Nusantaraphilia

Diving into an alternative planetarity rooted in Southeast Asia

During my visit to Singapore last year, to do a talk on the Permaweird, I learned the term Nusantara from locals. It literally means “between islands,” and is an emerging local term for the broader cultural consciousness of maritime Southeast Asia, emphasis on maritime. It is also the name of Indonesia’s future capital. This paper by Jennifer Graynor loosely explores the sense of the term. I’m also reading a book by Eric Thompson, The Story of Southeast Asia. But perhaps my favorite view of the region is provided by the spectacular (and somewhat controversial) quasi-fictional graphic novel, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (I seem to have a particular fondness for quasi-fictional works; Benjamin Labatut is another contemporary master). It really gets at the complex web of criss-crossing cultural, political, and historical currents that define the region and its sense of itself.

Nusantara is more than a name for a region or even culture. It seems to point to a general civilizational ethos shaped by the particulars of a region. Specifically a maritime region composed of fragments of settled terrestrial civilizational cores, none of which is large enough to dominate the oceanic context. Nusantara, literally construed, seems loosely synonymous to the generic term archipelago (overloaded to include the convoluted coastal region of the Asian landmass), but has both cultural connotations, and an emphasis on the negative space of the ocean “in between” the foci of human autocentricity, that distinguishes it. The term has a powerfully evocative decentering quality to it. Not only does it physically decenter our notion of space and matter (and through the fragmentation of the regional historical consciousness, time), it decenters human identity as well. Nusantara is as close to a non-anthropocentric sense of ourselves as humans have ever managed to construct. The people, as much as the geography, are a collage and composite. There are both settled and nomadic “locals”, and “foreigners” who seem to integrate much more intimately than in other other places.

When I contrast Nusantara with comparable terms like “America,” “Christendom” or “Ummah,” the contrast is stark. Nusantara is to those ideas as the internet is to a mainframe computer. To bring Eric St. Raymond’s metaphor for software back around to built environments, if those imaginaries are civilizational Cathedrals, Nusantara is a Bazaar.

In more abstract, technological terms of reference, Southeast Asia has historically been a naturally decentralized and network-based region (it’s no surprise “network-state” utopians love it). Though kingdoms and even empires have risen and fallen in the region in the usual bloody ways, the story of the region is fundamentally larger than the story of those kingdoms and empires. Even today, the region, with the usual mix of monarchies, democracies, and autocracies, seems to have an identity that somehow manages to be larger than the human-centered individual shards.

As such, the idea of Nusantara, I think, represents an interesting starting basis for constructing new kinds of what is beginning to be called planetarity.

There is something fresh and expansive about the idea despite its antiquity; it feels like it has the potential to seed a different sort of planetary ethos for the world at large. In contrast to existing planetarities, such as the one that rests on the tired Westphalian nation-state, or its more recent and fraying extension, the post-WW2 “rules-based international order,” Nusantara suggests an alternative mode of inhabiting our planet. One that is fundamentally more decentralized, less anthropocentric, and defined more by consequential negative spaces than by narcissistic human foci. The ocean plays a role in Nusantara that the planet as a whole — 70% oceanic — ought to play in any modern conception of ourselves.

Nusantara is the “pale blue dot” ethos reduced to an inhabitable planetary scale.

In small and specific ways, Nusantara is already part of the global consciousness, even if the term is not well-known yet. Perhaps the most visible sign of it is the popularity of Singapore as a notional model of an “ideal city state.” In the 21st century, Singapore plays the role Denmark did in the 20th. Political philosophers both amateur and professional, peddling both sophomoric and sophisticated theories of the world, turn to Singapore to both test and exemplify their ideas. As my Singaporean friend Chor-Pharn Lee likes to joke, Singapore is every wannabe political philosopher’s “fantasy girlfriend;” a mythic blank-canvas for the projection of political fantasies.

But Singapore, and Southeast Asia in general, is not a blank canvas. It comes with a powerful historically evolved operating system pre-installed: Nusantara. An existing cultural consciousness that is far more interesting than most of the ideas and theories that eager theorycels from around the world want to project onto it. And though it is tempting to regard Singapore in isolation, it is hard to separate the unique qualities of the modern city-state from the broader historical characteristics of the region. This becomes particularly evident when you compare to other cities situated at civilizational crossroads. I’ve remarked more than once recently that Singapore is something like a modern Istanbul, with a similar sense of many co-extensive realities collapsing together. But where Istanbul is a city-scale interface between epic continent-scale imaginaries (Europe, Africa, Asia), Singapore’s natural context is not the continental civilizations that connect to it at arm’s length (China, India, and more recently, Australia), but the Nusantara region.

I think it is easy to miss this because Nusantara is not the kind of epic cultural consciousness most of us are used to. Large landmasses tend to drive the untamed oceanic contexts of humanity to the periphery and minimize them both physically and psychologically. To view the world from the point of view of say European, American, Chinese, or Indian civilizations is to view it in a cartoonishly land-dominated and anthropocentric way. You’d think this planet was 70% land rather than 70% water. And this despite the fact that two fundamentally maritime civilizations — Britain and Japan — have shaped the modern world far more powerfully than most land-based civilizations. To extend Alfred Thayer Mahan’s point, we tend to under-theorize the role of “sea power” (in a broader planetary rather than naval sense) in shaping planetarity. Nusantara is a rare example of a notion that does not make this particular mistake.

In the normal human consciousness, shaped by epic civilizational memories, decentralized and networked polities are peripheral. Only history nerds, for instance, are familiar with the Hanseatic league of Europe, which briefly played a marginal (and oceanic) role in shaping Europe’s sense of itself and the world. Closer to Southeast Asia, China and India, which form important boundary conditions for Nusantara, have senses of themselves so insular and land-locked, the oceanic planet barely exists in the respective cultural consciousnesses.

And speaking of China and India, what is remarkable about Nusantara is not that it has been somewhat shaped by these two neighboring behemoth cultures, but that they haven’t been entirely swamped by them. In fact Nusantara manages to locally dominate them. Despite the undercurrents of Sanskrit-based culture, for example, when traveling in Southeast Asia, you get the clear sense that the Indian thread is subordinate to the powerful local cultural realities. There is some sort of secret sauce, something in the (salty) water, that allows the region to cohere in more powerful ways than you’d expect, and resist being drawn fully into neighboring spheres of influence.

Some aspects of this are obvious. Nusantara is home to all but one of the “Asian Tigers” (not counting Korea), which leave their bigger neighbors in the dust in terms of economic development. Nusantara contains Taiwan and the Straits of Malacca, which powerfully shape the geopolitics of the world at large. But there is something more subtle going on.

We miss this because there is something self-effacing and non-epic about the region. In my limited travels (Bali, Thailand, Singapore), I get a sense of a collective consciousness that is “island-sized” in individual minds, but somehow also connected region-wide into a whole that’s continent-sized in aggregate. In terms of my On Lore series of essays, Nusantara is a region that has powerful lore without the need for an overweening epic serving as scaffolding. It is the world of The Mandalorian but without the need for a larger coherence supplied by the Star Wars epic arc of Skywalkers and Kenobis. The stories of the region, such as the legend of the swordfish that is part of the mythos of Singapore, have a wonderfully small-scale feel to them, yet evoke a sense of a larger narrative space.

Even the borrowed bits, such as the bits of the Mahabharata and Ramayana that have percolated into the region’s myths, are somehow “cut down to size” from the epic scale they seem to have in the Indian imagination. They’ve become part of the human-scale warp-and-woof of Nusantara. The epic scale of the imagination seems deliberately left wild and oceanic. For humans to contemplate, but not colonize with narratives. Nusantara, one might say, is a cultural consciousness that does not need rewilding because it never lost touch with the oceanic wilderness that defines it.

The world currently seems starved of good ideas for making sense of itself, and imaginative ways of constructing its own future. We could do worse than draw on the idea of Nusantara at a global scale to feed this growing appetite. Some concrete bits of inspiration I’ve personally been finding in thinking about the region:

1. Nusantara is nearly a perfect fit for thinking about the potential of blockchains and decentralized technologies in general. It’s the original “distributed system” in politics and governance. It also feels somehow “open source” and “permissionless.”

2. Nusantara is also a perfect metaphor for how AI works — it is almost entirely a “latent” space. If the epic consciousnesses of the civilizational cores are like GOFAI, Nusantara is a geopolitical motif for deep learning. The “deep” being provided by the oceanic antara. More practically, it’s also where Chinese and American mental models of AI collide (as was pointed out by Benjamin Bratton at the event I was at last year). I wonder what kind of intelligence might be exhibited by a Nusatara-trained LLM (bleeding edge “mixture of experts” models already have some of the necessary archipelagic dispositions).

3. Nusantara is also Ground Zero for climate change. Every aspect of climate change is viscerally present in the region, in a way that presents a smaller-scale version of the global coordination challenges the problem represents.

4. And finally, Nusantara offers a non-blank canvas that is not Europe, or any of the familiar civilizational cores (China, India, North America, Islam) that supply all the baggage our collective imagination has to deal with it. Of course, the region has its own baggage, but at least it’s new baggage for most of us.

There is a case to be made then, for Nusantaraphilia as an orientation towards the global future and as a basis for a different sort of planetarity. As many have noted, the region can be a laboratory for the future. If the geopolitical future is already here and unevenly distributed, it seems potently present in Nusantara.

This is not to say that Nusantara represents, or even should represent, through some process of idealization, an aspirational utopian condition. To imagine that would be to repeat the “fantasy girlfriend Singapore” mistake on a planetary scale. What is interesting is the reality of Nusantara, and phenomenologically grounded understandings of this reality, rather than abstract fictions that vaguely rhyme with it. This means coming to terms with the unique character of the region, complete with its problems and limitations.

For instance, I do get the sense every time I visit that despite the region being a global crossroads with busy trade and travel links to the rest of the world, there is something perhaps too small and local about the imagination. Smart and restless people from the region seem to hunger for more than the region offers, and head towards more epic landscapes. The political imagination of governing elites seems oddly localized. Despite its economic over-performance, the region seems to punch under its aggregate weight class in many areas like sports and scientific/cultural production. It is not clear which of these attributes are intrinsic to the Nusantara environment and which ones are accidents of history.

But then again, asking these questions is perhaps an opportunity to question the premises of those questions too. Are our current notions of sporting, scientific, and cultural production too rooted in the same dying sense of the world that we are broadly tired of and seem to have exhausted? Should we re-imagine them with reference to Nusantara first principles?

There are lots of broad and deep questions to think about here.

Tomorrow, I’m heading to Singapore to help run a workshop that aims to get exactly that kind of thinking going: the Datus and Nusas workshop (datu is the local generic term for leader and nusa is island). The workshop is part of the Summer of Protocols program I’m running, but the theme interests me in deeper, more personal ways.

I’ll probably do a write-up about our deliberations and findings here later, but I wanted to get some of my preliminary thoughts down before heading out, and to invite you to consider becoming a Nusantaraphile yourself.