“Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” -T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
A protocol for marking time through cryptographically-signed responses to random interruptions, framed by poetry as a timepiece.
Poetry has been with us since the first ritualised utterance at the dawn of humanity. It charts timeless themes (“long”) through concrete moments (“now”) of individuals expressing within the context of their era. It is also a protocol that continually reinvents its own constraints, allowing it to endure by proceeding linearly through contemporary context and individual consciousness yet also folding time at pinch points into recurrent human themes.
For more, see: The Infinite Game of Poetry: Protocols for Living, Listening, and Transcending the Rules
As a result, poetry is a latent timepiece we can surface and utilise to understand humanity in both specific and timeless dimensions, as well as to address some urgent concerns of our present era.
“Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you’ve been alive” - Stephen Dunn, “Different Hours”
In a world forever changed by generative AI, where words and images can be synthesised from aggregations quickly, easily, and at scale, how can we continue to record authentic moments of human expression over time?
One answer is to retreat to private and analogue approaches — a handwritten journal, a face-to-face conversation, a photograph taken on film. Though more verifiable and incorruptible, these methods abandon the advances that digitisation and network distribution afford us for communicating quickly, globally, and for archiving artefacts at scale.
The Prufrock Protocol takes inspiration from poetry-time to provide an essential counterpoise to the meteoric rise of generative AI. It defines a means for provoking authentic expression to produce a verifiable record of situated human experience across a network of participants over time.
The protocol is medium-agnostic: its first domain is poetry, but its formal structure applies wherever the goal is to record verifiable human artefacts digitally and at scale in an era where this has suddenly become endangered.
For more on the protocol and the theory behind it, see The Protocol
“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons” -T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Even outside the domain of synthesised artificial content, human artefacts are at risk of becoming more synthetic and artificial. In an era of filtered selfies and staged events, we risk losing the veracity of spontaneous expression.
The Prufrock Protocol is also a provocation by which its eponymous figure might finally act, finding universe-distrubing transcendence in the midst of quotidian “coffee spoon” time. Where Prufrock requires courage to disturb the universe, and lacks it, the protocol brings disturbance to the willing participant, and compels them to act in the moment.
“Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”
The first experiments use poetry — specifically, the sonnet — as a response medium.
Poetry is perhaps our oldest compression algorithm. It distills subjective moments of individual reflection into form: originally into prescribed structures (metre, rhyme, stanza), now by recalling their echoes. A line of poetry compresses an experience into language shaped by constraint, and in doing so creates negative space for the reader’s inference and interpretation. It is an attempt to use words to transcend words, and thereby communicate essential human experience.
Generative AI models also compress human culture, but do so statistically and anonymously, deriving patterns of association from past human artefacts. Furthermore, while LLMs create a regression to the mean of human concerns, poetry proceeds in the opposite direction – as an expansion of human concerns in aggregate into momentary instances–thus the “infinite game” of using words to transcend words, giving specificity to the timeless.
The moment — a situated, timestamped, geolocated instant of individual experience — is precisely what generative models discard in favour of associational patterns. A timestamp or a person’s name is just another optional variable in a probability distribution.
In poetry, the moment is the central element preserved: poetry creates space for inference and interpretation within the consciousness of the reader. This is the space that generative models attempt to fill with statistically quantifiable certainty, whereas poetry attempts to preserve its framing as negative space. Generative AI has ready answers; poetry has questions.
The sonnet trial is the first experiment. The protocol’s parameterisation supports free-form writing and non-textual media, such as audio, image, or video as response medium. The protocol’s authentication, lineage, and tamper-evidence properties hold uniformly regardless of medium — a photograph, cryptographically signed and hash-chained to a prior photograph, satisfies the same invariants as a line of verse.
Each experiment is a point in the protocol’s parameter space. Comparing across experiments reveals which properties emerge from the protocol’s constants and which from the experiment’s variables — a question that is, at heart, an exploration of the myriad forms of creative expression and their unifying properties and themes.
Most cryptographic ledgers attempt to solve issues of financial trust. Prufrock explores their use in authenticating expressions of situated human experience. The need is, ironically, more urgent: the collapse of centralised banking systems remains theoretical; the collapse of our trust in words and images has arrived.
The poem-ledger is an append-only authenticated log. When prompt depth is one, the parent relation forms a directed forest; when greater, a directed acyclic graph. Chains through the graph are poems, i.e. maximal paths from genesis seed to terminal contribution, each node a verified moment of confrontation and response.
The ledger records what happened. It also records what didn’t, as forfeits are also permanently inscribed. The protocol insists that silence is data, not absence of data. This is a design decision about the relationship between a protocol and the world it observes.
In an era increasingly afraid to disturb the universe on record, provocation alone may not be enough. The Prufrock Protocol does not directly address the question of attribution within the initial protocol specification, but we intend to publish the results of initial experiments as a shared works. That is, the byline remains beneath the title, listing each author’s name, not as an annotation of every line.
In contributing to something shared, especially amongst cohorts of peers, the project further encourages authors to think beyond themselves into the wider concerns of the project, to bring their authentic and best self to the work in each moment, for a good greater than just themselves.
“It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends” -Czeslaw Milos, The Witness of Poetry
Each completed chain — each poem, each sequence of authenticated contributions — becomes a novel cultural artefact. It records a dialectical progression: a prior contribution (thesis) meets a participant’s situated moment (antithesis) and produces a new contribution (synthesis). It does so globally and longitudinally through verified responses to micro-moments over time.
Although inspired by collaborative writing exercises such as the “exquisite corpse,” the introduction of randomised interruption, forced confrontation with another’s authenticated expression, and cryptographic verification of human authorship transcends this lineage. It is an experiment in marking time through moments of attention, reflection, and response.
The artefacts are not merely the poems. The artefact is the ledger itself, a cryptographically authenticated record of how human beings, distributed across geography and timezone, responded to each other’s moments over time. It is, in a precise sense, a protocol for making shared memory durable in an era that has learned to fabricate memory at scale.
Implications for study through sentiment and theme analysis are extensive and impactful, charting verifiable human concerns across the span of humanity’s art-making. Creating the space for enduring participation, however, is the first concern.
The Prufrock Protocol asks whether, in an era of synthetic media and accelerated attention, we might still construct durable shared memory from small moments of authentic human expression. It asks this not as a poetic conceit but as a protocol-theoretic proposition: that the protocol, applied across domains, might produce a class of cultural artefact that is neither private journal nor public broadcast nor synthetic amalgam, but an authenticated and situated timepiece that conserves authenticity and art.
Updated 10 May 2026 by Robert Peake