New Hills to Die On

Everywhere you turn in recent years, there's a mini-cult of something. Hardcore, self-selected groups—some dispersed across the Internet like fandoms, some clustered like congregations. I keep running into them in unexpected places.

The most recent was a grocery aisle. Over the past two years, we've been doing work in the food and drinks field, focused on how people interact with this part of the market, particularly in America. One thing I noticed, having been outside the US supermarket frame for a few years, is the explosion of SKUs on almost every shelf. Not five craft beers but fifty. Not three kinds of jerky but thirty. Not recovery drinks but recovery systems. Ask people if they have a favorite in some segment and they'll tell you—at length. The why increasingly sounds like lore, presented as evidence.

Some of this explosion of niche product is money chasing innovation—pleasing micro markets, or attempting to kickstart new ones. But spend enough time there and you realize conversations have gone from "I like brand X" to something more intense. Watch how certain foods or supplements or routines get bought now and you notice the purchase isn't a preference, it's a compliance event, hardened in feeds, group chats, and comment threads. And how quickly things have escalated: from beef tallow, raw milk, and no seed oils to methylene blue, beef organ capsules, and injectable stacks with names like KLOW. The labels and shopping carts read like doctrinal statements because they are—this is no longer the realm of a fringe health brand whose packaging looks like a notebook from Se7en. Behind the purchase sits a complete system: what to consume, what to reject, who to trust, and what it says about you that you follow the rules, especially when they shift.

The shopping aisle—real or virtual—is also a training ground. The soft protocols—the coffee ritual, the supplement stack, the water you will and won't drink—are where people learn the catechism: hold the doctrine, spot the deviation, perform the compliance. Nobody starts as an ultra. A growing number end up there.

You've probably watched the transition in someone you know. It's the move from "things I swear by" to "this is the hill I will die on—and bring hell down on you while I do it." Swearing by something is testimony: personal, revisable, indifferent to whether you join in. The hill is different. The practice stops being something I do and becomes something you're wrong for not doing. My supplement stack becomes your negligence. Your breakfast becomes my business. What changed isn't intensity, but vector. The preference grew teeth. Once you see that threshold, you see it everywhere: diets, money, parenting, fitness, faith.

The term that best describes these formations is borrowed from technology: protocol communities. Voluntary groups organized around comprehensive, rule-governed systems for living, where following the protocol becomes the basis of identity, belonging, and knowing what's true. The word matters: protocols are the rules by which things function—without them, the system breaks down.

A tribe or a lifestyle is affinity-based. A protocol is a specification: what counts as in and out. This is a community held together by rules, and by the shared conviction that the rules are the difference between order and chaos, optimization and self-harm.

The surest tell is denial. Nobody in a protocol community believes they're in one—they just follow the evidence, or think clearly, or know why the grind size matters, or can hear the difference between thock and clack. If you're certain this describes other people, that certainty is worth examining.

None of this is new. We've had rules-based communities as long as we've had communities. The novelty is in the ecology. To enter is to choose, to opt in. Also in the speed: a formation can go from podcast to schism in eighteen months, and a member from tasting notes to hardened orthodoxy nearly as fast.

Most of these are what I'd call everyday protocol communities—EPCs. They never scale past brand fandom, and strongly liking something isn't a crime. What's noteworthy is how fast some escalate, and why. MAHA is the clearest example: traveling from a loose constellation of health and epistemic-denial communities to setting national policy—with deadly consequences already visible in renewed outbreaks—in under two years, reshaping everything from vaccine schedules to SNAP rules to food industry reformulation. It scrambled the old left-right coding as it went: wellness moms and populists holding the same line on seed oils. It won't be the last to make the jump. Others are further back on the same road—communities that start out talking about meme coins now building city-states out of group chats, various formations organized around a probability of AI catastrophe (each with its own safety philosophy), reading-list political movements already holding office, arguing protocol with the Protocol-Holder-in-Chief.

But speed and self-selection only explain how these communities form, not why anyone wants in. The deeper draw is epistemic—and it has a recent history. Covid trained an entire population in protocol adherence. The science behind it held up better than the folklore now admits. What collapsed was the delivery: officials exempting themselves from their own rules, enforcement that bent with status, compliance policed by in-group bullying, provisional findings announced as certainties and revised without acknowledgment. The public judged the endeavor by the perceived inconsistency, not the epidemiology. The rule-following muscle survived; the authority it answered to didn't.

There's a reason so many of the visible formations cluster around the body: the institutional damage ran deepest in public health, and the substitution is happening where the failure occurred. Other failures are quietly breeding other formations—around money, parenting, politics, machines—but the body is where the pattern shows most legibly.

The old authorities—doctors, regulators, agencies, churches—lost credibility, but that's not the whole story. We don't lack a way to decide who's right. The scientific method still works as well as it ever did. What's gone is the shared agreement to defer to it. Every question opens onto competing studies and competing experts, argued in front of a referee half the room no longer recognizes.

A protocol resolves all that. Steps, measurements, procedures, selections. Nothing needs deciding.

You don't have to know what's true if you know what to do.

Thinking in progress. More threads to pull as we go. Next up: mapping the protocol community state space.