To take back value: critique as protocol design

What can it mean to inherit the tradition of a critical international lawyer in a time when legal form is increasingly entangled with code, infrastructure and automation? This article explores these questions by tracing a shift from critique as judgment to critique as practice, as an engagement from within rather than from above. Drawing on the author’s work in developing the Decentralised Ecological Economics Protocol (DEEP) through the Sovereign Nature Initiative, it asks: what happens to critique when it is enacted as design rather than as distance? Through this lens, the piece approaches protocol design as a legal and political method, one that is tentative, situated and open-ended and attentive to the ambiguities and contradictions of value creation in the digital economy.