Welcome to Folklore, a community exploring the labyrinth of networked worlds. In this newly-commissioned essay, Kei Kreutler reflects on standardization and technological interoperability through the metaphor of the fictional spaceport. Kei’s work explores how cultural narratives of technology shape what worlds we can build.

No one knows how to repair a spaceport.

This is because spaceports primarily exist as a fiction. Spaceports imply the existence of inter-Solar System, if not intergalactic, infrastructure. Our existing international infrastructure already strains under its own weight.

Existing space stations have a varied history. The Soviet Union launched the first space station in 1986 with the name Mir, which some translate as peace, world, or in pre-revolutionary times, society. They assembled it in orbit, and in its later life, it hosted several international visitors. Over a decade after the launch of Mir, five countries and a number of intergovernmental treaties oversaw the launch of the currently active International Space Station (ISS) in 1998. The ISS makes sixteen earth orbits per day, with peak visibility during twilight.

Like Mir before it in 2001, the ISS is set to meet a managed end. By 2031 its remnants will share their final resting place in the South Pacific Ocean’s so-called “spacecraft cemetery.” The countries involved in its launch have not yet planned any international infrastructure to replace it.

After its descent, the Chinese Tiangong will be the only remaining space station in orbit.

Standards Also Unmake a World

Unlike space stations, perhaps spaceports don’t need to manifest beyond their fictions. Plain old ports exist because they fulfill a need. Marking the passage of a resource moving, from land to sea, sea to land, or embarking into the air, ports facilitate movement across terrains, sovereignties, and engineered environments.

But spaceports do more than that. As fictions, they facilitate movement that more explicitly bridges worlds. Worlds that could have wholly unknown ecologies.

While the term “worldbuilding” enjoys cyclical revivals in the popular imagination, a different definition of worlds could be offered here (a definition intended to be neither definitive nor canonical, but instead to be a temporary guide). We regularly think of worlds operating with specific external boundaries, which contain relative internal coherency despite the occasional leak.(1) The Victorian fascination with terrariums demonstrates this well. But what if the opposite were true, and unstable boundaries are precisely what constitutes worldness? Its contradictions exceed it. A world is so much a world that its boundaries cannot entirely be certain, with constant leaks into other worlds or further recesses into its own. With unstable boundaries, its relationships can be symbiotic, predatory, or, as more often happens, a mix of both. Ultimately in this understanding, a world confounds expectations of agency for those meeting it.

Do you think today we could build infrastructure that bridges worlds? There’s a joke that the most fantastical thing in the Star Trek universe is not the worlds they encounter, but the fact that intergalactic video calling actually works.

Standardization is one strategy for cross-world interoperability. Historically, standardization often comes from sovereignties wanting to consolidate. An early example: the first Chinese emperor sought to standardize measurements in the second century B.C.E. Other needs for standardization came from crises, like during the early twentieth century when a fire broke out in Maryland, United States, and firefighters arriving from other states could not connect their fire hoses to the fire hydrants. Many large-scale efforts at manufacturing standardization across sovereignties, though initiated before World War II, came to pass after its wake.

In the insightful essay “Standards Make the World,” David Lang writes about an approach to standardization that he calls “disruptive standards-making,” illustrated by influential groups rallying around engineering that just works. He cites the development of the internet as a chief example. TCP/IP, the computer networking protocol that facilitates the internet today, came from applied, practical development of the technology. The publicly lesser known Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) is a theoretical framework for computer networking largely developed by the International Standards Organization (ISO) at the same time as TCP/IP but with the stated intention to create a standard. TCP/IP, however, ultimately won out because it just worked. Lang writes, “Disruptive standards-making falls somewhere on the spectrum between de facto and voluntary-consensus—elements of both strategies mixed with heavy doses of entrepreneurial hubris. It’s an attitude of ‘we’re doing this—are you coming?’”(2) Though disruptive standards-making doesn’t begin with consortia, Lang concludes, standards usually survive in the longer term through consortia management.

Typically at a confluence of influence, capital, and institutional might, plus a little lucky timing, the documented history of standardization naturally favors the large-scale. However, one might wonder about standards that escape explicit formalization: cases in which there is just enough interoperability. One could argue that regions with differentiated linguistic dialectics might be examples of this. Just enough may be understood, and differentiation can multiply.

Still, none of these approaches explain how the Star Trek video calling conundrum could be solved (as long as we momentarily suspend our belief in Star Trek’s solution: the existence of a universal translator and “subspace” communications.(3)) This type of standardization implies coordination across entities that can already communicate with each other or which have at least some form of sufficient discoverability between them. Interpretability becomes central.

To explore the intergalactic video calling conundrum, we could understand protocols in contrast to standardization, though of course many would not make this separation in practice. For our purposes, we could define protocols as systems that prioritize interoperability over formal standardization, with spaceports acting as their central metaphor. Spaceports take the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) line further, to establish “rough consensus and running worlds.”

So while strictly speaking there might be no need to build intergalactically just yet, spaceports evoke a vital attitude toward infrastructure, as the sense that our technologies exceed our understanding as humans increases. Spaceports are a metaphor for our technological present. They represent infrastructure that adapts to plurality, or in other words, adapts to the proliferation of technological uncertainties: other worlds. To imagine what that means, first you can close your eyes.

Spaceport Aesthetics

Now imagine what a protocol looks like. Any protocol, just as an idea. What are its contours? Does it have a direction? A feeling?

A group of us tried this experiment, which resulted in the humble sketches below. Across all of the sketches, our visualizations of a protocol had a few commonalities. One of the most striking sketches resembled a crystal: the idea of the inorganic growing within a set of rules but without precisely predictable offshoots. Most of our sketches included infrastructures with a solid core, a means for free floating agents to interact around the solid core, and a directional arrow in time, as though simple operating instructions allowed these infrastructures to continue indefinitely. In short, we concluded, our collective subconscious had decided that protocols look like spaceports.

The thing about spaceports, however, is that they’re janky. They’re not going to maintain perfect operation over time. One must imagine every cable connector ever designed in the past, plus the thousand more cable connectors that will inevitably be designed in the future despite our best attempts at standardization, all lined up irregularly on a wall. That, rather than the sterile operating room of HAL 2000, is the aesthetic of spaceports.

Spaceports defy the dominant aesthetic narratives of technology. Given to us by 2001: A Space Odyssey and other media, these lingering science fiction imaginaries suggest that a technologically advanced future implies minimalism. Other popular science fiction imaginaries like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? suggest that technological collapse and earthly decay go together. Spaceports sit somewhere dynamically in-between.

Heterogeneous Devices and Cross-World Media

The research and development company Xerox PARC is best known for creating our modern personal computing paradigm. Additionally, beginning in the 1970s, Xerox PARC supported initiatives by social scientists to produce ethnographic studies of emerging technologies that would influence how we understand them today.

A classic paper from this initiative, “Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice” authored by Lucy Suchman, Jeanette Blomberg, Juliane E. Orr (Work Practice & Technology Associates), and Randall Trigg that American Behavioral Scientist published in 1999, summarizes some of their work on human-machine communication over previous decades.(4)

This research group conducted case studies of technologies, including a new, “feature-rich” photocopier that consistently received complaints from those trying to use it. In this case study from 1981, Suchman explored why these difficulties arose despite users having a detailed instruction manual for the photocopier. From observing its use in several different contexts, Suchman concluded that no matter how “self-evident” designers tried to make a new device through things like instruction manuals establishing interaction patterns, users could not escape some level of contingency as they interpreted its functions. She reframed the task of designers from creating a device that acts nearly like a human, in the sense that it should be able to fully explain itself, to creating a device that requires writing, reading, and interpreting with the ambiguity that entails, because interactions with devices lack the “subtle, emergent, and highly contingent courses of collaborative sensemaking that characterize interactions among humans.”(5)

It’s also interesting here that Suchman implies designers considered instruction manuals part of a “self-evident” device. Today we might be more inclined to think of instruction manuals as separate from a device. Even consulting them might be considered a sign of failure of a device’s explanatory power. This could be for multiple reasons, one being that we have much more established interaction patterns to rely on when interpreting devices. As devices become more agentic through artificial intelligence, however, this point should be revisited. What happens to interpreting devices when the instruction manual speaks back?

In subsequent work by Blomberg from 1987 to 1988, she expected to find a correlation between the number of service calls a photocopier required and how users perceived its reliability. She was surprised to find none. Instead, she inferred, it depended on not the number of service calls, but their helpfulness in problem resolution.

In 1991, a larger scale ethnographic study by Orr was initiated in response to “corporate concern” over how to train service technicians. Orr concluded that rather than “the rote repair of identical machines,” repair work “was better characterized as a continuous improvisation with a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine.”(7) Maintenance, Orr argued, is inherently idiosyncratic, and narratives, it seemed, proved the best compensation for this idiosyncrasy. As this research group writes in the paper, “Storytelling is the principal medium available for technicians to share their knowledge and stay informed of subtle developments in machine behavior.” Responding to “subtle developments in machine behavior” requires technical skill as well as narrative skill.(8) The Star Trek video calling conundrum may only be tractable through open improvisation. With artificial intelligence, agentic devices might be interestingly understood as teaching machines to improvise (machine improvisation).

At the time of this research group, nowhere embodied the dynamic, idiosyncratic nature of maintenance better than airport operations rooms. For two years in the late 1980s, the researchers visited one such place. Summarizing their experience, they immediately mention how the airport operations room challenged the dominant science fiction imaginary:

Where on the deck of the Starship Enterprise [in Star Trek] it appears that all the artifacts were created at a single moment, the operations room presented us with a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired, in bits and pieces, over time. Rather than being homogeneously and seamlessly integrated, these artifacts comprised a heterogeneous collection of information and communication technologies, including telephones, radios, video monitors, networked workstations, whiteboards, clocks, and a wide array of documents. The integration of these artifacts, correspondingly, seemed more a matter of string and baling wire than of design.(9)

They also observed the social organization of the staff, a small, close group, who oriented their team toward events distant in space and time. This led the researchers to redescribe an information system, not as a clearly delineated organizational form, but instead as an “unfolding” of “partial, heterogeneous devices.”(10)

While understanding technology as a situated social practice has become familiar, this ethnographic work from the 1970s onward set precedents for how we think now. Some people might even read the emphasis on “storytelling” as part of a contentious cultural fault line in technology discourse today. However, whether overly familiar or even contentious, our aesthetic understanding of technology perhaps never took the conclusions of these researchers to heart.

Maintaining complex technology proves inherently idiosyncratic. Standardization at scale has chaotic externalities. Rather than assuming anything other than minimalism is a design flaw, what if we were to integrate these idiosyncratic, adhoc tendencies as a sign of just enough interoperability in our technology, made of “archaeologically layered” “partial, heterogeneous devices”? What if we were to take these tendencies seriously as necessary marks of spaceport aesthetics, of plural, cross-world interoperability, and of worldness itself?

Infrastructure as Organization

If even standardization can’t escape some form of idiosyncratic, adhoc storytelling, how can we think of the innovation complex technology writ large offers?

In traditional economics, organizations supposedly form because they maintain knowledge shared among their participants, processes, and tools, which should improve efficiency. In many scenarios, an employee troubleshooting a technical error in a process created by the organization would be more efficient than outsourcing the troubleshooting to a service technician. That is, unless the troubleshooting requires specialized knowledge the organization does not maintain, in which case, the organization outsourcing the troubleshooting would lower its “transaction costs.” Referred to as Coase’s theory of the firm, this idea suggests that an organization with stable boundaries forms when it sufficiently lowers the transaction costs of accomplishing an endeavor.

Spaceports hypothetically elude this theorem, which is questionable in its own right. As we’ve conceived of them, spaceports are infrastructure designed without stable boundaries. They are meant to accommodate the fellow traveler and the unknown visitor alike. Yet this doesn’t mean they don’t imply some interpretable organizational form.

From our protocol visualization experiment, the activity of docking came up. Before landing a fellow traveler might think, would the spaceport have digestible food? What would the cultures there be like, and if their spaceship became damaged, would the spaceport have the tools to repair it? Would the spaceport have the right connector cables? Some unknown visitors would not have any questions like these. Spaceports are organized adaptations to these uncertainties.

What I’m getting at, then, is that spaceports demonstrate the concept of infrastructure as organization. For spaceports to exist, they would need to be built for just enough interoperability. Their infrastructure would have to substitute for the shared, maintained knowledge of an organization, making it worthwhile to land. The needs that couldn’t be anticipated technically would have to be met with practices of improvisation.

Current software experiments in cross-world media like the Autonomous Worlds Network can be seen through the lens of infrastructure as organization. Building “autonomous worlds,” which can be understood as media, game, and cryptographic environments, they make their software protocols public, intending their operating rules to maintain consistency plus discoverability akin to digital, Newtonian physics.(11)

The game This Cursed Machine is one example from the Autonomous Worlds Network. In a 2023 talk, game developers ARB and Agnes Cameron presented their work in the context of developing “composable game loops.”(12) They suggested questioning the assumption that, in the context of public blockchains, a game is meaningfully composable simply because its game states, rule sets, and objects are on-chain and therefore readily available data. Instead, they set out to create composable game loops, that is, small, simple mechanisms that facilitate technical as well as narrative composability. In the case of their game, as they explicitly point to in their talk title “Bugs In, Sludge Out” (you’ll get it if you play the game), participants can think of the technical and narrative output of one game loop as an input for another game loop, which participants can then build themselves. From these integrated, composable game loops autonomous worldness can grow.

Autonomous Worlds Network is a nascent, playful example that, in some cases, intentionally embraces spaceport aesthetics from the start, whereas other established examples, including photocopiers, instruction manuals, and operations rooms, have incorporated it over time. We will likely see many changes to these examples, both new and old, as agentic devices develop further.

Understood this way, complex technology innovates through infrastructure as organization, providing just enough interoperability on which improvisation can build. Such approaches will be vital as our technology tends toward the agentic unknown.(13)

A metaphor for our technological present

Spaceports do not represent a will toward homogeneous, globalized standardization, but neither do they represent a will toward borderization. They exist in the protocolized, permissionless mess in between. They attempt to articulate a vernacular without walls: welcome to fellow traveler and unknown visitor alike.

Ultimately, repairing a spaceport involves storytelling as well as technical skill. While no one knows how to repair a spaceport, after this thought experiment, one could imagine a manual fragment captured from the training data set of an old agent 2.78 AUs away. It might read:

• Just enough interoperability

• Computer says maybe

• Aesthetic pluralism

• Iterate on one mechanism at a time

• Liability should not exceed agency

• Vernaculars without walls

• Agnostic infrastructure, opinionated implementation

• Theater of all possibilities, not performances

The rest of the manual fragment would be illegible and unknown, lost somewhere in the inorganic yet decomposing spaceport cemeteries of the future. We do know for certain that if spaceports exist, they will definitely need repair.

NOTES

1. ludens, “The Case for Autonomous Worlds.”

2. Lang, “Standards Make the World.”

3. Ursula K. Le Guin’s faster-than-light communication device the Ansible might be the subject for another essay.

4. Suchman et al., “Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice.”

5. Ibid, 395.

6. Ibid, 396.

7. “Unidentified Floating Object.”

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid, 397.

10. Ibid, 399.

11. ludens, “The Case for Autonomous Worlds.”

12. “Bugs In, Sludge Out: Production Circuits As Composable Game Loop ✧ Agnes Cameron & Arb ✧ Assembly.” November 15, 2023.

13. Someone may deem it pertinent to write The Cloud of Unknowing, but instead of how to relate to God in the fourteenth century, it describes how to relate to technology in the twenty-first century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Bugs In, Sludge Out: Production Circuits As Composable Game Loop ✧ Agnes Cameron & Arb ✧ Assembly.” November 15, 2023.

Lang, David. “Standards Make the World.” Summer of Protocols. Accessed August 26, 2024.

ludens. “The Case for Autonomous Worlds.” Autonomous Worlds Network, August 9, 2023.

Suchman, Lucy, Jeanette Blomberg, Julian E. Orr, and Randall Trigg. “Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice.” American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (November 1999): 392–408.

The Public Domain Review. “Unidentified Floating Object: Edo Images of Utsuro-Bune.” https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/utsuro-bune/.

Cover image: Ismail al-Jazarī, Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, 1206.