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Seapunk is a research-and-imagination movement and community interested in solarpunk imaginaries for Southeast Asia, inspired by the region’s historical open common sea, and the emergent thriving decentralized ‘punk’ worlds it fostered.
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Our first major program this year was the Khlongs & Subaks workshop this April 21-25 in Bangkok.
This three-track (public policy, tech, culture-history) workshop will explore the rapidly evolving frontiers of open distributed AI and blockchain protocols, tapping the lenses of historical Southeast Asian water-and-rice sociocultural and governance infrastructure like Thai khlongs (canals) and Balinese subaks (cooperative water management systems) towards inspiring visions and prototypes for distributed frontier tech futures that are both uniquely Southeast Asian and globally relevant.
This workshop was a collaboration between Summer of Protocols (SoP), CMKL University, GCC, and Seapunk Studios, and was also a successor of sorts to last year’s Datus & Nusas Workshop (also organized by SoP), out of which Seapunk sprouted from meme to (mini-)movement 🌱
Stay tuned for content updates from the workshop!
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For our first official 2025 event, we co-hosted an online salon on open distributed tech futures.
While the rest of the world gets sucked into the vortex of Great Power competition, can Southeast Asia offer an alternative vision of technology inspired by its own decentralized geography?
Video, slides, and links below.
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Our first year of Seapunk culminated in the Seapunk Playshop — a two-week co-imagination camp in Chiang Mai that included:
For a Seapunk-participant’s-eye-view, check out this post from Yan:
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📝 We will also be releasing a volume of initial Seapunk ideas later this year
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Archive of earlier Seapunk Playshop info and invites:
[Info] Seapunk Playshop — A Co-Imagination Camp
[2024 Intro & Invitation] Seapunk Playshop
As of March 2025, our Seapunk quest will mark its one-year anniversary (based, at least, on the seapunk.asia registration date).
As both the Seapunk community and movement grow, our vision is to begin to decouple the broader ‘seapunk’ movement (an open, lowercase cultural movement or aesthetic / genre like solarpunk, instead of a proprietary Brand™️) from our initial founding stewardship efforts — which we hope will eventually just become some among many.
Effective March 2025, we will be constellating our core research, imagination, event curation, and other initiatives under the label (or ‘metalabel’, to borrow a concept) of Seapunk Studios (SS).
SS will be the hub organizer of Seapunk’s core 2025 activities and initial steward for the Seapunk community, newsletter, and other resources (including this website). Collaborators and partners welcome! Unless otherwise specified, SS will also be the ‘we’ we write from on this site and other core ‘official’ Seapunk comms.
Terminology TLDR:
©️ SEAPUNK STUDIOS 2025