spheres of influence do that is not natural to the topography of that sphere of influence? Do they enjoy some sort of centralization premium?
Protocols, understood in their full-scope way are not precious little marginal larps, but the ascending planetarity. Obscured by imperial larps that are thin theatrical fictions modeled on nostalgic reactionary sentiment rather than real power. Russia and the US have already learned that in Ukraine and Iran. China will learn that too, soon enough.
I think you are right that I made protocol too archipelagic and peripheral. But I think you stretch protocol too far in the other direction. If protocol names everything from NATO to SWIFT to BRI to the internet to sanctions, it becomes almost coextensive with modern coordination itself. I’d now put it differently: stack and protocol are instrumented by empire mind. The stack is the body; protocol is the regenerative grammar; empire mind is the appetite to bend both toward central advantage.
Protocol projects are small only in the way stem cells are small. They are not marginal because they lack mass. They matter because, when the main body weakens, they can differentiate into new institutional tissue. That is why they attract both utopians and foxes. The protocol world is not the opposite of empire mind. It is where empire mind now goes looking for its next body.
Di is not an old imperial nostalgist. He is a strategist of protocol capture: cheap AI, installed base, data/cashflow from the middle zone, industrial-chain editing, parallel systems, monetary workarounds. That is not emperor power. It is empire mind learning to operate through protocol.
For me the test is our definition: A protocol is an engineered argument. Ie a structure for disagreeing with rules of engagement that embody some engineering logic as opposed to being the free-for-all of either total war or schmittian sovereign exceptionalism. So yeah, the moment total war and/or sovereigns become rule-bound you’re in protocol-land. After that it’s a question of degree, not kind. So yep. I do think protocolization is co-extensive with modern coordination. You don’t need flat power gradients or entity size distributions to be narrow. Stacks are just a complementary structural description of the same entity not a different entity, tcp/ip is a protocol AND a stack. I’d characterize empire entirely differently — exceptionalism narratives. So a sufficiently long line of monarchs and nobility “above the law” in a schmittian sovereign exceptionalism sense makes the narrative of the system itself exceptionalist, the more the exceptionalism is curtailed by protocols, the weaker its imperial authority. Empire and protocol are true duals. The oldest form is what Fukuyama called rule of law (protocol) vs rule by law (empire). Rule by law implies a class formally above the law. But whether de jure or de facto, the limits on the exceptionalism tendency *are* protocol. Everything else — blockchains, tab,e manners, coronation rituals… those are just the UX of protocols.
Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻 created “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountains” 愚公移山, an oil painting, when he was visiting India in 1939-1940 at the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore. It was at the height of the Sino-Japanese War and the painting, inspired by a parable in Liezi 列子, an ancient text, reflected the artist’s confidence that dedication and hard work would win out in the end. In July 1945, Mao Zedong gave a famous speech inspired by the same story. Geremie
❤️😛