The idea of Seapunk is a confluence of:

🌅 Solarpunk for South East Asia (SEA). If solarpunk is a language, what is its SEA dialect? What kinds of sustainable futures could be envisioned apropos for a world of tropical climate, rice paddies and rainforests, diverse syncretic cultures, and more?

🌏 The sea-centered history and world of Nusantaria. SEA is the midpoint of the world’s largest archipelago (termed Nusantaria by Philip Bowring), a realm that shares a linguistic, cultural, and trading base and connects East Asia with India, the Middle East, and Africa.

🌌 The sociocreative ‘punk’ world of SEA’s remote highlands and open seas. Studies of SEA have described ‘the art of not being governed’, a borderless cultural fluidity across port cities, and populations with a playful,subversive history of finding their own way.

⤢ Between South & East

SEA is not just an assortment of neighboring nation-states, but a region profoundly shaped by its relationship to the sea, monsoons, and global trade routes, and all these entail. For much of its history, including today, a core defining role of the region has been as a bridge and link between South and East, both geographically between India and China, Yemen and Yokohama, but also culturally between the Global South and the Far East.

🌏 In Search of ‘South East Asian’ Characteristics

Despite being actively connected, there has never been a singular SEA empire, unlike many other regions. Initial surveys of SEA lore suggest fragments of a shared SEA sensibility, at least across the world of maritime SEA (sometimes also known as Maritime or Insular / Island SEA, and partially overlapping with Monsoon Asia). Might these shared elements be sufficient to inform a SEA ‘seapunk’ sensibility?

🌊 A SEA-Centric World

Intensive rice cultivation and water management were the backbone of many SEA kingdoms. But even at their greatest, the reach of rice kingdoms was small compared to the extent of sea exchange. Greatness in SEA was more a function of plugging into the sea ‘game’ than local land conquest. While each kingdom and ruler had its ‘center’, the real ‘meta-center’ of SEA was the sea. No man, no people were as big as the sea.

To SEA, for centuries (at least prior to the 1500s), the sea provided connectivity without colonization. Interoperability without imperialism. Exchange without empire. While there were periods of strong centers and influence, the sea was rarely ever one power’s pond.

🌌 Punk: Technology Without Technocracy

The spirit of punk is to embrace new tools or tech while rejecting the technocracy or authority they come with. Interestingly, this has deep resonance with the culture and history of SEA which, adjacent but not subject to the world’s trade routes, has a long and colorful history of adapting and repurposing global ideas and tools to suit local sensibilities – be they foods, textiles, languages, or even gods.

Seapunk has a rich, colorful and sea-centric tradition to draw from. But what future(s) might it draw up?

🔮 A Seapunk Vision of South East Asia

When we think of South East Asia today, we often think of the ten nations of ASEAN with their lands and flags, states ruled by strongmen, and a ‘developing’ region  catching up to the developed world.

But SEA could be so much more. For most of its history, the region was a single hyperworld connected by the sea, sharing trade, food, and religions across peoples, languages, and cultures. SEA was open to the small and decentralized, where refugees from one land could start fresh lives in another, where people could move and assimilate into new ports, cultures, and communities.

What if some of these historical aspects could be reimagined and reinvented, perhaps leveraging the technologies of today? Could SEA become not just a ‘catch up’ for yesterday’s modernity, but a frontier for planetary solarpunk experimentation? Could young South East Asians begin to dream not of studies in and emigration to California or London, but of research and entrepreneurship on rainforests, regenerative agriculture, tropical architecture and urbanism, biodiversity stewardship, culinary experimentation, and more (along with many young global creators attracted to innovation at the new frontiers of SEA)? What possibilities might this unlock for SEA, for Asia, for the planet?