On the Sovereign Protocol

I. The Model

Nested on the Malay peninsula between the Straits of Malacca lies one of the greatest exceptions of our modern world. Would we still assess our teleological progress by wonders — it would be likely to sit squarely at, or close, to the apex of modern achievement.

Singapore.

Singapore exists as an immutable anchor point in a dynamic and vibrant region marred by uncertainty. For centuries it has assumed a role far beyond its afforded stature, and redoubled those positions tenfold in the last decades alone, eclipsing regional neighbours and many other international contemporaries by orders of magnitude.

It occupies a unique and coveted position on global leaderboards; Economics. Education. Equality. The barometer by which most humans universally measure the success of a civilization are all overrepresented by and within Singaporean society.

Such change does not emerge organically, neither without the ire of jealous neighbours or worse — siblings. Slotted between both Malaysia and Indonesia, Singapore had an immensely difficult childhood; best described by the Bahasa colloquialism of 'abang-adik' — the interplay between older and younger brothers. For years, both nations pressured deference.

Instead, they got defiance, and exceptionalism emerged.

Singapore does not succeed despite the dysfunction of the region that surrounds it, it succeeds because of it. It has exploited a unique strength — and the absence of it within these neighbours — to achieve such radical progress and profit.

It succeeded because of governance by protocol.

II. The Architecture

Amidst any celebration of Singapore will be a clamour of criticism. It is no stranger to such — and in fact, examination of its underlying architect shows this to be more by design than by dependency. That man is Lee Kuan Yew.

While Singapore exists wholly as a cumulative sum of efforts by the Singaporean people, to conduct any deconstruction of Singapore without any reflection on his role would not only be remiss, but outright incorrect.

Lee Kuan Yew is perhaps one of the most remarkable men to ever have existed.

While countless men have etched their names into the annals of history with the sword, he elegantly and lucidly illustrates that there are cases in which the pen is truly mightier. A trained legalist, LKY was left with the seemingly insurmountable task of wrenching Singapore — an ex-colonial and imperialist vassal state of both the British and then the Japanese — into not just independence, but out of the barren mud flat and into the modern metropolis it is today.

To be clear, there were a multitude of options available, and many competing global hegemonies vying to influence that decision. The Americans desperately wanted Singapore to adopt their flavour of democratic decision-making, as the Filipinos dutifully had post-WWII. This was countered by the spectre of Chinese, not strictly Soviet, Communism — to transform it into a command economy that would accelerate Eisenhower's infamous 'Domino Theory'.

It is clear from his personal memoirs that this was not a decision taken lightly. He understood, from the outset, that this choice would not simply affect the Singaporean people, but all of ASEAN, and he applied strictest caution in his assessment of options.

Democratic — governance by preference aggregation (populism).

Autocratic — governance by command (authoritarianism).

— and a third, largely hidden force operating behind one mask of the former two —

Protocolic — governance by execution logic (determinism).

For LKY, his blunt assessment was that true democracy was never a suitable possibility for him — as arguably the Singapore of the 1960s had advanced far closer to what we see now in terms of the globalised West; nations grappling with large, sometimes conflicting, ethnic diasporas. Philosophers like Žižek are prepared to equally concede that these globalist tendencies have produced the death of liberal democracies, leaving most of the West to rethink their approach or face total annihilation in the face of remaining ethnically homogenous nations.

Turning back to post-Colonial Singapore, LKY also understood that this multi-racial fragility — particularly his need to rely upon ethnically Malay soldiers in the vacuum of a British retreat — meant that he equally could not assert autocratic rule.

Instead he carved a third path, and co-opted the face of democracy but constructed a detailed system that operated policies as instruments of protocol. Like the legal profession he was inculcated within, LKY applied legalistic principles to governance — crafting inputs and outputs that conduce outcomes — which he bet, as economic prosperity increased demonstrably, would continue to win him, and the People's Action Party (the PAP), democratic assent.

Almost all large-scale foundational policies in Singapore act this way; the Housing Development Board (HDB), the agglomeration of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), the Central Provident Fund (CPF), Ethnic Integration Quotas — all these are serialised protocols underpinning a much larger structure of a nation state. Rather than enforce these via coercion, as an autocracy would, he architected compliance by economical rationality — and as Singaporeans participated in this protocolic system, they found themselves rewarded, as their education, employment and economic opportunities incremented at rates since unseen.

So how did LKY succeed where all other models of governance failed?

III. On Administration

The success of any protocol is ultimately governed by the administrator of it.

To understand this point, it is helpful to briefly rationalise by analogy from an unlikely source. In 1981, Disney released TRON. It was a fascinating cybernetic fiction film that transported viewers inside their computers to a world called 'The Grid' and cast a harsh, merciless program — the MCP, or Master Control Program — as chief antagonist.

In this domain, where computer code controls all, there are only the inputs and outputs of protocols, with the MCP as total master of the domain. It initialised, scaled and administered the entirety of this digital universe from a single almost unassailable node.

This is precisely what LKY was able to do for Singapore. He constructed the protocol, improved, adjusted and ultimately administered it for close to four decades of political life — producing a system which has outclassed every other form of governance model on earth.

This statement thus makes clear the fatal flaw in protocolic systems — they are only as capable and competent as their administrator. LKY was able, remarkably so, to balance a wide array of complex competing interests and engage 'satisficing' trade-offs in near real-time with full political power. This is not a transferable skill, nor is it a teachable one. Instead it is the hallmark of a supremely remarkable individual that was willing to devote his entire life to the cause of uplifting people from poverty to prosperity.

In fact his administrative ability was so strong that modern critics, unable to assault his methods of the past, now instead suggest that Singapore still runs on the institutional momentum of his legacy rather than active administration — and indeed, time will tell.

In any case, reflecting on his success, how can that kind of orchestrator be replicated?

IV. On Collapse

Against the example of LKY, there are countless failures wherein protocolic governance has collapsed under the weight of itself. There are many forms this degradation takes, with close historical analogies.

Deng Xiaoping provides instruction as to corruption of protocol on transference, where the inheritor recrafts it to serve new political or personal ambitions. The protocol was never properly codified beyond the person into replicable policy instruments the same way it was done in Singapore. With no suitable inheritor, it is bound to collapse.

Vladimir Putin highlights the dangerous descent when the protocol stops optimising the system, and instead optimises singularly for regime continuity. In this case, the administrator's survival instinct progressively outranks the protocol's objective function — warping it beyond recognition. In these cases, protocol violation is rampant and frenetic; the entire system becomes more reactive than proactive, leading eventually to destruction.

Lastly, the DPRK is protocolic governance in the terminal state — coercion over rational compliance — collapsing into one objective function of administrator worship. When the administrator no longer can assert accurate information as to the performance of the system, observability is lost. This nullifies the failure signals; all nodes begin to optimise for administrator approval rather than objective outcome. As a result, we arrive at an epistemically closed network that consumes itself whole.

All these serve as stark, and dangerous reminders, of protocolic failure. These are not moral judgments, merely structural diagnosis on when and why the role of administration is such a near-impossible task for the fallible human condition to shoulder.

V. Limit, not Lethargy

If we acknowledge that protocolic governance had to rely on the administrator, then it was not lethargy that led us not to proliferate this model of governance and coordination, but merely existed as a physical limit unto itself.

Without the man, there is no model.

Singapore only worked because the administrator had such a powerful and potent intellect, combined with an utterly selfless spirit. To maintain such difficult — and sometimes conscious — contradictions must have weighed heavy upon LKY, and despite whatever critics say about the man, so few politicians of the past, and even fewer today, possess such traits.

But that does not mean we are without new options.

Capitalism and socialism have equally failed us — alongside the constituent mechanisms of governance that accompany their existence. Therefore it is important to consider this third-axis for resolving coordination at scale.

Fortunately, every change in governance is preceded almost immediately or concurrently by a technological change. Linguistic script gave rise to codified law under the Sumerians, the Printing Press gave rise to thoughts beyond Theocracy, and while the Internet may have solved for decentralised communication, it did not solve for governance — until the present.

We stand at the dawn of a new technological age.

Artificial Intelligence — not yet true thinking machines, but approaching their era of adolescence — means solving protocolically becomes possible.

Singapore provided us the model.

Artificial Intelligence promises a possible solution to align sovereignty between the individual and that of the state.

An individual that operates within the confines of a properly architected and administered protocol is not delegating sovereignty, they are reclaiming it.

The question left to answer on protocols is not what — but how?

— C