Seapunk

= "SEA (South East Asia) punk is a quest for fresh ‘solarpunk for South East Asia’ futures inspired by the region’s historic open-sea world and culture, and imagined against the technologies, opportunities, and crises of our time."

​ URL = seapunk.asia

Characteristics

Yan:

"Four “root imaginations” that embody seapunk. These are threads that are tied deeply into South East Asian traditions that we tether to as we imagine future worlds.

First, Living with the World, instead of living over the world. In September 2024, Chiang Mai, alongside vast swathes of the northern parts of South East Asia was struck by record breaking floods. I was lucky that my house stayed dry but many friends had their houses and shops wrecked by a waist high surge from the Ping river. While much of the city’s built environment is now brick and concrete, traditional houses in the old style of the Lanna culture still dot the cityscape. Being built on raised platforms, they are designed to let the waters rise and fall under and around them. This would be an aged-old example of living with the world, instead of paving it over to live on top of it. These kinds of adaptations are everywhere you look in the region. Another example is the ubiquitous terraced rice fields, some of which are even UNESCO heritage sites. Solarpunk ideas take a lot of inspiration from these kinds of traditions, such as in keyline design that uses simple ditches and dams to optimise water usage on agricultural land. For seapunks, it’s simply something already baked into our cultures waiting to be taken up anew.

Secondly, Small Sovereigns, Big Commons. Historical kingdoms across South East Asia operated under what is called a Mandala model, where centers of power did not try to have total sovereignty over territory, but rather to secure expanding networks of patronage from people. A local chief of a village would pay tribute to both a Thai and a Burmese king, and be enmeshed in a complex network of patron-client linkages with many other chieftains and princes. As a result, most communities across South East Asian history maintained a lot of autonomy because the sovereign just did not have a concrete grip over you4. The land is largely a big commons that is yours to till and travel on. Asking a king to draw the borders of his kingdom is almost as absurd as asking a tech company to draw a border around all the bits of the internet they control. Today’s world of borderless digital cultures and global supply chains lend themselves more readily to this mental model of the world than the one of post-colonial nation states that struggle to keep their borders from being too porous.

Notable mandalas in classical Southeast Asian history (c. 5th to 15th century), where sovereignty of kingdoms was not absolute but overlapped with one another. Source: Wikipedia

Our third imagination is Spirit and Science coming together through Stewardship. As a region that is saturated with spirituality and religiosity, South East Asian countries have had to walk a tightrope between maintaining their roots while they champion development through technological and scientific advancements. Research universities in the region vie for top spots in the global rankings, and the previous generation’s industrialization is now being ramped up even more. While ads for tourism will tout some picture perfect blend/bland of the high tech and the traditional, the rifts between the two are very real. As the young, urban, educated elites gain more access to the fruits of tech-fueled economic development, the old, the rural, the marginalised ethnic minorities live increasingly precarious lives. To add insult to injury, the latter have had their land, resources and traditions uprooted while being accused of falling behind because they refuse to abandon their “backward” ways. This is the eerie, uncanny, Black Mirror-esque present we need to imagine ourselves out of. In the seapunk imagination, we see the need of sustaining and stewarding nature as key here, because science might give us the how, but we need to tap into our ancestral spirituality to give us the why. It is to our advantage that unlike in the west, our world has only been partially disenchanted.

The last one is Cosmo-local Rurban Forms, which, admittedly, is quite the mouthful of terms. My understanding of cosmo-local, or cosmopolitan localism, is that it originated in the open source hardware and maker movement from the 2000s. The main idea is to build a culture of sustainable localised practices for making things we need locally, whilst sharing our ideas for how to make them in a global commons. It pushes back against the capitalist absurdity of treating physical resources as if they are infinite and free, while locking up intellectual resources as if they are finite. It flips this idea on its head, by only making what we need where we need it but sharing knowledge freely with the world, unlike corporate mass manufacturing and its wasteful and alienating practices. South East Asian societies are traditionally centered around rural village life with cities that served as entrepots for trade. With colonization and industrialization, some of the latter have morphed into megalopolises with a handful boasting populations in excess of 10 million. Perhaps a cosmo-local inspired seapunk future does not have to decide between the idyllic villages of our tradition, or force our people to flock to increasingly cyberpunk cities for jobs and opportunities, and we can explore all kinds of other possibilities in between and within the rural and the urban—rurban forms if you will.

To me, cosmo-local in a seapunk sense could also capture a lot of the vibes of all four of the root imaginations. The Bugis people of the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia hold up the passompĕ, the migrant or wanderer, as an ideal. In Minangkabau tradition, becoming a merantau, where a young man travels away from home in search of life experiences, is highly romanticised. Traversing the sea and seeking knowledge and fortune across the vast Malay archipelago, they choose to leave their home for short or long periods, maybe returning at some point, maybe finding a new home in some new place connected by the sea. Imagine the stories that they tell that nourish the cultures of their old and new homes, and the way they weave together a web of shared knowledge and culture across the seas. The cosmic/cosmopolitan sea is a big commons with sparse sovereignty, dotted with localities that draw from, and live with its wealth of spirit and substance. We have always been seapunks."

(https://livingwithshoggoths.substack.com/p/we-have-always-been-seapunks)