protocols

The Protocol

The Prufrock Protocol is defined by five invariants, all of which are protocol constants — they hold across every instantiation, regardless of domain or medium:

  1. Interrupts. The protocol reaches into a participant’s ongoing experience at a moment not of their choosing (only a time window of their agreement). The interruption is the protocol’s temporal anchor: it binds the contribution to a specific moment in a specific life.

  2. Confronts. The interruption carries a payload: a prior contribution from someone else in the network. The participant does not respond to a blank prompt. They are confronted with a prior authenticated moment — an antithesis against the thesis of their present experience.

  3. Records. The participant’s response is captured as a signed contribution that includes the timestamp and geolocation. The contribution artefact becomes a compressed representation of the participant’s outer context and inner consciousness in that moment.

  4. Authenticates. Every contribution is cryptographically signed and hash-chained to its parents. The signature binds content to identity; the timestamps bind it to a moment; the geolocation binds it to a place; the parent hashes bind it to lineage. Together, these produce a contribution that is not merely stored but situated — authenticated not just as “from someone” but as “from this person, here, now, in response to that.”

  5. Preserves lineage. Each contribution commits to specific ancestors via cryptographic hash reference. The result is a directed acyclic graph of authenticated moments — a structure in which every node knows its parents and any tampering with an ancestor invalidates every descendant. The graph is the protocol’s durable memory; it cannot be revised.

These five invariants define what makes something a Prufrock interaction. Everything else is parameterised.

For Protocol Theorists

The Prufrock Protocol is small, fully specified, parameterised, and simulatable. It is a protocol that can actually be implemented and studied — distinguishing it from the usual examples in protocol theory (climate treaties, blockchain governance) that are too large to experiment with.

It offers several contributions to protocol theory proper:

The compression-fidelity trade names a property every protocol possesses but few make explicit: the relationship between what a protocol records and what it must discard. Prufrock’s contribution tuple — seven fields per contribution — is a compression specification. The unrecorded remainder is the protocol’s negative space. This trade can be analysed, compared across protocols, and potentially nondimensionalised.

Negative space as design category inverts the usual analytical frame. Protocol theory studies what protocols do — their rules, states, transitions, observables. Prufrock introduces a formal concept for what protocols don’t do and argues this is equally important. The unrecorded dimensions of an interaction are the space in which participants exercise judgement, agency, and meaning-making. A protocol’s negative space may determine its susceptibility to drift: too large, and participants fill it with uncoordinated practices that diverge; too small, and the protocol becomes brittle.

Aesthetic enforcement names a class of constraint with no enforcement mechanism in the traditional sense but enormous structuring power. A sonnet’s rhyme scheme or a ghazal’s radif are not enforced by punishment, consensus, or cryptography. They are enforced by visible commitment — violations are apparent to subsequent participants through the stigmergic surface of the poem-in-progress. This is coordination without consensus, and it may generalise beyond aesthetic domains.

Situated authentication extends authentication from binding content to identity to binding content to a specific moment and place. Most protocols authenticate actions. Prufrock authenticates situated moments of human experience — the fact that a specific person, in a specific place, at a specific time, was confronted with another’s expression and responded.

Protocol and Experiment

The Prufrock Protocol is parameterised. Its formal specification distinguishes protocol constants [P] from experiment variables [E]: the constants define the protocol’s identity; the variables define a specific instantiation.

The constants are structural: the signature scheme (Ed25519), the hash function (SHA-256), the clock domain (UTC), geographic resolution (H3 level 5), append-only ledger structure, self-exclusion (you are never prompted with your own work), prompt anonymity (you respond to contributions, not to people), and forfeit recording (absence is data — the ledger does not pretend silence didn’t happen).

The variables are configurational: cohort size, response window, response medium (text, audio, image, video, mixed), response unit, prompt depth, interruption timing, selection rule, form constraints, seed source. A specific combination of these variables defines an experiment — a concrete instantiation of the protocol with a defined population, duration, and output form.

This separation matters. It means the protocol can be studied as a formal object independent of any particular experiment, while experiments can be compared as points in a shared parameter space. It also means the protocol can migrate across domains without losing its identity: a Prufrock experiment using sonnets and a Prufrock experiment using field recordings of birdsong satisfy the same five invariants and produce the same kind of authenticated, lineage-preserving record.

Example Experiment

Sonnet Experiment Diagram

Draft Formalisation

See: Draft Formalisation