Life of Protocols: Evolving Evolvability in Open-ended Socio-technical Systems

Abstract

Protocols are rule systems that regularize interactions among human and non-human actors in socio-technical systems (STS). Documented in RFCs, standards, or laws—and ultimately instantiated in hardware and software—they create a landscape of affordances: an architectural substrate that serves as a new layer of reality upon which new worlds flourish. Once deployed, a protocol can catalyze the spontaneous emergence of higher STS layers and new protocols, forming a hierarchical socio-technical ecology. The Internet protocol, for instance, catalyzes online commerce, virtual communities, and social media, while also hosting higher-order protocols such as blockchains. By governing how actors act within afforded possibilities, protocols determine the evolvability of everything built atop them—effective protocols remain open-ended, continually inviting innovations, while ineffective ones ossify, stifling further novelty. Crucially, protocols themselves evolve, as evidenced by successive Internet protocol upgrades, keeping the broader socio-technical ecology poised at the edge of chaos, where it retains the capacity for ongoing emergence of innovations. This position paper frames protocols as a control in Artificial Life (ALife) systems, revealing their  flourishing at the edge of chaos, adaptation through upgrades, evolution of evolvability, hierarchical self-organization into nested stacks, and eventual senescence or death through ossification or environmental change. We aim to elevate protocols as first-class research concepts in STS research and open a fertile dialogue connecting STS research through the lens of ALife theory.