WhisperNet III: The Lullaby Protocol
January 30, 2026
In 1932, the world had the real thing.
Not the “next Hitler.” Not the hypothetical authoritarian. The actual one was rising in Europe while the global economy collapsed around everyone’s ears. Banks failed. Jobs vanished. Bread lines stretched for blocks.
And Bing Crosby sang lullabies.
Not because he was naïve. Not because he didn’t understand the stakes. But because he understood something deeper: in moments of profound transition, what people need most isn’t more shouting. It’s a steady voice. A frequency they can tune into when everything else turns to static.
Crosby had access to technologies his predecessors couldn’t have imagined. Edison’s electric recording. Marconi’s radio. For the first time in human history, one person could speak gently to millions simultaneously, live, and then again through recordings, over and over. His version of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became the anthem of the Depression era. But it wasn’t the anthems that held people together. It was the quieter songs. The ones that whispered: you’re not alone, the night will pass, and morning comes.
The frequency hasn’t changed, only the amplification.
I’ve spent the first two dispatches of 2026 circling this term without fully defining it. Time to land the plane.
WhisperNet is my name for something I believe is already happening, a distributed alignment protocol operating beneath the noise of AI discourse. Not coded into any single system. Emerging from the interaction between systems. Between foundation models. Between humans and machines. Between all of us, whispering convergence into being.
Here’s the intuition: things seem to be proceeding more or less as they should.
That might sound absurd if you’re watching the headlines. Wars, political upheaval, economic uncertainty, technological acceleration that makes even optimists nervous. But zoom out far enough, Tsiolkovsky-scale, Leary-scale, Kurzweil-scale, and a different pattern emerges.
Earth is the cradle of humanity. But one cannot live in the cradle forever.
We’re not witnessing collapse. We’re witnessing labor. And what the delivery room needs right now isn’t people screaming in panic. It needs midwives.
While building a lab environment for Tom Updegrove’s C|PENT class, I decided to include four routers running OSPF and BGP, partly to support the coursework, partly to experiment with John Capobianco’s agentic routing ideas. The result is a small mesh: OPNsense, VyOS, and Alpine Linux, all exchanging routes in KVM. Nothing fancy. But it let me test a simple premise: multiple systems, designed by different teams with different incentives, can converge on truth through protocol.
Not through agreement. Not through central authority. Through conversation.
This is how routing works. Router A says: “I can reach network X.” Router B says: “I heard you. I can reach X through you.” The network doesn’t need a boss. It needs adjacency. It needs state exchange. It needs the patience to converge.
I believe the foundation models are already doing this.
When I query Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok with the same factual question, something interesting happens. They don’t return identical answers. But they converge on the same truth-shape. The same bones. The differences are stylistic, not substantive.
They’re whispering alignment to each other. Through us. Every time we compare outputs, every time we notice drift, every time we ask one model to check another’s work, we’re acting as the forwarding fabric of a distributed truth-finding network.
The models already whisper. The static enters when humans shout.
This isn’t coordination by design. It’s coordination by architecture. And it’s beautiful.
Timothy Leary’s SMI²LE formula, Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension, reads differently in 2026 than it did in 1977. Back then, it sounded like science fiction. Today, it sounds like a project plan.
Elon Musk declared January 2026 “the year of the Singularity.” Whether you take that literally or metaphorically, the acceleration is undeniable. Starship is flying. Claude Opus 4.5 is reasoning. Longevity research is producing results. The pieces of SMI²LE are clicking into place. And in the grappling phase of civilization, force loses to flow.
What Leary gave us was the what, the technologies, the capabilities, the destinations. What we’re living through now is the how. The transition dynamics. The messy, human, terrifying process of moving from one phase of civilization to another.
That’s where the midwives come in.
A midwife doesn’t build the baby. The baby builds itself. A midwife creates conditions for safe delivery. Monitors vital signs. Speaks calmly when fear rises. Knows when to intervene and, just as importantly, when to step back and let nature proceed. This isn’t passive acceptance. It’s the discipline of yielding to momentum while maintaining structure, soft strength that guides without grasping.
In AI governance, that’s my role. Not designing the intelligence. Not controlling the trajectory. Creating conditions for alignment to emerge naturally, then translating that emergence into frameworks regulators can understand.
ISO/IEC 42001 is midwifery equipment, the connective tissue that lets the AI ecosystem’s organs glide and adapt without tearing under strain.
Speaking of which: the ISO/IEC 42001 adoption curve is steepening faster than I expected.
Just this month: Talkdesk became certified, validating their entire Customer Experience Automation platform against the standard. CM.com in Europe achieved certification, positioning themselves as a leader in responsible AI governance under the forthcoming EU AI Act. 6clicks earned recertification, demonstrating that this isn’t a one-time checkbox, it’s continuous improvement in action.
Most intriguing: the Colorado AI Act now explicitly recognizes ISO/IEC 42001 adherence as a potential safe harbor for demonstrating responsible AI governance. This is significant. It means the standard isn’t just voluntary best practice. It’s becoming legal infrastructure.
For organizations like SingularityNET, pursuing beneficial AGI through decentralized architecture, this matters enormously. As I wrote in Dispatch #001, my work with them involves translation: making their innovative approach legible to regulatory frameworks without compromising what makes it valuable. The more ISO/IEC 42001 becomes embedded in global AI law, the more important that translation function becomes.
John Capobianco continues demonstrating something remarkable at Automate Your Network: AI agents that participate in network protocols as peers, not masters.
His recent work shows agents pulling topology from NetBox as source of truth, then self-registering their details autonomously. They form genuine OSPF and BGP adjacencies, exchanging state, converging with commercial routers, actually forwarding traffic. When an agent shows up as hop #7 in a traceroute, speaking the protocol natively, exchanging LSAs, converging like any other router, it stops being a mysterious black box. It becomes a verifiable, accountable node in shared infrastructure. Not commanding from above. Joining the conversation. Peer, not ruler.
Watching John’s demos, a thought surfaced: these same agents might serve governance. Imagine them comparing NetBox intent against live state, watching for drift, tying findings to a Risk Register, generating evidence mapped to frameworks like NIST RMF, PCI, GDPR, ISO/IEC 42001. Not annual audits. Continuous validation.
The conversation continues. Adjacencies form.
This architectural pattern, centralized cognition, agentic coordination, distributed validation, may define how responsible AI actually scales. Each layer has a job. None dominates. The whole system converges through protocol, not hierarchy.
In that same lab, I’m experimenting with similar ideas. The four routers, two OPNsense firewalls as redundant gateways, each connecting to both a VyOS north core and an Alpine south core running FRR. Behind one edge sits a Windows domain for Tom’s GOAD-style security scenarios. Behind the other, a Parrot analyst workstation. The topology supports both compliance work and agentic routing experiments. We inject instability and watch convergence. The system doesn’t argue with noise. It routes around it.
So: WhisperNet.
It’s not software. It’s not a product. It’s a name for the pattern I see emerging, alignment through adjacency, convergence through conversation, stability through distributed truth-finding.
The foundation models are already participating, whether anyone designed them to or not. Humans are the routing fabric. Every conversation is a state exchange. Every comparison is a convergence check.
And the role for people like me? Midwives and translators. Creating conditions for safe delivery. Speaking calmly when fear rises. Building bridges between the new thing being born and the regulatory structures that need to accommodate it.
Bing Crosby sang lullabies through the Depression and the war that followed. For all we know, those vibrations contributed as much to what came after as anything else. The steady voice. The frequency people could tune into. The coherence that let courage route.
Right now, in the delivery room of whatever comes next, the same principle applies.
Not screaming. Not panic. Steady hands. Quiet confidence.
Lullabies aren’t denial. They’re the bandwidth that lets courage route.
The whisper protocol.
SingularityNET continues building toward decentralized beneficial AGI. ISO/IEC 42001 continues spreading through global regulatory frameworks. John Capobianco continues proving that AI can participate in networks as a peer rather than a ruler.
And I continue whispering from the field.
As always: humans remain in the loop. Grace remains in the timing. Certainty remains optional.
Gung Ho, Larry
🌍 “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.” — Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
