Gordon Brander on Building Protocols for Thought

Table of content

Gordon Brander spent his career at the infrastructure layer of the web. Five browsers at Google and Mozilla. An operating system. Then he stepped back and asked: what would infrastructure for thinking look like?

The answer became Noosphere — “a protocol for thought.” Not another note-taking app, but an attempt to build the plumbing that lets ideas flow between minds, the way packets flow between machines.

Open-Ended Ecosystems

Brander’s obsession is open-ended systems — environments where value emerges from unexpected combinations.

“Open-ended ecosystems are where value is created. The value comes from the system surprising itself.”

This isn’t abstract philosophy. It’s a design principle. Noosphere was built on UCAN (User Controlled Authorization Networks), content-addressed data, and P2P sync — technical choices that prioritize permissionless creation over gatekeeping.

The Subconscious app built on top became a testing ground: bidirectional links, local-first sync, multiplayer thought streams. The protocol was archived in September 2024, but the ideas seeded dozens of tools-for-thought experiments.

Learning to Build Living Software

His newsletter Squishy Computer (7,000+ subscribers) explores software ecosystems through the lenses of evolution and ecology. The title is apt — he treats software systems as organisms, not machines.

Some recurring themes:

Composable alphabets: Small primitives that combine into infinite expressions
Pace layers: Different parts of systems change at different speeds
Emergence over design: You can’t architect creativity; you can only create conditions for it
Requisite variety: A system must match the complexity of its environment to survive

His personal site hosts 165+ interconnected notes — a public zettelkasten covering systems thinking, storytelling, strategy, and futures. Each note is atomic, tagged, and links to others. Browsing it feels like wandering through someone’s extended mind.

From Protocols to Futures

Brander’s current project, Deep Future, applies these same principles to strategic foresight. It’s an AI system for scenario planning — stress-testing strategies against thousands of possible futures.

The approach combines:

Live signals intelligence (AI agents monitoring your environment)
Cross-impact analysis (mapping how forces interact)
Strategy stress-testing (running plans through simulated futures)

It draws on scenario methods from RAND and military strategy, but powered by multi-agent AI systems. If Noosphere was about infrastructure for thoughts, Deep Future is infrastructure for decisions.

Core Principles

From his writings, a few patterns emerge:

Build to think: “Prototyping isn’t about validating ideas. It’s about having ideas.” The artifact is the thinking process made visible.

Tools over technique: Invest in instruments that can be reused across problems, rather than memorizing recipes for specific situations.

Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” Start simple. Let complexity emerge.

Work back from UI: Start with the experience you want, then figure out the technology. Not the reverse.

Modularize later: Don’t over-abstract early. “The only way to find the right abstraction is to make the wrong ones first.”

What You Can Steal

Write notes atomically: Single ideas per note, heavily linked. Brander’s site demonstrates how a zettelkasten approach creates emergent structure.
Think in systems, not features: Study ecology and evolution. Software products are ecosystems; users are organisms. Design for adaptation, not control.
Scenario planning for decisions: Don’t predict one future. Map the possibility space and stress-test your strategy against multiple trajectories.
Protocol-first thinking: Before building an app, ask: what’s the underlying protocol? What would let others build on this permissionlessly?