We have always been Seapunks
How I got enamoured with South East Asia’s answer to Solarpunk
Hello folks, this is my first big post on this newsletter and unfortunately, it got a little too long. If you’re receiving this via email, it might be truncated, and you might want to read it on the website. I’ll try really hard to finish another (shorter) post next week. Thanks for reading!
There’s something particularly unforgiving about feeling like you’ve wasted your thirties. As 2024 was drawing to a close, and I was about to turn 38, that was a feeling I regularly wrestled with. It’s not that I have wasted wasted my thirties, so much as having had to spend a good chunk of it stumbling and falling and getting back to the baseline I was at in the early years of that decade. It’s a feeling of deja vu from having to confront the same decisions again.
I remember precisely this moment when I was about to turn 30, and was not doing so well in my attempts at trying to get my first proper corporate job, when it dawned on me that, heck, I didn’t have to! I could keep doing this freelance mish-mash of tech-for-social-good, sometimes paid, sometimes pro-bono stuff that I had been dabbling in for the preceding few years and turn it into an actual career. Maybe eventually start my own company with other like-minded people. I excitedly went home to tell my (now ex-) wife about the epiphany—it did not go well. I did it anyway. Financial struggles followed, but two years later, I managed to start the company. It went well until it didn’t. After building a dream team of like-minded people and an exhilarating (and profitable) couple of years of working on civic tech and data journalism in my home country, Myanmar, a military coup brought everything to a grinding halt.
Now, after years of slowly building things back up, I still struggle with the anxiety of whether I had made good life decisions. That old question rears its ugly head: “Shouldn’t I just give up on being a punk and get a real job?”
In every city in the world, there is some semi-gentrified neighborhood that still maintains a rough edge, where you can find those old punks wandering the streets with their mohawks, combat boots, and torn-up jeans. Carefree on the surface but permanently inebriated to push down all their pain, holding on to memories of some bygone glory days when they had a band that almost made it. Across most of 2024, I felt like I was going to turn into whatever the techie equivalent of that was.
A hole in the grey curtain
“The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.” - Mark Fisher
In his 2009 book, Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher traces how our contemporary lives are wrought with a host of mental health problems stemming from a “privatization of stress” that prescribes treatments at the level of individuals but never deals with root causes. The main cause, he argues, is how capitalism creates in us a sense of anhedonia—a lack of interest and enjoyment of life's experiences apart from a banal pursuit of pleasure and comfort. When we are only wired to chase comforts as atomized individuals, “there is a sense that 'something is missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.”
In some ways, I’m lucky to have always been afraid of that sense of complacency, that feeling that a self-serving, comfortable life is the way forward because at least it is safe. If I ever choose that path, the feeling that “something is missing” will gnaw at me until I completely break down in dysfunction. Unluckily, though, if you are not chasing safety, you have to roll with the punches and might end up like those old punks roaming the streets, miming rebellion while capitalism has ground you down and made you into a decorative backdrop for tourists in a gentrified neighborhood. Staring at the specter of that fate, I found myself asking again, “Shouldn’t I just give up on being a punk and get a real job?”
About a month ago, I was finally able to answer that question again, with a confident no. While there are many reasons why I have come to that conviction, one of them is coming across a budding community that calls themselves seapunks.
In October, hundreds of web3 techies (or crypto bros, as the rest of the world derogatively calls them) from all over the world converged onto my current hometown, Chiang Mai. They all came for a series of events called Pop-Up Cities—which are basically conferences that are extended over the course of a few weeks instead of the typical few days1.
I’m not by any means a crypto/web3 person but all these events happening in my hometown piqued my interest. I went to one that caught my eye that had to do with worldbuilding and “solarpunk-inspired futures for South East Asia”. To my surprise, that event had almost nothing to do with crypto but had everything to do with ideas that were deeply resonant for me.
Cyberpunks, Solarpunks, and Seapunks: a genealogy
My assumption with the readers of this newsletter is that you guys are not all-in the know about the minutiae of geek culture. So, before I dive into what “solarpunk inspired futures” entail, let’s trace a genealogy of how we got to solarpunk and what it means. Feel free to skip this section if you are already well-versed in cyberpunk and solarpunk.
It all started with cyberpunk, which is an imagination of how a society controlled by computer and internet technologies will look like from the vantage point of science fiction writers of the 1980s. Its protagonists were anti-heroes and its irreverent aesthetics were inspired by the punk music scene that was also coming into its own around the same time. The originators of cyberpunk extrapolated the unbridled capitalism of the Reagan-Thatcher years into a dystopian view of the future, where mega-corporations were more powerful than governments, cities were alienating concrete sprawls where an impoverished majority survived by hustling in a gig economy, and shallow virtual pleasures stand-in for the emptiness that pervade people’s lives. If you think that sounds like our actual present, then you are quite right.
One important vibe that cyberpunk was able to convey was how technology succumbs to the flaws in society, instead of technology allowing us to overcome society’s flaws. In Star Trek’s classic science fiction universe, we have been able to harness technology to eliminate hunger, cure diseases, and overcome petty political squabbles. In cyberpunk worlds like those of Blade Runner, however, the rich still oppress the poor out of pettiness and greed. Technology only changes the means of oppression. The downtrodden are also masters of technology in their own way—tinkering with it to rebel, resist, and persist in an unforgiving world, which of course, is punk as f**k.
Above: Blade Runner’s intro sequence is one of the most iconic portrayals of cyberpunk.
It is that part of cyberpunk—the idea that social forces subsume technology, and that the addition of technology causes more continuity than change—that spawned dozens of “-punk” subgenres of speculative fiction. There’s steampunk, which reimagines Victorian worlds with automatons and flying machines; silkpunk, which blends an East Asian aesthetic and a decolonial ethos; there’s dieselpunk, which is like steampunk but set in the 1920s-1940s replete with fascism as a backdrop; decopunk, a shiner, art-deco dieselpunk; biopunk, a riff on cyberpunk with more emphasis on biotechnology, and a whole bunch of others. And then there’s solarpunk, which, unlike the rest of them, did not come first in the form of works of fiction, but rather as an invitation to imagine.
As I mentioned above, cyberpunk is no longer fiction. We live in a present where billionaire tech moguls are planning to colonize Mars, while on Earth, inequalities are at the highest levels they’ve ever been. We live and work and play in virtual worlds, while the real world is wrecked by environmental catastrophes. I can go on and on. The whole premise of my newsletter is that the Shoggoths are here and we have to learn to live with them. Enter solarpunk, which says, let’s try to imagine a better world that is the opposite of our dystopian cyberpunk existence.
It’s hard to pin down solarpunk, and its proponents intentionally want it to be that way. As of now, the most prevalent visuals for its aesthetics come from a yogurt ad. Yes, you heard that right. Not because it’s too obscure or too new to have culture cache. It’s been around since 2012. In the words of Jay Springett, who has been an early shaper of the subculture, it is a “movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question ‘what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how do we get there?’”
True to the roots of the punk scene that it gets half its name from, solarpunk is more of a movement than a genre. Whereas steampunk’s biggest draw is mostly its possibilities for wicked cosplay outfits, and cyberpunk fiction offers escapist fantasies of hacker anti-heroes, solarpunk is not about pretending to be anything but trying to figure out what to do in the here and now. To me it feels like drawing a big circle around all kinds of sustainable living practices from permaculture to rooftop solar panels to urban farms, and saying “OK let’s make this into a whole vibe”. Ideologically, it’s also very flexible, with cheerleaders ranging from center-left neoliberal types to radical anarchists2. Another way that I find helpful to picture it is to look at how it is in many ways the opposite of the cyberpunk dystopia we currently live in: hopeful instead of grim, bright and sunny instead of dark and grimy, communal instead of “lone hero against the world”, and lush green natural environments instead of concrete jungles.
I make data visualizations for my day job so I can never pass up the opportunity to share a particularly insightful chart. The “solar” in solarpunk refers to both the ethos of optimism for a brighter future, and also literally the source of renewable energy that is making sustainable living increasingly possible. The chart below, from The Economist, shows how year after year, “experts” have completely missed the mark at predicting how solar power is going to grow. Each of the yellow lines indicate the predictions made in each year—that growth is going to plateau—and the black line shows the actual exponential growth. Unlike other types of energy infrastructure that is mostly planned and built in a top down way by governments and large utility companies, solar panels are installed by you and me on our own rooftops3. It’s a completely decentralised capture of power in both a literal and metaphorical sense. There’s something very punk about a movement that doesn’t even know it’s a movement because it’s just people choosing to make good decisions at a local level, in a way that is completely illegible to the “experts”, and the “suits”.
Now that we have traced how we got to solarpunk and described its core tenets as a focus on sustainability, optimistic worldbuilding about the future, and its remix-friendly “make it into your own thing” vibe, let’s return to my personal journey of discovering an offshoot of solarpunk that is rooted in all things South-East Asia: SEApunk.
Seapunk and its four root imaginations
At the Chiang Mai event I met Sam Chua, who describes himself, among other things as being interested in “how concepts become culture”. We got along right from the get go and he invited me to this worldbuilding week where he was planning to build out an idea of “SEApunk” that originated from a post-it note put on a board at a brainstorming session he and some co-conspirators had a few months back. Out of curiosity more than anything at this point, I agreed to join.
I’ve done a lot of design-sprint type brainstorming/ideating workshops in my time but this one seemed to be built on a risky assumption that the right people will randomly show up to contribute and that it will all form a coherent whole at the end. All the people who joined were self-selected, and came with a curiosity itch that they’ve been scratching, maybe as part of their professional lives, or as some side quest. The only common denominator was that they felt that an exercise in thinking up solarpunk futures for South East Asia jived with their interests. There were folks who are designing public policy frameworks to align corporate incentives with ecological needs, business school professors who are serious about doing things that can’t ever scale, folks trying to approach regenerative finance through a Buddhist lens, urban planners who wanted to reimagine what third-places look like, and more than a few disgruntled academics who wanted to find an alternative to the publish or perish pyramid scheme of academia. All of them were South East Asian or had lived long enough in the region to call it home. I felt like I had serendipitously stumbled upon a buffet of ideas and the friendly ambitious nerds behind them. The thing I loved most with this crowd was that I had no idea what their accolades were, where they worked, or any of the usual things that gets front-loaded in networking-centered events. The way I got introduced to each of them was by dropping in on a fascinating conversation that they were having, and tagging someone in my brain as so-and-so who was nerding out about idea X.
Sam was a top notch facilitator and he worked with us to cluster all our sprawling ideas into a framework that captured a uniquely South East Asian ethos. The sea in seapunk derives both from the acronym for the region and the sea itself. South East Asia is geographically 70% ocean, and its millenia of cosmopolitan, syncretic, polyglot civilisations were all nourished by its connection to the maritime trade routes that linked South and East Asia, and the New World to the Old. The sea brought new knowledge, customs, beliefs, livelihoods, lovers and a calling to resettle, rebuild and remix yourself a new home somewhere out in a distant node connected by its expanse.
In the postcolonial second half of the twentieth century, the region struggled with birthing new national identities, got caught between ideologies of socialism and capitalism that fuelled genocides, and yet grew Tiger economies that speed ran industrialization and development. Now, we are paying the price for it with ecological catastrophes, alongside vast inequalities in human development stretching from the millions eking out a life in Myanmar in the midst of a devastating civil war, to the ultra-prosperous few in the city-state of Singapore (incidentally also the two countries I grew up in), and everything in between.
What does it mean for a futurism to embody the ethos behind an entire region in all its complexities? While solarpunk is a universal call to arms to imagine our collective future, what would it mean to think of a version of it that speaks to our lived experiences as South East Asians? These were the questions that probably will need a lot of thinking to figure out, but what I liked about the approach we took that week was that we mostly pushed forward with wherever our intuitions guided us. Sometimes the irreverence of going all-in on vibes over ponderous rigor takes you places, and that is why I think seapunk is true to its punk roots.
Our intuitions led us to 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.
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.
Why we need this
I’m drawn to the idea of seapunk because it sees a future in practices and traditions that we have always been part of. During that week of ideation, I kept remembering this iconic photo from the twenty-teens from Myanmar of a man who has worked abroad as a sailor, and upon coming back to his home village, built a boat out of recycled plastic bottles to help out with evacuations during a flood. A merantau in his own right!
This newsletter is called Living with Shoggoths because I believe that the technological and environmental disasters are here to stay, and we have no choice but to find ways to live with this precarity. Seapunk is not about reimagining the past (like steampunk and silkpunk) or imagining/catastrophizing the future (like cyberpunk and solarpunk), but captures our culture of living with and finding ways to thrive in a world that will continue to be neither completely utopian nor dystopian.
A lot of millennials and Gen-Z grew up at the tail end of the glory days of neoliberal globalization, and have inherited a lot of expectations for how prosperous and fulfilling our lives should be, but are left struggling with how unrealistic those expectations are outside of a narrow elite. Globally, democracies are straining under the weight of an aspirations gap. Soon, perhaps everyone will have to live precarious lives like those of us in the Global South—we will be the ever growing, borderless, Global Majority of the precariat.
An old friend of mine had been doing a lot of reflection of his own lately. He lives in Myanmar, and wants to stay on despite the everyday hardships because he has found purpose in reconnecting with many of his friends who have moved abroad and helping them access a slice of home. Be it through a bowl of noodles for breakfast, making friends with a neighborhood grandma, or taking his dogs for walk in today’s eerily quiet Yangon streets. We talk a lot about being almost 40, and our struggles with whether we should quit being punks and get real jobs. My encounter with seapunk has punched a hole in that miasma for me, and now I’ve not only come to terms with, but I’m downright excited about the fact that I’ll always be a punk. In the words of Mark Fisher, “suddenly anything is possible again”.
Pop-Up Cities are a topic that deserves a deep dive in a future post.
This ideological flexibility can make solarpunk easy prey for being co-opted by the same oppressive forces that it seeks to counter, in the same way you have corporatised, “girlboss”, “lean in” feminism. This essay by Eden Kupermintz about radicalism, complacency and solarpunk lays out that risk in a lot of thoughtful detail.
Of course we can’t ignore how the boom in solar power is the direct result of the Chinese government's massive subsidies in that industry, but I’ll explore that particular rabbit hole another time.
It is also one of the reasons why the imported Western idea of the nation state is still being ardently pushed back against in some parts of South East Asia, most recently and tragically in Myanmar's current civil war.