White-Hat Protocol Punks

A quick note from Manila, where I'm traveling for a conference.

Life in Manila, like many emerging-world megacities, is full of workarounds. Infrastructure is strained, systems don't always work, and protocols aren't always legible.

The kinds of conditions under which protocol 'punks' proliferate. To survive, navigate, and perhaps even thrive under these conditions favor an agile and adaptive mind and a knack for discovering loopholes.

Which made me wonder: what if this knack could be harnessed into a protocol-positive feedback loop? What if protocols were designed such that the default response to loophole-discovery was not quashing, but learning?

Sound familiar? This is the same principle behind open-source software and white-hat hacking: where developers with a 'hacker' sensibility search for security bugs so they can be patched, often for reward or recognition.

If we consider social and institutional protocols as a systems language, Southeast Asian megacities like Manila are often full of expert 'hackers'. From a talent and systemic view, much of this talent is currently undertapped.

With a clever incentive system (which will probably be 'hacked' itself on its iterations towards equilibria), perhaps these could be used as 'ruggedizing' labs for 'real-world' protocol development, testing, and improvement.

We might imagine a punk-positive design principle for protocols that aligns incentives for the ingenious with improving the systems when they identify loopholes, instead of exploiting or extracting from the system.