Hi folks! Sam Chua here.
As a protocol-curious Southeast Asian and longtime nerd of tech, culture, and history, this was a really fun workshop that left a lot to think about. So here’s some extended reflections as a participant.
First, it feels like there’s a current ‘Southeast Asian’ moment of emerging regional-self-awareness that this particular workshop is smack in the stream of. Ten years ago, I led a Southeast Asia-focused culture research lab for a global tech company, but despite our Southeast Asia (SEA) scope, the way we conceived SEA for our research was from the outside looking in (e.g., what are the trends and opportunities for us?). Historically the term ‘Southeast Asia’ itself came into modern usage in reference to the WWII regional theater of war. For our lab, Southeast Asia was essentially our theater of study. But the view this year feels different.
More recently, over the past six months, I’ve noticed several unrelated communities start to coalesce around questions of Southeast Asian identity, networks, and futures. A couple of workshop participants remarked on how the SEA POV of the workshop felt surprisingly fresh (underattended to) despite having engaged in all sorts of initiatives and explorations over the years. So at least in some circles, there’s an active search for what it might mean to be SEA (and how that could be explored from the inside and ground-up).
What might it mean to be SEA? Maritime SEA (the focus of this workshop) doesn’t have a single unified history as a polity or empire despite having been colonized by multiple masters but, over the course of the workshop, a shared sensibility emerged.
Some of the themes that surfaced include (as Venkat and others have described):
- Lightness, smallness, irreverence: a culture of not taking oneself too seriously, good humor around misunderstandings, SEA lore is not crusades but cautionary tales, typical protagonists like a small but quick-witted mousedeer
- Fluidity and non-permanence: SEA is where one might change even cultural identities by adopting the right protocols / customs when moving around, and where ‘even hell isn’t forever’ (a phrase recounted in one of the groups)
- Adaptability, bricolage, exaptation: SEA routinely repurposes all sorts of global-trade-route imports from foods, languages, rituals, and even gods!
(Note that this is an initial sampling, and also mostly derived from culture / literature / history that pre-dates the modern nation state era of SEA. It’s arguable that many of these patterns have become less culturally salient over recent modern internationally-educated generations)
These themes suggest a culture not of grand universal meaning, but of rough consensus and running code. Where, regardless of the ruler of the season, life has to and will go on. Perhaps the essence of SEA is punk; not in the sense of revolution, but in the spirit of a tree that insistently grows out the side of a cliff.
As our first exercise in the workshop, participants were invited to share one word each, relating to the workshop’s themes and the notion of possible Southeast Asian futures. For me, the word that came to mind was ‘seapunk’ (partly an allusion to sea pirates, nomads, and ‘ungovernable’ Southeast Asians; partly a curiosity about what good ‘solarpunk for SEA’ futures might entail). Over the workshop, I came across many more elements of SEA lore and logic that resonated with this notion of a ‘seapunk’ ethos and sensibility, to the extent that the term feels to have really taken root, and might perhaps sprout further life of its own.
What might something like ‘seapunk’ have to offer the world (or at least the protocol-minded)? If we think of culture as an adaptation to the realities and vagaries of a particular environment, we might imagine how a harsh maritime environment (prone to violent storms, tropical rot, political upheavals, and twists of fortune) might reward flexiblity, adaptability, and a sense of smallness and nimbleness towards the world (as opposed to, for instance, a control mindset to redirect rivers). Perhaps, in navigating the challenges of the Anthropocene or imagining solutions and protocols of the future, there will be occasions that call for thinking small, or fluid and protocolizable identity, or designing for adaptability and resilience, under which we might then find appropriate SEA-derived inspirations to draw from.
Did the workshop live up to its aims? We had a couple dozen participants over two days, and while it feels on one hand we’ve only begun to scratch the surface, it also feels that the first digs have been rich and generative. The goals and promises of the workshop were (a) to explore creative new possibilities for Southeast Asia via examining historical regional traditions, culture, and governance through a protocol lens, (b) that participants would leave with fresh perspective and a sense of new possibilities. On both counts, this feels to have been an energizing yes.
What might be worth doing next? Some initial ideas (happy to brainstorm further!):
- A SEA-focused culture-x-protocols imagination-fest (current humanities/social science scholars, artists/writers/philosophers, protocol scientists, etc.)
- Seapunk futures cum memetic workshop (speculative nonfiction a la Cascadia and other pills)
- A SEA-perspective general teaching curriculum, perhaps open-source (most teaching in the region is still narrowly nation-centric)
And a final closing thought. If protocols deserve to be first-class concepts for thinking about the world, then I think this workshop has made a strong case that SEA worldviews and sensibilities deserve to be non-peripheral logics or lenses in both our mental and developmental toolkits.