For a general overview of P2P activities in the region see the page Asia.

Quotes

What is the South East Asian lifestyle, is not just a relic from the past, but the ideal and realistic coping strategy for the Age of Human Surplus:

Chor Pharn:

"The intelligent ocean will not produce more Chinas or more Anglo-Atlantics. Most of the planet will look like Southeast Asia: light state capacity, heavy social density, constant improvisation—and somehow still intact. That will be the normal condition of a machine-run world. The systems will manage themselves; humans will manage one another.

Southeast Asia shows that low capacity does not mean collapse. Weak states can coexist with capable societies. The mechanism is simple but hard to replicate: people fill the gaps faster than institutions can create them. When a port is congested, small traders reroute through side channels. When prices spike, extended families share food and credit. When government relief is slow, mosques, temples, and unions take over. It is constant repair work done without instruction. The region runs on improvisation, kinship, and habit—three forms of intelligence that don’t need central permission.

The pattern is everywhere once you see it. Bureaucracies are small but personal. Rules are flexible because everyone knows someone who will bend them when needed. Formal corruption often hides informal welfare: the bribe that pays an official’s family also keeps another family employed. The moral core is not purity but reciprocity. That’s how the machine world will function at human scale—through messy exchanges that keep trust alive even when legality breaks down.

Kindness is not sentimental here; it is structural. In regions where law and welfare are thin, decency is the cheapest stabiliser. You help today so you can ask tomorrow. In Manila, when typhoons cut power for weeks, neighbourhoods pooled generators and ran shared kitchens; everyone contributed rice, fuel, or labour. Nothing about it was planned, yet no one starved. It was messy, temporary, and deeply human—the opposite of efficiency, the definition of survival.

That ethic produces redundancy—the real secret of Southeast Asian survival. Every role overlaps with another. The shopkeeper is also a lender; the religious leader is also an organiser; the cousin abroad is the backup income stream. Nothing runs efficiently, but nothing truly stops. Each failure is caught by a net of small obligations.

This is not to whitewash the failures of low capacity. Every act of kindness here carries fatigue; care fills the gaps where justice should have been.

As the machine world spreads, this style of living will spread with it. Automation and global logistics will make governments everywhere lighter: fewer civil servants, fewer tax dollars, fewer levers to pull. But the space that opens up can be filled by the same dense social metabolism—voluntary groups, neighbourhood systems, mutual aid, religious and digital communities that make up for what the state can no longer guarantee. The question is whether other societies can build this redundancy before their own shocks arrive. "

(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-ocean-of-intelligent-infrastructure)