We have canonical metaphors for organisations:

• Machines
• Organisms
• Brains
• Cultures
• Political systems
• Psychic prisons
• Flux and transformation
• Instruments of domination

Whilst reading Helen Czerski’s Blue Machine, it struck me that we need a similar canonical metaphor list for protocols.

Some candidates:

• Oceans
• Musculoskeletal systems
• Civil sociotechnical infrastructure
• Mesoscale biological signalling