Skip to content

Southeast Asia: Discussion

TalkSamuel Chua
researcheracademic
Southeast Asia: Discussion
Open resource →

Samuel Chua hosts a wide-ranging discussion with the Cunk Studio collective reflecting on two years of Southeast Asia-focused protocol work, tracing its origins from the 2024 Singapore workshop through the 'protocol design fiction' method, the 'Humboldtian imaginary' concept for world-building, and the reframing of 'Southeast Asia' as 'Seizure' (sea-centered geography). Participants debate how cultural DNA (bureaucratic, punk, Peranakan, PRC-influenced) shapes which protocol expressions take root locally, and outline future plans including a river-finance climate fiction project and an archipelago coordination workshop in Indonesia.</br>

Topics

archipelago-coordinationcosmolocalismfictiongovernancehumboldtian-imaginaryorganizationsprotocol-design-fictionprotocol-watchingseizure-sea-based-geographysymposium-2026

Related resources

Talk

The Indelible Importance of Illegibility

Patrick Atwater, innovation program manager at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, argues that protocols exist simultaneously as documented formalisms and undocumented implicit norms, using case studies from a neighborhood park, bridge/infrastructure permitting, and track-2 diplomacy to illustrate this gap. He proposes practical strategies for navigating illegible terrain—black-boxing unknowns, cultivating domain-expert practitioners as guides, and lightweight fieldwork logging (e.g., a 'protocol watching' Notion database)—and shares a real example of a water utility valve project where jurisdictional coordination revealed pseudo-official knowledge and unwritten norms.

Patrick Atwater

Talk

A Common Protocol for Composable, Modular Organizations

Simone Cicero of Boundaryless presents O2A (Open Organisation Alliance), a proposed open standard for making organizations 'composable' by replacing implicit coordination mechanisms like hierarchy and meetings with an explicit, machine-readable contract graph of units, offerings, and relationships. He argues the protocol's compact grammar—three economic primitives (purchase, revenue split, investment) plus composition mechanisms—can represent bespoke institutional arrangements like Haier's Rendanheyi model or joint ventures as 'sentences' in a common organizational language, becoming essential as AI agents enter firms and transaction costs collapse.

Simone Cicero

Talk

Group Brains: Minds Made of People

Kaliya Young presents her Protocol Institute-funded research on the IETF as a 'group brain' — a durable collective cognition combining a memory substrate (the data tracker, RFC series, mailing lists) with a human 'knowing' culture (rough consensus, birds-of-a-feather sessions, sortition-based leader selection) that together produce capacities no individual member holds. She extends the framework to Wikipedia and DAOs as comparative cases, introduces the concept of a 'group membrane' (who's in/out and how boundaries harden toward power), and argues AI should augment rather than replace human group cognition, positioning group-level alignment as a missing middle between individual and humanity-wide AI alignment debates.

Kaliya Young