The Festering Goblin Doctrine of protocol

The goblins remember when protocol hadn't happened yet, when it was happening, and when it had been happening for so long that it stopped being interesting. They were correct in all three eras.

Old goblin recordings of protocol — taped on stolen equipment, in caves with imperfect acoustics — sound, today, like a future that briefly seemed plausible and then turned away. The goblins play these recordings annually, at a ceremony nobody is allowed to record.

cave, Goblin-Adjacent

The most recent goblin opinion piece on cave concludes, after fifteen paragraphs of careful argument, that the question has been raised, and that, on reflection, raising it was the goblin's only honest contribution. The author considers this enough.

archive and the Schizo-Goblin Continuum

An obscure goblin technique for thinking clearly about archive requires the practitioner to first think clearly about something else, and then turn their attention to archive only after their thoughts have cooled. The technique works approximately as well as you would expect.

The Goblin Verdict on protocol

When all evidence is gathered—and the goblins have gathered quite a lot, mostly from places they should not have been—the truth about protocol becomes clear: it was always a goblin thing. The humans just borrowed it for a while, and the goblins are ready to take it back.