Punk, Folk, Myth, Protocols: Sketching The Socioimaginational

TalkSam ChuaJuly 11, 2024

Sam Chua presents a framework distinguishing 'punk' (technology without technocracy) as a recurring pattern in Southeast Asian history—sea-punk trade networks, rice-punk irrigation governance like Bali's subak system, and forest-punk hill refuges—arguing these predate and parallel modern cyberpunk sensibilities. He introduces the 'social imaginational' as a distinct layer from the sociological, governed by dream-like, caricature-style logics (metaphor, myth, shadow-puppet non-seriousness) that resist reduction into protocols, and proposes a punk-prep protocol cycle (dangerous protocols breed punks, who build good protocols, which breed complacent 'prep' protocols, which decay back into dangerous ones) as a lens for protocol literacy and design.

Topics

fiction governance guest-talks induction-without-reduction metaphysical-multilingualism protocols punk-prep-protocol-cycle social-imaginational-layer technology-without-technocracy

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