Prologue: Skeletons

Protocols Rule Everything Around Me, and Me

I once worked alongside a man I’ll call Bob, who had the permanent hunch of someone trying to hear the sound of his own footsteps in a carpeted room. He walked with a rushed and anxious gait, as if every step risked collapsing some invisible scaffolding. It was never clear if he was running away from something, or running late towards some meeting. Although it was probably both. One might say his posture was inherited from years of being caught between responsibility and impotence; he was scrunched and skittish. He often told me, in the tone of a confession like a rationalist giving sincere consideration to astrology, that he thought it might be possible that the building itself redistributed authority at night, the cubicles and titles shifting based on some routing protocol no one had documented.

Bob was a senior individual contributor of some function called “Strategic Enablement,” which meant he maintained a vast spreadsheet whose purpose even he doubted. The spreadsheet functioned like a medieval grimoire—half treaty, half curse, half salvation—because everyone referenced it, no one fully understood why it existed, yet everyone feared what would happen if it disappeared. It had about fifty tabs, filled with data about people and processes. He was the only one who seemed to be able to read the primary matching column, called “id,” a name that had less to do with psychology that the experience of analyzing it suggested. Overall, the spreadsheet seemed less like a source of data than a spellbook whose encrypted incantations generated only further doubt, a compendium of archaic symbols that promised knowledge while withholding certainty. Anyone reckless enough to peer over Bob’s shoulder would become locked in the same trance one adopts when staring too long at recursive system logs, glimpsing a near infinity of layers. Each tab was color-coded according to a long-forgotten schema, with neon cells glowing like electric sigils indicating states no one could now interpret but Bob, who was the legend, although not the same type of legend he once dreamed of becoming. It was a legacy artifact from a transformation initiative that began three reorganizations ago, roughly a decade past, created by a now-defunct task force whose memory barely persisted through the formulas Bob nervously guarded.

His counterpart, Alice, lived two floors up in an annex decorated with motivational slogans in a font so large it felt like the building was broadcasting instructions across its internal network. Visitors described the annex as a wellness-themed command bunker, where platitudes about “unlocking potential” competed with the hum of malfunctioning air vents and the quiet resignation of people who had willingly become digital avatars. Alice said the posters had been selected algorithmically, optimized to manufacture morale, though no one could identify the system responsible for curating them. Most recently, Alice had announced a company-wide initiative to embed “culture” into its software. In other words, Alice was generating digital motivational posters that employees were encouraged to set as backdrops to their video calls and profile pictures. Her own handle on the corporate chat system rotated motivational quotes weekly. And, to ensure optimal engagement, she had installed a bot to distribute inspirational images randomly across project messaging channels. Alice and Bob believed, as did I when I worked alongside them, that they were the leaders of a grand experiment: an internal transformation program meant to usher their organization—nominally a transportation firm founded in 1933, practically a relic—into the nebulous category of “the future.” They each carried folders brimming with freshly printed slide decks describing the future in precise but interchangeable jargon, full of arrows and circles pointing toward destinations charted but never reached. They told me, separately, that their work represented the company’s last hope of remaining relevant, though both also whispered that the real decisions were being made elsewhere. When I interviewed them for what eventually became a research footnote, I discovered that both lived inside parallel fantasies: Bob thought Alice was orchestrating a subtle coup through meetings, and Alice thought Bob controlled the entire company through secret data models. Their paranoia coagulated into conspiracy.

In truth, neither had any meaningful authority without navigating the jankspace protocol stack required to access their work environments. Like the rest of the organization, they mostly lived in the liminal space between authentication sequences—scanning into each room, then pulling out their phones to perform biometric verification, only to discover the device needed charging before the identity gateway could unlock the one-time code required to validate the password stored inside their keychain vault, which itself demanded a secondary face-scan. Only then could they log into the company’s network, request a temporary network token delivered through an encrypted mail relay, and finally access the confidential drive, which—naturally—required yet another layer of verification. And so on, and so forth, until the workday usually dissolved into a choreography of recursive entry rituals whose true purpose no one could convincingly explain.

Beyond this, should they be lucky enough to escape the initial maze, lay the overstate protocols, a jurisdictional thicket in which every action, no matter how trivial, was routed through a cascading set of layers that claimed supervisory rights over one another. To mark a task complete, one had to submit an initiation packet via both email and chat, and ideally log it in the weekly resourcing report, each channel acting as an independent verification pathway. These reports were reviewed by a rotating set of managers who always seemed to be on holiday, and who evaluated the request against a tacit rule set that had grown organically rather than by design. A single task might bounce through a half-dozen verifications, collecting endorsements like a poor pilgrim collecting alms, until it reached a critical level of urgency set not by any explicit mechanism but by silent collective auction, of course complemented by a randomness quotient. Unfortunately, if the timeline extended for too long, someone would likely request a reinterpretation, effectively resetting the entire sequence, forcing the proposed task—often already completed—back into a review phase to realign with the most recent strategic narrative so that the action could be re-defined, and re-justified.

It is here that we can begin, in the flow of corporate life, to document the protocols that keep us, like Alice and Bob, moving predictably at a tempo we usually do not see or consciously consent to. What appears to us locally as individual responsibility may be nothing more than a web of embedded constraints: escalation paths framed as autonomy, approval queues forcing collaboration, and incident-response procedures engineered to activate minds which have long wandered off. These protocols often dictate what work may be attempted, when it becomes visible, when it is forgotten, and when it must be resurrected to satisfy some quarterly narrative. At NPC Inc., flow is not set by any great manager. Instead, it emerges by the interplay of dependencies, reporting cycles, and the ever-thickening sediment of prior decisions, each carrying forward assumptions no one remembers making. Here, what matters is not whether the task is necessary but whether it arrives on the correct beat, aligned with the organization’s skeleton of protocols.