On their own, technical protocols don’t have flexibility. Same goes for social protocols that are taken too literally. They become cold without a human in the loop. In some ways, this is a good thing. The impersonality of protocols could help in situations where bias is harmful. On the other hand, rigidity can suffocate growth and diversity – necessary ingredients of progress.
There are two components to protocols. Procedure (a sequence of tasks) and rules (what cannot be done or said during those tasks). For example, when information is exchanged between computers, they send packets. Packets have to include and exclude things. Sending Egyptian hieroglyphs won’t trigger a response. Packets also need to be sent and received in appropriate order. Same holds for medical trial protocols, diplomatic protocols, and exercise protocols. Integrating both commission and omission is an important, powerful aspect of protocols.
Like organizations, trends, organisms, and stars… protocols die. They are not exempt from mortality and the forces of competition. Once set in place, however, they can exhibit surprising longevity. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that become popular tend to embed themselves, slightly out of sight. Same goes for sociocultural protocols, like handshakes.
Monarchs and elected officials are meant to meet the needs of their constituents. But a direct line from the populace to a head of state doesn’t scale. It’s simply too much information for one person to process. Diplomatic protocols evolved to amplify signals which balanced the needs of constituents with the survival of their state. Within the corporate world, protocols (often legislated by governments) can help balance the desires of executives, workers, and shareholders.
Protocols arise in response to coordination problems in the world. Solutions are often intuited or stumbled upon before being formally specified. Over time, patterns of control get architected into the built environment – this reduces the cost of keeping a protocol in use (maintenance costs) but it also ossifies protocols into a rigid state. As compliance with a given protocol becomes the default, we lose active awareness of their existence.
Control is a virtue of protocols, but comes with its own dangers. Surrendering agency allows us to focus on more important things. What happens if a once useful protocol becomes hazardous? For example, handshakes can become a slipstream for pathogens during a pandemic. There is no central Department of Physical Salutations. Mature protocols usually don’t have owners who can foresee problems and implement preventative measures. New paradigms have to emerge bottom-up, as happened with the somewhat awkward invention of the elbow-bump.
There is no “one protocol to rule them all”. If protocols become too large, they’re difficult to replicate. The emergent workaround is to stack them. Individual layers are improved or merged in an incremental fashion. Rarely does an entire stack survive being intentionally collapsed into a single, comprehensive successor. This stackable quality is one of the reasons protocols are so durable, but also a major factor in their tendency to evolve slowly.
Traditionally, protocols have been treated as agreements between actors in economic models rather than as actors themselves. But once instantiated, they begin to exert influence without continued human involvement. They are an active specter of past preferences. It’s possible that game theory is a common root of protocol studies and economics. In diplomacy, protocols serve as something like games. Officials and their aides, by following protocol, are playing along. This shows other parties that they can recognize and meet expectations in a reliable manner.
Once routinely followed, protocols fade beyond our horizon of awareness. When we rediscover them, like Chesterton’s Fence, it’s common to not see their purpose. Protocols provide stability for other social and technical activities. How quickly we abandon old protocols is a litmus test for conservative/progressive tendencies (do we tend to favor or disfavor the status quo). "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." - A.N. Whitehead.
Non-protocolized environments and overly-protocolized environments both exhibit dysfunction. The symptoms of the former result in a lack of hardness, or certainty. On the other hand, excess protocol is bloatware and leads to stagnation at best. If there is a utopia with perfect protocol saturation, it exists on the middle of an inverted-U-shaped curve.
Importantly, this only applies to visible, immature protocols. Once they've faded into the "background hum of social regulation", they don't constitute as much of a drag on day-to-day operations.
They can be a Benevolent Dictator For Life. Ossified (mature) protocols are firm guardrails on behavior. Whatever path History is on in a given moment, protocols tend to prevent large departures from the status quo. Continual reenactment of protocol is not the only source of momentum. Protocols often introduce record-keeping procedures. The output provides a body of precedent and a basis for future narratives.
Following protocol requires *not* taking other actions. This means agency is intentionally limited, especially in the case of coded (technical, not social) protocols. However, these constraints increase agency at other times and locations. By following traffic flow, drivers reduce the probability of accidents. People return home from work earlier — giving them more time. At a higher level, ratifiers of the Montreal Protocol voluntarily limited their emissions of ozone-depleting substances. The horizon of possible futures broadened across the globe.