The word protocol carries weight from three distinct traditions, and each deposits something essential in Fabric’s use of the term.
The technological register. In computing, a protocol is an agreed-upon set of rules enabling communication between autonomous entities without a central controller. TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP – these are agreements about how to relate that make the internet possible. Key properties Fabric inherits: interoperability without uniformity (participants need not be alike, only follow the same rules at the interface); layering (higher-level protocols depend on lower-level ones); version control and evolution (protocols change through defined processes, and backwards compatibility matters); and voluntary adoption with network effects (no one is forced to use HTTP, but because so many do, the benefits of adoption are enormous).
The ceremonial register. In diplomacy, ceremony, and indigenous governance, protocol refers to the ways beings enter shared space with respect and intention. You follow protocol not because a machine requires it but because the relationship requires it. Key properties: relational meaning (the ceremony of greeting is the relationship being enacted, not overhead); embodied practice (protocols engage the whole person, not just the rational mind); contextual sensitivity (the right protocol depends on who is present and what the moment asks for); and accountability to something larger (ceremonial protocols orient participants toward forces, ancestors, ecosystems, and responsibilities that exceed the immediate interaction).
The meta-relational register. In decolonial studies and practices, relational protocols are containers for being-together-across-difference without requiring consensus, convergence, or ideological alignment. Key properties: not consensus but relational coherence (the ability to move responsibly together across differences); orientation before action (layers of inquiry – temporal orientation, positionality, strategy, grief – before any question of “what to do”); designing for asymmetry (participants are differently positioned, differently exposed, differently risked – the protocol names and holds difference rather than pretending equality); and meta-consequence rather than meta-crisis (the polycrisis reframed as a consequence of an imperial system reaching its limits, shifting the design impulse from fixing toward composting).
These three registers are not competing definitions but three dimensions of a single thing. They converge in the claim that Every protocol has three inseparable layers: accord (technological), ritual (ceremonial), and critique & contemplation (meta-relational).