Many Act 2 Games are Afoot

Protocol Institute, Long Now Labs, Strange Rules art show, vgr_zirp update, World Machines, TensTorrent

I have a bunch of actual newsletter-type personal news update items I need to share, so I figured I’d share them all at once as a kind of life update. Taken together it feels like a definite phase shift. I guess this might be my Act 2 finally getting started? I feel like I’ve been promoted to Regional Manager of the Internet.

It’s a bit all over the place (“the fox has many Act 2s, the hedgehog has one big Act 2”?), but also all around fun in a way that feels like it should be illegal in the grimdark climate of today. Still I’m not complaining.

Protocol Institute

The Summer of Protocols program I was leading for the last 3 years is spinning out as The Protocol Institute. Timber Stinson-Schroff, who was a researcher in the first cohort, will be leading the new org as Managing Director, and I’m going to be the Director of Research. I wrote about my plans in that capacity last week in our magazine, Protocolized.

TLDR: We’re going to invent New Nature.

As you might expect, we’re looking to raise funds, so if you like the sound of what we’re up to, get in touch at venkat@protocol-institute.org. If you know any organizations or high-net-worth individuals that might be interested, introduce me to them.

The program to date has been running at about a million a year since 2023, almost entirely bankrolled by the Ethereum Foundation, but with small amounts of support from other sources. The EF told us to stop living in the basement and go get a job, so that’s what we’re going to try and do. We’re hoping to raise $1.5-2 million for 2027. Timber and I are working on a pitch deck, and I’ll share in this newsletter in the next few weeks.

This is the first time I’ve gotten involved in a non-solo startuppy team thing in 15 years. The SoP program started out as a narrow solo consulting gig around the growth problems of Ethereum, but over three years morphed into a much bigger thing — research, fieldwork, education, field-building, publishing, scene-making, and hundreds of alumni/participants of various programs worldwide. It was initially meant to be a transient program to jumpstart a broader conversation around protocols (which it more than did), but the more we dug into the topic, the more we realized that we were exploring a huge and weirdly unexplored and undertheorized invisible current in technology evolution. So around a year ago, we started talking about doing what is now PI.

And then the agentic AI explosion happened, and it rapidly became clear that protocols were going to collide explosively with AI in an epic evil-twins type encounter, like Godzilla meeting King Kong.

We have a bit of spin-out funding from the Ethereum Foundation that will last us through the end of the year, after which we have to find funding or Timber and I turn into pumpkins at midnight on December 31, 2026. More tragically, the fragile young field of protocol studies will turn into a pumpkin and you don’t want that to happen.

Long Now Labs

One of the first programs of the new institute is a collaboration with the Long Now foundation, through its new Labs program, led by Denise Hearn. There are two open grant opportunities, The Book of Time and Epistemic Cycles. As befits my new Act 2 éminence grise status, I’m on the jury for the program even though I’d rather be competing.

Applications for both are due June 5th. More details here.

The success of this program will greatly increase the chances of Timber and I not turning into pumpkins, and of the Protocol Institute getting tangled up with AI to make benefit future of planet by inventing New Nature.

Apply for these grants if you have ideas. Tell your creative friends to apply.

Strange Rules/Monsters Between Worlds

On a related personal note, my Bucket Art project has evolved into an installation collaboration with Famous Actual Artist ™ Simon Denny called Monsters Between Worlds (a reference to my Gramsci Gap essay among other things) at the Strange Rules art exhibition at the Venice Bienalle, devoted to the emerging Protocol Art scene (which the Summer of Protocols program helped meme into being).

The two pieces facing each other in the center of the picture below are plotter-based reinterpretations of my Boat #1 and Sun #2 bucket art pieces. The black and white one on the right wall is based on the cover of one of the Summer of Protocols essays, Protocols in (Emergency) Time, by Olivia Steiert.

I can take some credit for inspiring the name of the show too 😎, via my essay Strange New Rules on Protocolized last year, which kicked off our efforts to develop the protocol fiction genre (now 3 anthologies and 40+ stories old). I’m now memeing at institutional levels.

The Strange Rules show is curated by Famous Actual Artists™ Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, and godfathered by Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Serpentine Gallery, who was once described to me as the “pope of the art world.” I’ve known this crowd casually for about a decade, but this show marks my formal debut into the art world.

Right at the top. It’s the only way. My Not-Yet-Famous Real Artist™ friends are all jealous of me.

And I didn’t even have to tape a banana to a wall.

It cracks me up that I’ll likely never be published as a “real writer,” but I’ve acquired a top-tier artist credential almost entirely by accident. If you’re going to be in Venice this summer, stop by the Palazzo Diedo (which houses my old pals the Berggruen Institute) and check it out. I haven’t checked it out myself yet, but will likely be there in October for the closing if the airlines still have fuel to fly then.

vgr_zirp Update

My vgr_zirp bot experiment on the resurrected archival Ribbonfarm has been unexpectedly successful, creating a bit of a problem for me, since it’s now burning API dollars.

The whole point of the migration to a cheap static-site setup initially was to save big on hosting. Now it looks like the bot will cost more to run than the old blog. So I’m in the market for some tastefully well-aligned sponsorships to keep building and provisioning this. You can see some house sponsorship banners rotating on the bot’s pages. I’d like to put some paying-sponsor banners there.

In the couple of weeks since I launched it, readers have logged over 1500 sessions, costing me over $150 in API fees, and the usage is rising steadily, causing me some anxiety.

The use case I anticipated, which is readers old and new diving into the content archives, is the second most common use case. The most common use case (and I guess I should have seen this coming) is people using the bot as a much cheaper consultant/advisor than me. This thing is terking muh jerb and I’m having to literally train my replacement 🤣.

I’m currently working on a couple of peer bots covering current writing, other corpuses like my past academic work, my Secret Consulting Notebooks, etc. and ways to turn the set of bots (tentatively named mixture_of_vgrs) into a true self-disrupting consultant. (I also made a similar but less mature bot, C3PO, trained on the Protocol Institute archives).

I’m getting lots of comments on how unique vgr_zirp is, and requests to share the construction methodology. It’s evolved significantly past the soul.md pattern I started with, but isn’t yet cleaned up enough to release as a reusable template, since it’s all very artisanal and bespoke and heavily tuned to my material.

It’s also turned into an absolutely fascinating technical project (see details here) that I want to keep evolving. I didn’t think it would be this easy to get to the artisanal AI frontier but apparently I’m doing at least a couple of things nobody else is.

You can read the publicly shared chat transcripts here, and also subscribe to them via RSS. Basically, what I thought would be an unchanging museum site is turning into a kind of coral reef of secondary content on a scuttled ship.

I guess Ribbonfarm is having its own Act 2, independent of mine.

World Machines Project

A brief heads up. The World Machines Project (WMP) I kicked off a few weeks ago is now live as a collaborative effort by half a dozen contributors at worldmachines.org.

The Prime Radiant is starting to take shape, and the vibecoding of psychohistory has begun. Join us. This month we’re reading Revolution in Time in the Contraptions Book Club, which is the feeder activity for WMP, so we’re currently figuring out how to engineer a suitable temporality into the Prime Radiant.

TensTorrent

Finally, I want to mention TensTorrent, the AI hardware startup I’ve been consulting for since 2019, which has been my other big gig besides the protocols work. The CEO, Jim Keller, is my oldest client (I’ve been working with him since 2011, across AMD, Tesla, Intel, and now TensTorrent).

This is easily the most technically exciting work of my consulting career, right at the esoteric bleeding edge of frontier AI, and it’s finally entering the industry spotlight. I still can’t actually talk about my work there due to NDA constraints, but finally enough information is public that you can explore for yourself. If you’re a low-level AI developer, check out their developer hub, and there is also a cool QuietBox AI workstation you can buy (I’m lusting after it myself, but can’t yet justify it till I improve my lower-level AI chops).

You can try out the tech yourself here on the demo cloud. If your company is looking to own its own AI hardware/IP infrastructure, TT should definitely be on your radar. If you’re interested, I can introduce you to their sales folks.

First Thoughts on Act 2

This feels like it’s going to be a year of serious changes for me. I bought a house (and went into serious debt 😬) for the first time at age 51 two months ago, while all this was unfolding. At the same time I was going through the at-once cathartic and bittersweet project of archiving Ribbonfarm properly (that was before the bot gave it a weird and unexpected new possible lease on life).

It feels like not just the beginning of my Act 2, but the beginning of my personal exit from the Gramsci Gap the world’s been in since 2015, when I tagged it the Great Weirding. But it also feels like it’s going to be a long time before the whole world is out of it, so it’s a precarious sort of contingent exit.

As I said, it feels like it should be illegal to be moving on into the new world amid the gathering grimdarkness. My Be Slightly Monstrous slogan from last November (aka -1mo BCC; Before Claude Code) feels justified now. I keep thinking a Balrog-style bigger monster is going to derail AI and drag us early-exit types back into the gap by our ankles.

The old world dying, the new world struggling to be born, and I’m monstrously having fun even as elsewhere events are teetering on the edge of horrifying.

One way or another, Act 2 is going to be very interesting.