Progress fascinates. It always has.
True, the printing press had its detractors. And one can hardly imagine the defenders of medieval walls marvelling at the first bombards that pulverised their ramparts. But since the Renaissance, in the West at least, the enthusiasts have always prevailed over the sceptics. Today, this fascination verges on enchantment.
Yet the great technological accelerations have also left the deepest scars on the social body.
Consider the birth of capitalism. Among its founding dynamics, one carries a particular symbolic charge: the enclosures. From the fifteenth century onwards, first in England and then progressively across Europe, the common lands — those commons where peasants had exercised collective rights of use for centuries, allowing them to live with dignity — were systematically fenced off, privatised, transformed into exclusive property.
It would take until Proudhon, in the nineteenth century, for the logic of those dispossessions to find its sharpest formulation: “Property is theft.” But by then, entire populations had been expropriated, driven into the cities, reduced to destitution — thus creating the very conditions for a labour market to exist. Karl Polanyi demonstrated it: this dislocation of rural communities was not a side effect of modernisation. It was its engine. Without the destruction of rural society, the self-regulating system founded on three abstract and commodified fictions made interchangeable — land, labour, and money — could never have emerged.
The industrial cities that resulted were, first and foremost, places of concentrated misery — fuel for the first industrial revolution, just as much as coal. The wealth created was immense. So were the ruins and wars it engendered. As for the distribution of this wealth, it reached such a level of concentration in the nineteenth century that Piketty, a century and a half later, gave it a structural formula: the return on accumulated capital would systematically outpace the creation of new wealth — the past, in effect, devouring the future.
We are not today on the brink of yet another bank bailout by our chancellor. That headline, which Satoshi Nakamoto etched into Bitcoin’s genesis block on 3 January 2009, was a diagnosis of a systemic crisis. The stakes are no longer financial.
We stand at the convergence of several structural crises. A second great industrial revolution — which must be named first, because the crises that follow are precisely its consequences. A planetary system breaching the boundaries of its own stability, approaching environmental collapse. Global warming — a term whose political history is itself a case study in the management of urgency. And the unravelling of the world architecture born in 1945 — that balance of terror which, for eight decades, froze the fault lines without ever healing them.
The logic of the enclosures is at work again. New fences are already being erected — around data, algorithms, digital infrastructures, cognitive resources.
What follows on this site is both a diagnosis and a blueprint — and this twofold ambition is the purpose of the Protocol. The diagnosis maps the convergence of these crises with the rigour the moment demands. The Protocol proposes concrete architectures — for digital infrastructure, for economics within planetary limits, for governance capable of operating at the speed of the forces it must govern.
To honour all those who, throughout history, refused to bow before technological progress and the uncontested concentration of power — and to carry that refusal forward, this time before the fact. But above all — to anticipate the transformations to come, and to act with the clarity this moment demands.
Not to defend gains wrested too late from the previous revolution — but to shape the terms of this one before they are imposed.
This is neither the enchantment of progress nor its refusal. It is something the nineteenth century never managed: arriving before the damage is done.
To act, this time, in time.
Alternatively, jump directly to the 5 Pillars of the Protocol: