Working repository for Robert Peake’s research and projects on humane protocols for the transhuman age.
Taking up the idea of protocols as engineered arguments, this talk, given July 2025, explores the timeless algorithms that give poetry its power to evolve—from an ancient mnemonic device to a transformational way of being. Drawing on both theory and practice, this exploration examines various examples of poetry’s rule-making and rule-breaking. In a world at odds with Rilke’s admonition to, “live in the question” never more have we needed what poetry offers according to Marvin Bell: “the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.”
See: The Infinite Game of Poetry
A protocol for marking time through cryptographically-signed responses to random interruptions, framed by poetic form. Where generative AI compresses human concerns toward the statistical mean, the protocol works in the opposite direction — expanding what is compressed in humanity in aggregate into specific, signed, dated instances of individual consciousness.
Poetry is among the oldest long-nows we have: for four thousand years it has bound the long (timeless themes) to the now (concrete individual moments) in a single act. The Prufrock Protocol takes this intrinsic long-now structure and makes it the timepiece itself.
Pitch in development for The Long Now Foundation Lab 001.1 — Book of Time — in conversation with the Protocols Institute. Submission: 2026-06-05.
Asks how human collaboration paradigms (GTD, agile, pair programming; older traditions of ritual and ceremony) might be transposed into transhuman protocols that span the human-AI boundary, and how to measure their effectiveness against not just task output but cognitive load, sovereignty, governance, and social impact. Also explores protocols for inter-human communication among diverse neurotypes as well as inter-species communication as avenues for productive borrowing and/or contrast with mainstream inter-human protocols.
In conversation with the Protocols Institute.
See: Protocols for Effective Human-AI Collaboration
Updated 10 May 2026 by Robert Peake