10 Mar 25 Monday Briefing
From seas to khlongs and subaks – an open invitation
Instead of Contrapuntal’s usual Monday Briefing, this week I’ll be highlighting the next chapter of seapunk for those of my readers who have been following my adventures from Datus and Nusas since May 2024, to Seapunk Playshop at Edge City Lanna in October 2024 and now, Khlongs and Subaks Workshop April 2025, in collaboration with CMKL University, Summer of Protocols, and GCC.
What is seapunk?
Many movements can’t trace their beginnings back to a singular point, but seapunk can. It was May 27th, 2024, the first day of the Datus and Nusas Workshop, and long-time friend Sam Chua wrote a single word – seapunk – on a post-it note that would spark what is now, I believe, one of the most exciting decentralised movements that could shape the future of our planet for the better.
Seapunk is permissionless and ungovernable in nature, and means whatever you want it to mean to you. It is a vibe, an aesthetic, a container to fit all the odds and ends of your visions for a better world.
This is what about a dozen of us brought together for the Playshop in Chiang Mai last October, which culminated in a Symposium that showcased what a diverse collective of like-minded people could achieve with the affordance of a pop-up village’s energy and convergence from all walks of life.
From our collective imaginations, we reimagined living with the world instead of over it, small sovereignty and big commons rather than vice versa, spirit and science leading to stewardship, and cosmo-local rurban forms, all of them worth PhD-level studies in their own right.
What next?
If we are to live with the world, then our reimaginations have to be deeply, wholeheartedly practical in application, or we will stay stuck in self-congratulatory workshops and retreats whose impact stay right there. There is no right or wrong way to be practical, but there is certainly a line of sight as to whether movements are evincing practice. To that end, Seapunk Studios has been formed as a metalabel, to organise and steward activities for the Seapunk community, such as the Seapunk Community Newsletter.
From Seas to Khlongs to Subaks
We paid due attention to the seas that connect Southeast Asia, and this year it rightly turns to khlongs that connect our inland cousins, and subaks – the og RiceDAOs – that provide a governance model for management and distribution. How can seemingly unrelated things provide a foundation for open distributed AI and blockchain protocols in this silicon age?
We start with an online salon this Friday called Silicon Archipelago: A Salon On Open Distributed Southeast Asian Tech Futures, in which we will also share some info about the upcoming Khlongs and Subaks workshop. Folks such as
, , Sam, myself and others will be co-hosting.If any of this interests you, please sign up for the newsletter linked above, or drop me a DM, or sign up for the online salon, or all of the above! Consider this an invitation to join a movement that is at once fun, inclusive, engaging, and full of promise. 😊