Institutions are being rewritten—not through ideology or law, but through code. Artificial intelligence and blockchain offer rival grammars of coordination: one predictive and fluid, the other verifiable and constrained. Their convergence exposes a deeper misalignment: our inherited systems no longer hold shape, scale, or rhythm in a world that moves differently now. Protocols offer a new logic—not just for governing, but for composing interaction across layers of containment, exposure, and time. We are no longer updating functions within old forms. We are redesigning the forms themselves. To do so with precision and coherence, we must rebuild institutions from the clock up.
Contemporary civilization presents a paradox. Technical capacities have advanced at extraordinary pace—artificial intelligence operates at planetary scale, networks span global infrastructure, and supply chains reconfigure labor and materials across jurisdictions in near real time. Blockchains, meanwhile, offer frictionless coordination infrastructures unconstrained by geography or centralized control. Yet our collective ability to govern, coordinate, and adapt appears increasingly incapacitated. Trade tensions escalate through archaic policy instruments; democratic processes fray; existential risks mount without responses adequate to their urgency or scope.
This is not a crisis of imagination, nor of knowledge, nor even of political will. It is a structural mismatch between the conditions we now inhabit and the forms of institution we continue to employ. The mismatch lies not primarily in ideology or function, but in form—specifically, the latent geometries through which institutions contain, connect, and endure.
We propose a three-dimensional model for analyzing institutional form:
- Containment: the bounding structures that define identity, jurisdiction, and enclosure;
- Connectivity: the interfaces and interdependencies across institutional boundaries;
- Temporality: the rhythms, cadences, and update cycles through which institutions operate and reproduce.
Persistent dysfunction arises when these dimensions are maladjusted to their environment—when institutions over-assert closure in networked contexts, or propagate latency in domains that demand real-time responsiveness.
Our claim is that today’s dominant institutional failure lies in temporality. Contemporary institutions are not just spatially misaligned; they are desynchronized from the systems they aim to govern. Temporality is not merely an extrinsic scaffold for decision-making—like OODA loops or planning cycles—but the substrate through which institutions and individuals alike experience being and becoming. It is the most foundational of the three dimensions, shaping how institutions send and receive information, redefine boundaries, and create or destroy interdependencies. Some institutions are too slow to react; others operate on artificial cycles dictated by legacy structures. In both cases, coordinated action breaks down.
The consequences span domains: protectionism resurges, collective identities fragment, ecological collapse proceeds unchecked. But these are not mere policy failures—they are symptoms of institutional timekeeping gone awry.
We are not without tools. Emerging coordination protocols—such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for contextual interoperability and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) for multi-agent communication—hint at a new possibility: institutions not merely accelerated by artificial intelligence, but recomposed around it. Temporally aware, interoperable, protocol-driven systems may yet enable governance at the speed and scale of the world they must engage.
Alongside AI, blockchain technologies provide complementary primitives for institutional composition. Tools like Eigenlayer on Ethereum allow institutions to layer subjective judgments into cryptoeconomic consensus, enabling programmable trust networks that evolve through use. Meanwhile, zk-SNARKs and related cryptographic techniques allow for privacy-preserving guarantees without reliance on trusted third parties—enabling selective transparency and structural accountability at once. Together, these technologies are not merely innovations in computing; they are substrates for a new kind of institutional form.
What follows is a diagnosis of our present misalignment—and a proposal for how we might begin to rebuild from the clock up. By tracing institutional dysfunction to failures in temporal architecture, we aim to show how new compositional primitives—especially protocols that elegantly integrate distributed AI and blockchains—can offer a way forward. These protocols are not merely technical substrates; they are architectural instruments capable of aligning inference with constraint, and coordination with coherence. If we are to restore institutional functionality in a fractured world, we must learn to design systems that keep time as well as they keep order.
The recent escalation in tariff regimes—particularly those initiated by the United States against Chinese exports—exemplifies the persistence of industrial-era containment logics within a post-industrial topology. Instruments like tariffs presuppose a geopolitical economy in which legal authority and economic production are territorially aligned.
Yet supply chains today are globally distributed, software-coordinated, and economically decentered. A single manufactured object may traverse dozens of jurisdictions, with components produced under divergent regulatory, monetary, and labor regimes. In this context, national tariffs do not merely introduce inefficiencies—they reveal a temporal lag between institutional reflex and infrastructural reality.
What fails is not only containment, but the tempo of institutional response. Markets operate continuously; production cycles adjust in weeks or days. Trade policy, by contrast, unfolds across bureaucratic and electoral timelines. The result is neither sovereign assertion nor strategic coherence, but disjointed interference.
A salient example is the U.S. CHIPS Act, designed to bolster domestic semiconductor production and restrict China's access to advanced chips. However, these measures inadvertently accelerated innovation within China's AI sector. Chinese companies, such as DeepSeek, adapted by developing competitive AI models despite the restrictions, highlighting the unintended consequences of such policies (restofworld.org, brookings.edu).
What is often labeled a “meaning crisis” in affluent, digitally saturated societies is frequently misdiagnosed as a matter of ideology or cultural fragmentation. A more structural reading sees it as a breakdown in the temporal architectures of personhood once sustained by institutional rhythms.
Modern institutions historically offered more than material support or symbolic identity—they provided durational scaffolding: pathways through which biographies acquired coherence and social legibility. School, profession, family, civic life—each operated along normative timelines. Today, it is not simply trust in institutions that is eroding, but their capacity to sequence life in time.
In their place, network platforms offer continuous streams of content and opportunity—perpetually updating, never culminating. The result is not formlessness, but desynchronization. People are not only alienated; they are out of phase.
Across both mature and emerging economies, institutional breakdown manifests less as mass unemployment and more as an involution of labor: work patterns that are individually coherent but collectively stalled. In East Asian contexts, “involution” describes escalating competitive effort within rigid systems that yield diminishing social returns. In the West, parallel patterns emerge as burnout, “quiet quitting,” and performative labor in algorithmically managed spaces.
These are not mere failures of employment policy or educational alignment. They reflect a deeper collapse in institutional sequencing—the capacity of organizations to align effort with advancement, and of careers to unfold through stable developmental arcs. Connectivity is abundant: collaboration tools, dashboards, chat interfaces. But rhythm is absent. Without temporal coordination, institutional participation becomes repetition without momentum.
At the heart of this is a lack of temporal anchoring. The problem is not necessarily the work itself—being an Uber driver or freelance designer may be tolerable or even appealing. What alienates is the inability to know whether that role will still exist in five years, or whether a pathway of advancement even exists. The phenomenon began at the economic fringes, where gig work and just-in-time employment first took hold, but it has crept inward as software continues to "eat the world." Even once-reliable futureproofing strategies—like “learn to code”—have become unstable, as AI renders their promised security increasingly hollow.
This dynamic plays out differently across socioeconomic strata. Among the professional class, we see a rise in emotional exhaustion and disorientation from the erosion of structured progression. Among middle and working-class workers, the patterns are harsher and more materially constrained: fake job growth numbers driven by part-time or gig roles, the slow collapse of full-time employment, and a steady shift from pensioned employee status to precarious contract work. In China, the "lying flat" (tǎng píng) movement has crystallized this disaffection, with younger generations rejecting a future defined by endless competition and unattainable stability (brookings.edu, en.wikipedia.org).
No crisis illustrates institutional temporal failure more starkly than anthropogenic climate change. The science is established; the consensus is broad. Yet institutional response remains incremental, symbolic, and lethargic.
Climate dynamics unfold over decades, but critical thresholds are nonlinear and sensitive to short-term action. The institutions nominally responsible—nation-states, multilateral organizations, regulatory regimes—operate within rhythms shaped by electoral cycles, fiscal calendars, and diplomatic inertia.
The failure here is not primarily moral or epistemic—it is chronometric. Institutions cannot act at the tempo the planet demands. Worse, their slowness often masquerades as prudence. The result is a form of institutional pacification: action that arrives not too little, but too late—not because of ignorance, but because of rhythm mismatch.
In response, networks like C40 Cities are stepping in to fill the void. These coalitions of urban centers are implementing ambitious climate policies, often outpacing national governments. Their proactive stance highlights the potential of subnational actors to drive meaningful environmental change (c40knowledgehub.org, c40.org).
If institutions are infrastructures of temporal coordination—arrangements that bring disparate agents into rhythm with one another and with their environments—then their failure must be understood not merely as dysfunction, but as desynchronization. What we face today is not simply a breakdown of order or authority, but a condition in which the tempos of institutional action no longer align with the dynamics they are meant to mediate.
Historically, institutions functioned as the clocks of collective life. They gave shape to time, structuring it through electoral cycles, fiscal years, tenure tracks, and rites of passage. Even when these rhythms were artificial, they offered shared frames for accountability and orientation. Institutions rendered the future calculable and the past auditable. As Douglass North emphasized, institutions reduce uncertainty by imposing durable constraints over time—an effect that depends on temporal coherence. What has changed is not the disappearance of these clocks, but their proliferation and misalignment.
Contemporary life unfolds across wildly divergent temporal layers. Financial markets operate in nanoseconds. Legislative processes stretch over quarters or years. Social media cycles turn over hourly, while climatic systems respond across decades or centuries. Institutions today increasingly fail to synchronize across these layers. More precisely, they fail to mediate between fast and slow dynamics, generating either bottlenecks—when they cannot respond in time—or noise, when they react without resolution. As William Sewell Jr. observes in Logics of History, institutions are governed not just by structural constraints, but by the temporal and causal logics that link their actions to effects—and those logics are now diverging across domains.
The illusion of acceleration obscures this misalignment. The surface has become faster: dashboards update in real time, decisions appear instant, and “agile” methods proliferate in name. Yet the underlying structures often remain inertial, tied to legacy processes, rhythms, and rules. The speed is performative, not substantive. Deleuze’s “societies of control” anticipated this regime of continuous modulation: a world where institutions seem fluid but remain unable to adapt with precision or accountability.
This produces a condition of temporal incoherence: institutions that simulate responsiveness but act at mismatched horizons, issuing decisions either too late or at the wrong scale. What results is neither adaptability nor continuity, but oscillation—movements that reverse or reset without building coherence or legitimacy.
The crises explored earlier—resurgent protectionism, fraying social identity, labor involution, climate inertia—are not isolated events. They are symptoms of institutional desynchronization. Trade policies are implemented on lagging indicators. Governance systems are outpaced by the very substrates—technological, ecological, economic—that they seek to regulate. The normative timelines that once ordered life—through education, work, or family—no longer align with lived experience.
These are not just failures of will or policy, but failures in the temporal architectures of coordination. And crucially, they are also failures of narrative. As argued in Tempo by Venkatesh Rao (Amazon), coherent decision-making is narrative-driven and tempo-sensitive. When tempo decoheres, so do the narrative structures that institutions use to sequence action, justify choices, and maintain legitimacy. The result is unraveling—decisions made without conviction, or conviction pursued without timing.
One reviewer of an earlier draft captured this dynamic succinctly: “Right solution + wrong time == wrong solution.” Few events illustrated this more clearly than the COVID-19 pandemic. From lockdowns and school closures to vaccines and mask mandates, the institutional response was not always wrong in substance—but frequently wrong in timing. The result was eroded trust, politicization, and a failure to consolidate consensus, even when science and policy were ostensibly aligned.
As Saffron Huang argues in Control and Consciousness of Time, temporality is not a secondary feature of governance, but a constitutive infrastructure. Institutional rhythms—how fast decisions are made, how long commitments last, how frequently feedback is absorbed—determine whether coherence is possible at all. Reform that ignores this axis—focusing only on new content, greater participation, or enhanced technical capacity—cannot restore institutional legitimacy.
What is needed is a new temporal grammar: a way of composing institutional time that can operate across multiplicity, layer difference without collapse, and synchronize without homogenization.
Before we can imagine new institutional forms, we need a vocabulary adequate to the ones we already possess—and to the ones we are leaving behind. In a separate literature survey, we proposed a minimal analytic model that treats institutions not as monoliths, but as composites structured across three dimensions: containment, connectivity, and temporality. That survey—available here—compiles and annotates the intellectual sources that underpin this essay, including classic works from historical institutionalism, systems theory, computational governance, and contemporary protocol thought. What follows is a more synthetic and applied distillation of those materials. These are not metaphors or stylistic categories, but literal features that shape what institutions can do—and where and how they fail.
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Containment refers to the ways institutions enclose, define, or insulate. It is the logic of jurisdiction, sovereignty, and bounded identity. The Westphalian state, the colonial trading company, the vertically integrated Fordist firm—each asserts a form of institutional enclosure.
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Connectivity is the architecture of exposure and exchange: the interfaces through which institutions relate to what lies beyond them. Alliances, treaties, trade networks, APIs, intergovernmental bodies, blockchain bridges—all operate by linking institutional boundaries across differences.
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Temporality concerns how institutions endure, adapt, and repeat: how they structure duration, encode rhythm, and determine cadence. Whether through the slow churn of legal precedent, the rigidity of budget cycles, or the real-time loops of algorithmic decision systems, temporality governs not only what institutions do, but when and how fast they do it. More fundamentally, temporality shapes how institutions send and receive information, redraw boundaries, and create or dissolve interdependencies. It is the dimension that most directly touches how we experience being and becoming.
This triadic model emerged from a traversal of multiple intellectual lineages. Douglass North framed institutions as durable structures that constrain behavior and reduce uncertainty over time. Elinor Ostrom emphasized decentralized, polycentric forms of governance rich in connective flexibility. John Meyer and Brian Rowan highlighted how institutions persist symbolically even when their functional basis has eroded. Gilles Deleuze, in his Postscript on the Societies of Control, described the transition from rigid enclosures to ambient modulation—governance enacted continuously through distributed code.
More recent thinkers have extended these insights into the computational domain. Benjamin Bratton, in The Stack, reimagines sovereignty as computational infrastructure—stacked layers of addressability, identity, and control across planetary systems. Yuk Hui argues for the coexistence of multiple technological ontologies, each shaping its own institutional logic. Saffron Huang, in her work on temporal design, emphasizes that time is not merely a parameter but a design primitive—structural to how institutions govern and adapt.
Each thinker illuminates a facet of the triadic model. North gives us institutional time. Ostrom gives us modular connection. Meyer and Rowan show us how containment persists as ritual or mythic performance. Deleuze shows us how it dissolves into protocol. Bratton reframes containment and connectivity in computational space. Hui and Huang help us imagine temporal multiplicity and ontological plurality as starting points, not bugs.
Seen in this light, the history of modernity is not merely a history of institutional types—state, market, firm, university—but of shifting compositional balances across these three dimensions. Early modern institutions emphasized containment: territorial sovereignty, guild hierarchies, bounded orders. The industrial era layered in connectivity—bureaucracy, global markets, technocratic planning—while preserving enclosure. In the digital era, containment weakens, connectivity accelerates, and temporality fragments. Institutions grow more porous and entangled, more interoperable yet less durable, more expressive yet less synchronized.
This is not a smooth evolution, but a growing misalignment between form and function. Institutions built for enclosure now operate in open systems. Institutions designed to synchronize struggle with ambient asynchrony. Institutions that promised continuity instead generate churn.
We offer this model not as a taxonomy, but as a grammar. A grammar for reading what is breaking—and for composing what comes next. Protocols, as we will later argue, do not only recompose temporality—they also offer new logics of containment (through modular constraint) and connectivity (through interoperable interfaces), allowing all three dimensions to be recomposed in tandem. If institutions are to operate again in time with the world, they may need to be rebuilt not as hierarchies or platforms, but as protocols: rhythmic, interoperable, and composable across both human and machine domains. Throughout the rest of this essay, we use the term “protocol” in this multi-modal sense: not only as computational scaffolding for coordination, but as a temporal grammar, a design instrument, and a narrative frame for rebuilding institutional rhythm.
Artificial intelligence and blockchain are often cited as transformative technologies. But rarely are they treated as elements of a shared institutional horizon. More often, they are cast in isolation—AI as an engine of productivity or risk, blockchain as a vehicle for decentralization or speculation. This separation obscures a deeper structural reality: each represents not only a new computational paradigm, but a conflicting theory of how coordination should be organized.
In this light, AI and blockchain appear not as parallel tools but as institutional antipodes—mirror technologies whose architectures pull in opposite directions. They are, in a sense, evil twins: each powerful, each incomplete, and each generative of the other’s failure modes. Where AI centralizes, blockchain distributes. Where AI thrives on data exposure, blockchain insists on constraint, verification, and—more recently—selective opacity. One seeks to model the world; the other binds it.
Contemporary artificial intelligence, particularly in the form of large-scale foundation models, exhibits a pronounced centripetal tendency. It draws data, computation, and control into centralized architectures. Performance scales with aggregation: of training data, compute capacity, and optimization control. Models become more capable the more of the world they absorb—so long as that world can be rendered legible to statistical inference.
This logic extends beyond training pipelines. It shapes the ecosystems around deployment. Systems like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Google’s Agent-to-Agent (A2A) framework formalize multi-agent coordination by creating shared contexts and structured exchanges. These protocols offer remarkable gains in coherence and responsiveness—but they remain grounded in a worldview where legibility and central visibility are prerequisites for coordination.
Yet central visibility is not simply about seeing more—it is about orienting within context. As Kei Kreutler argues in Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity, intelligent systems do not just process information—they inhabit memory as a medium of spatial and temporal coherence. And as Venkatesh Rao suggests in To Know Is to Stage, epistemic containment in AI systems arises not from physical boundaries, but from staged context: the structured presentation of information that renders it navigable, trustworthy, and legible to agents both human and machine.
The result is a model of institutional intelligence that is fluid, adaptive, and real-time—but also fragile, extractive, and dependent on pervasive instrumentation. AI systems, in this configuration, flatten context into tokens and behaviors into predictions. They prioritize anticipation over deliberation, coherence over discretion. And while they operate at high temporal resolution, they often do so without embedded memory, structure, or accountability.
By contrast, blockchain-based systems begin not with inference but with agreement. Their fundamental operation is not to learn, but to bind. They coordinate not through prediction, but through constraint—anchoring interaction in cryptographic proofs, consensus protocols, and formalized commitments. A blockchain does not model the world; it records what has been agreed upon, and limits what may happen next.
This architecture brings distinct affordances. Blockchain systems are designed to resist discretionary override—to prevent single actors or institutions from unilaterally changing rules after the fact. At the core of this is a commitment to strict global consensus: only those facts which are objectively verifiable by all participants are permitted to enter the record. Anything else is ignored. This makes blockchains inherently blind to any data that cannot be objectively proven, a constraint sometimes called the Oracle Problem. Systems must rely on external mechanisms (“oracles”) to attest to off-chain reality—an architectural concession that underscores blockchain’s epistemological minimalism.
There is also a sharp contrast in data scale and epistemic ambition. AI thrives on maximalism—it seeks to ingest and model as much of the world as possible. Blockchain, by contrast, seeks the absolute minimum amount of data required to produce an objective, verifiable proof. Its ideal is not omniscience but constraint-by-design.
Techniques like zk-SNARKs reinforce this ethos, enabling parties to prove compliance or correctness without revealing underlying data. They offer selective verifiability: the ability to be trusted without being seen. New systems such as Eigenlayer extend this logic into programmable trust scaffolding. By allowing restaked security guarantees to be modularly composed, Eigenlayer enables subjective consensus to be layered on top of objective protocol integrity—offering a more expressive substrate for intersubjective coordination and institutional design.
Blockchains are not only decentralized—they are engineered to remain decentralized even in the presence of attack, disinterest, or drift. They produce what might be called a self-enforcing rule regime—a system whose constraints are continuously and unavoidably applied once adopted. Not quite tyranny, but an architecture one cannot easily exit or ignore. Their strength lies in this structural integrity, but it comes at a cost: blockchain systems often lack nuance, interpretive flexibility, and contextual sensitivity. Governance is difficult to evolve without reintroducing hierarchy or ambiguity.
Where AI overreaches, blockchain underreaches. Where AI is dangerously adaptive, blockchain is stubbornly inertial. If AI risks a legible panopticon, blockchain risks a rule-regime whose structure is immutable but misaligned.
Taken together, AI and blockchain reveal two contradictory instincts for institutional design. One seeks openness through modeling; the other seeks order through agreement. Each responds to the failures of the other. AI offers flexibility but lacks formal restraint. Blockchain provides constraint but lacks responsiveness. Each, in isolation, reproduces its own blind spots.
But their opposition is also an opportunity. If mediated well, these technologies could become counterweights rather than antagonists. AI systems could benefit from blockchain’s verifiability and integrity. Blockchain protocols could gain adaptability through AI-assisted sensing and classification. The challenge is not to choose between them, but to design protocols that hold their tension—that choreograph their interplay without collapsing one into the other.
Future institutions may not resemble the ones we know. They may be composed not as platforms or bureaucracies, but as composite systems—protocols in which inference and agreement, exposure and discretion, centralization and decentralization, are composed into dynamic balance.
If temporality is the axis along which institutions most visibly fail, it is worth pausing to consider the archetype that once defined our relationship to time: the mechanical clock.
A clock is not merely a device for measuring time—it is a machine for regulating it. It converts stored energy—a wound spring or suspended weight—into a measured sequence of intervals. At the heart of this regulation lies a mechanism called the escapement: a device that interrupts the continuous release of energy in order to produce discrete, legible pulses. The escapement is not simply a brake; it is what makes the passage of time intelligible. Without it, the clock would spin uncontrollably, measuring nothing.
The analogy to institutional form is immediate. Every institution must manage two opposing forces: a driving force—the pressure to act, to respond, to adapt—and a regulatory mechanism—the structures that constrain, interpret, and qualify that action. Too much drive without structure produces chaos. Too much structure without drive results in paralysis. Only in tension does rhythm emerge.
Recasting this metaphor, we can see artificial intelligence as the mainspring: an engine of continuous acceleration, interpolation, and anticipation. But without constraint, a mainspring can unwind in a burst of unchecked motion—producing not useful movement, but explosive disorder. If its energy source is continuous and external—like computation or capital—it will accelerate until it meets a structural limit or exhausts its system. This is not unlike what happens in physical systems when unregulated acceleration leads to heat buildup, resonance failures, or outright collapse.
As Vitalik Buterin has argued in his reflections on "d/acc" (decentralized acceleration), acceleration itself may need to be governed by distributed constraints—not to prevent progress, but to pace it in accordance with system stability and human agency. A protocolized world, in this view, is not anti-acceleration—it is temporally aware acceleration: structured drive rather than runaway motion (Buterin, 2025).
This is not just metaphorical. Blockchains implement their own native time systems: time measured not in seconds or dates, but in blocks. Unlike external timestamps—which are often considered unsafe or manipulable—the block is the only reliable and verifiable unit of time on-chain. It is a form of temporal abstraction akin to the historical shift from solar observation to mechanical clocks. Blockchain reorgs—where a recent history is temporarily rewritten—have even been compared to a kind of distributed daylight saving time, in which the clock shifts slightly and all actors must reorient.
As Josh Stark argues, blockchains operate not merely as databases but as form engines—institutions that encode constraint, rhythm, and repetition in software. And as Kei Kreutler notes in Artificial Memory and Orienting Infinity, these cryptographic time systems offer more than auditability—they function as orientation devices, anchoring memory and interaction in a shared cadence even when the content remains decentralized or disputed.
The institutional failure of the present may be read, in part, as a misassembly of this mechanism. We have released the mainspring but disconnected the escapement. The result is not coordinated velocity, but disorder—systems that oscillate, lock, or spin without rhythm. A clock without tempo.
If institutions are to operate again in time with the world, they must be designed not as static enclosures or frictionless networks, but as temporal machines: systems that choreograph drive and constraint, inference and agreement. This is the promise of protocol—not simply as a medium of coordination, but as a composer of institutional rhythm, what Saffron Huang calls the conscious infrastructure of time in institutional design.
If the institutions of the past were defined by industrial modes of enclosure, and those of the present by internet-era connectivity, then the institutions of the future may be defined by protocol-based temporalities. Not as metaphor, nor as shorthand for "digital rule," but as a distinct form: a new kind of institution that organizes temporality, authority, and coordination native to computational media—yet legible to both human and machine actors.
A protocol is not an organization, a platform, or a law. It is a grammar of interaction in time: a set of modular constraints that define how agents relate, synchronize, and evolve together. Unlike legacy institutions, which are vertically integrated and spatially bounded, protocols are composable, durational, and scalable across domains. They do not enclose; they orchestrate. They do not prescribe content; they structure rhythm.
Unlike platforms, protocols do not depend on centralized operators. Unlike pure standards, they are not passive conventions—they embody governance. A protocol encodes not just what must happen, but under what conditions it can be changed, forked, or contested. Its structure is not static; it evolves through embedded processes of deliberation, dispute, and update.
What makes protocols especially suited to our moment is their temporal plasticity. Institutions today operate on rhythms inherited from industrial and legal infrastructures—election cycles, budget periods, academic calendars. Protocols, by contrast, can be designed to operate asynchronously, recursively, and at multiple temporal resolutions. They can encode short feedback loops alongside long-term commitments. They can coordinate in real time without abandoning historical accountability—what William Sewell Jr. calls the interplay of eventful and structural time in institutional transformation. This accountability depends not just on record-keeping, but on institutional memory as an orienting scaffold—what Kei Kreutler describes as the infrastructural role of memory in navigating distributed, asynchronous environments.
To build with protocols is to recompose institutional time. Instead of anchoring behavior to a single cadence—a fiscal year, a term limit, a review cycle—protocols enable layered temporalities. A dispute resolution system might respond within hours; a governance proposal might trigger every quarter -- or every so many blocks on a blockchain; a credential might persist indefinitely unless revoked. Time becomes a configurable dimension of institutional design.
This recomposition does not imply speed for its own sake, nor slowness as virtue. The goal is temporal coherence: the ability of heterogeneous agents—human, artificial, legal, ecological—to act in sync, even when their intrinsic tempos differ. An effective institution does not need to move fast. It needs to move in time with its environment. This echoes contingency theorists like Lawrence and Lorsch, who argued that institutional form must adapt to environmental complexity—not just spatially, but temporally.
Seen in this light, protocols offer a medium for reconciling the opposing tendencies of AI and blockchain. Where AI provides inference and adaptivity, but often by simulating foresight rather than grounding it—producing anticipatory coherence that may lack memory, deliberation, or causal accountability, blockchain provides durational integrity and constraint. Neither is sufficient alone. But together, mediated through protocol, they can form institutional systems that are both flexible and accountable, both real-time and durable.
A protocol can bind an AI system within a rule-governed shell—ensuring auditability, contestability, and limits on discretionary power. Just as staging creates epistemic containers for interaction—as in Rao’s notion of “to know is to stage"—protocols give temporal and contextual framing to otherwise amorphous flows of inference and adaptation, turning responsiveness into legible memory. At the same time, it can extend a blockchain’s functionality through AI-driven sensing, classification, and parameter tuning. Rather than resolving their tensions, protocols can compose across them—binding the mainspring and the escapement into a shared temporal machine.
The result is not a new theory of governance in the classical sense, but something closer to choreography: the structuring of motion in time. Protocols do not merely regulate—they orchestrate interaction, enabling heterogeneous agents to move together in ways that are intelligible, interruptible, and cumulative.
This demands new design sensibilities. This includes recognizing that protocol design is a participatory practice—involving not only engineers and policymakers but also communities, publics, and ensembles of human and non-human agents. Institutions can no longer aim to freeze uncertainty, enforce uniformity, or optimize for speed alone. They must learn to compose with flux. Luhmann framed institutions as self-reproducing systems of communication that process complexity over time—highlighting the importance of internal rhythmic coherence in adapting to external environments. They must create coherence without rigidity, feedback without noise, structure without enclosure. And above all, they must learn to think in time. Dewey imagined public coordination as an ongoing, situated choreography—less about law than about how people continuously respond to each other and to unfolding problems.
We inhabit a world increasingly characterized by temporal dissonance. Institutions no longer move in rhythm with the systems they aim to govern. This crisis of synchronization is not just structural or technological—it is musical. As Ben Zucker explores in his Summer of Protocols project Renotations, reimagining the notational schemes of music makes it possible to generate entirely new expressive forms from the same underlying score. This provides a powerful metaphor: what if institutional protocols—like musical notation—are not fixed instructions, but scaffolds for diverse performances? Institutions, in this view, have lost not only their timekeeping function, but their ability to collectively interpret and improvise around a shared rhythm. The score is scattered, the ensemble unsynchronized.
This disjunction expresses itself in diverse ways: policies implemented on delay, governance models unable to metabolize digital realities, social contracts detached from lived experience. At the core lies a structural failure to reconcile multiple temporalities: the speed of computation, the rhythms of culture, the slowness of law, the nonlinear thresholds of planetary systems.
Against this backdrop, two technological paradigms—artificial intelligence and blockchain—have emerged not just as tools of computation, but as templates for institutional form. AI offers anticipatory coherence: the ability to sense, infer, and adapt at scale. Blockchain offers procedural integrity: the capacity to bind, constrain, and remember across adversarial contexts. Each alone is incomplete. But together, mediated by protocol, they open the possibility of institutions that are rhythmically composed, temporally aware, and structurally accountable. As Luhmann argued, systems that endure must not only maintain structure, but continuously recalibrate across incompatible temporal demands—a task now increasingly assumed by protocols.
What we have called protocols are not simply digital infrastructure. They are instruments for composing time—capable of aligning fast and slow dynamics, layering commitments, and orchestrating action across human and machine agents. They are not fixes grafted onto broken systems; they are the basis for composing a new institutional grammar that blends formal structure with improvised artistry, liveliness and energy with new modes of myth and ceremony. As Meyer and Rowan observed, institutional rituals often persist not for their functional utility but as sources of symbolic legitimacy. Yet today, we are reaching for new and potent forms of myth and ceremony that are not merely theatrical, but effectual—capable of shaping material reality while underwriting new modes of meaning-making through narrative alignment and collective imagination.
To build with them is not to automate governance or decentralize power in the abstract. It is to learn how to choreograph systems that can generate coherence without rigidity, adaptation without drift, trust without centralization, and legibility without total visibility. It is to treat institutional design as a problem not just of politics or engineering, but of rhythm. As Arendt reminds us, political action is never timeless—it unfolds within the fragile temporality of shared appearance, where rhythm matters as much as intent.
The path forward will not be linear. It will not be driven by blueprints or manifestos. It will emerge through compositional practice: experimenting with new forms, forging new grammars, and tuning new instruments—until the beat lands.
A protocol, after all, is not just a rule. It is a score—waiting to be played. And the task ahead is not simply to write better rules, but to bring a sense of controlled musicality back to institutional design: compositional, improvisational, and syncopated—capable of carrying harmony and controlled dissonance across temporal registers.