Samuel Chua of Seapunk Studios presents 'reverse-imagineering,' a methodology for protocol studies that starts from speculative fiction worlds and works backward to infer the protocols that would need to exist to make them plausible. He illustrates this through three Seapunk worlds—South(east Asia) with neoanimist distributed AI and 'ghost machine' commons-hardening, SNOW Society's shanzhai-inspired peer-to-peer climate adaptation supply chains, and the 67th World's longevity/automation governance where immortality requires earning social legitimacy—arguing that building fiction first surfaces protocol ideas that direct present-to-future design work would miss.
Shared by the speakers for the symposium. Email addresses have been removed.
Transcript
YouTube’s automatic captions, unedited, so names and technical terms are often misheard. Each timestamp opens the video at that moment.
0:00 Yeah, you’re running kind of two sessions back toback. First one’s a talk, second one’s a discussion. Is that right?
0:07 Yep. So, hi everyone. Uh Sam Chua here from Cunk Studios. We’ve got a few folks uh with with us here. Uh we’re in a pop-up studio in Chiang Mai. Uh and we’ve got the next hour or so. I see a few uh Cunk alumni in the chat. So, hi to all of you and hi to all SOP friends as well. Uh or PI friends today. Uh so um thanks Nathan for that really interesting uh session. Uh actually we’ve we’re here in Chiang Mai for a month uh attending protocol symposium or snippets of it at least. But we’ve also been doing some world building about a fictional world in which uh rivers institute a kind of like ecoarchy across the world. Uh and one of the questions we’ve been grappling with is what to use your language what would the virtues of a river be right and the current working title we’re using is actually a plur rivers with rivers in there but a world is very plural and kind of like so that a lot of synergies there and uh we can probably talk more about that in our discussion so over the next hour uh we kind of split into two sessions uh I’ll do a first half that’s a bit more of uh protocol studies protocolization studies methodology reflection sharing ing a bit from this the imagination work that CBunk has been doing and the kind of ways it’s helped us to think about new ways of discovering uh what future protocols might look like. Uh and then in the second half for the next half an hour uh we have a few seps who will kind of join me on this like little uh couch here and then we will have a bit of a discussion about some of the work we’ve done the journey we’ve been on and uh it’s been a bit of a journey I think for uh summer protocols/protocol institute um exploring Southeast Asia and our project has grown out of that so we can talk a bit about what we’re doing prospects predicaments protocols of Southeast Asia as a kind of more of a chat uh for that session so the first half will be a bit more like of uh I guess more academic methodology discussion and the second can be maybe reflections and lessons around that stuff and if you want to hear more about some of the work we’re doing here I’ll be happy to chat more about that in that second half as well which is a bit more uh I guess like fireside chat or something uh to that effect so let me try and get my screen up if I can uh let’s see okay hope this is visible for everyone yes some slides here good okay I see timber First thumbs up. Cool. So, uh we’re going to talk a bit about like uh some of the work that CPU has been doing uh but not so much as a CPU show and tell, but uh really hoping to offer kind of uh I guess some learnings and what we think might be a methodological uh offering for protocol studies and protoization studies more generally. uh and uh sorry for the mouthful like uh we’re calling it like cunk uh world protocolizations uh and offering this idea of reverse imagineering as a method uh in the the field of protocol and protocolization studies. Uh so quick introduction about Sebank Studios. We’ll talk more about this in the second half. Uh we are an open anybody can join uh roaming. We don’t have a fixed base. We kind of like gathered together in different places.
3:11 When Changai here last year for protocol school we gathered a group of about 15 20 people uh about four or five who are here uh on this chat and in this room uh in Kal Lumpur. And so we kind of move around different parts uh with a bit of a Southeast Asian base. Uh we’re a collective uh that’s interested in imagining fresh hopeful researchbased stories for seizure Southeast Asia but also the the broader world of the connected seas and oceans and I guess with our recent work rivers as well like the the waters of the world and the the geographies that uh come around that and the global south. Uh we do research and imagination. So we aspire to research things and think about philosophy and virtues and protocols and histories and all that but then use that to generate fictions that are richer. And in this talk I’ll talk about how that imagination process doesn’t just generate fictions. It’s also help think a lot more about what the non-fiction side is. Uh for example the kinds of protocols that could be could need to exist for some of these fictions uh to be true. Uh we’ve done a bunch of different kinds of work before. uh we’ve done some stuff uh on like uh Southeast Asian futures. Last year we collaborated with uh protocol uh summer protocols to do uh a workshop in Bangkok that led to the release of Southeast Asia a set of videos. I’ll show one of those later. Uh we also like do study groups and creative retreats. Uh we gathered about 20 people in KL last year to tune into protocol school live and learn a bit and do some writing and research exercises out of that. Uh we’re also doing a bit of climate fiction. uh the river project I just mentioned uh is one of them and last year we did one called snow society that I will show a bit more uh on this.
4:48 So uh the broad idea of sea punk very quickly is really thinking about fresh futures for sea which is Southeast Asia but also the the maritime sea uh and in a solar punk kind of way. So it’s about sea solar punk. Uh and we’re also inspired by the idea of punk which we spoke about quite a bit uh back in 2024. I gave a SOP town hall talk about about punk and other things really like that what we saw in Southeast Asia was the open sea enabled a lot of pluralism a lot of uh punk where people who were refugees displaced from somewhere else could find places to start new lives and kind of like regrow and and and in very fresh kind of ways right so that that culture of the sea enabling a culture is part of the motif and inspiration that drives our imaginations and futuring so that’s uh a bit of the the backdrop So what is today’s talk about? Uh so the symposium uh protocol institute is uh here is about inventing new nature. Uh and that’s uh [clears throat] spoken a bit about it like there’s been research and stuff about it. Uh the question we’re trying to explore is really what are the methods and approaches to uh invent new nature. Uh and so you can kind of think about what are the methods and approaches in protocol studies or protocolization studies. uh and so I want to start with just uh if we kind of think about like uh how how do we think about how some of these methods show up right so if we think about like uh the initial kind of like protocol studies right you can think about it as trying to see the invisible right see the invisible all and the small and think about the different protocols that kind of underly enable uh all those to function so like uh this kind of like uh shows up as protocol literacy you could extend that to think about you know like is there a process of protocol enography or protocol archaeology where through looking at balance in the world and exploring the protocols beneath them we can begin to kind of like make sense of see protocols in the world and develop a kind of protocol literacy and perhaps protocol agency. Uh a second kind of axis is between like uh over time between like the present and maybe the futures or what I like to think of as the possible uh and this is really like uh where you get practices from like futures future studies and also like fiction which has been a bit big focus of uh protocolized of course. So like this is where you get work like foresight scenarios uh backcasting going back from possible futures to like what it would take to get to them. So if you two by two this uh you can kind of see how some of these uh methods uh map onto it. Uh and then I want to kind of think about if I think about some of the approaches that uh the protocolized magazine for example has been taking right protocol fiction maybe maps from like future protocols to the kinds of worlds that would ensue out of that. uh and a lot of talk about protocol stewardship and protocol engineering I think has to do with how do protocols in the present uh evolve adapt learn uh do become protocols in the future that that enable different kinds of possibilities. So we have here a bit of kind of like a sort of like a method map of of sorts starter map that you can add different things to and think about along these different uh axis. So the next part I want to talk about is really like uh trying to think about if I use this map as a basis like what is what has cunk been kind of like uh through like stumbling around and and exploration what have we actually been doing uh and I kind of think of it like uh in this kind of like meandering kind of like uh reverse U shape right where we and I’ll kind of break it down a bit more into uh three different parts right so we call ourselves like a research and imagination collective uh a lot of the work we’ve done has been about trying to really explore the connection between uh wool and protocol right so classic protocol studies for the clunks and sububac workshop last year we really looked a lot at protocols in traditional agriculture and like uh how people growing rice learn to share water and principles like that and maybe explore ways for thinking about that towards how you can explore similar analogies for AI uh and then we also do a bit of like uh imagination which is from worlds in the present, can we imagine worlds in the future? So we have a Southeast Asia of today, could we imagine Southeast Asia of tomorrow with distributed AI and blockchains in them? Uh and part three, which is really the focus of this talk is so we can study stuff, we can do some futures exercises, right? Uh that’s great. But like I think the really interesting thing that we’ve learned is through that process we’ve actually been able to like imagine possible protocols in a way that we probably would not have been able to do if we went straight from present protocols to possible protocols in this kind of way. Right? So the roundabout way actually for us feels like it’s yielded more interesting uh perspectives. So this reverse engineering process is what I think I’ll try and give you guys a bit of a flavor of in the through some of the work that we’ve done uh before.
9:48 So uh to kind of extend the analogy of like uh the inspiration of like uh nature and new nature and drawing from the book inventing nature in which the work of like Alexander Wanalt uh really shows us the the process of getting to that idea of nature was not a grand theory from nowhere right like Humbalt was really one of the most like fearless and like widely traveled explorers of his time and the kind of data collection he was doing and all that was really like uh it was through a deep intu ition for a lot of the data that he was able to kind of like synthesize and see some of these theories emerge. Uh and in some ways I could think of uh the process of reverse imagining as a kind of like imaginary home molding where we kind of like homolding through these different worlds trying to like explore the act the imaginations have been created but maybe with a more rigorous maybe like systematic lens and try and see like what patterns and protocols might need to be here for this new nature in this speculative world to exist. Right? Right? So you could think of it as a sort of speculative uh protocol ethnography uh if you like.
10:54 So that’s what we like to offer to the map uh this previous engineering process uh that you can kind of think of as an imaginary humbulting uh and im imagining or inferring of uh new nature or a speculative protocol or archaeology uh different depending on how you aim it. Are you looking at artifacts? are you looking at human practices or cultural practices in this virtues perhaps in this thing you can kind of like infer uh differently so that’s the kind of the theoretical framework offer um for the next section I’m going to talk through like uh examples of this from three of the different sep fictional worlds that we’ve been able to build over the past couple years to give you a sense for like what at least this felt like for us as we were building the worlds and some of the analysis we were able to do and maybe the ideas of protocols that we felt we probably wouldn’t have got to had we not done this roundabout uh imagination lab exercise. So the first world I talk about is one that maybe is familiar to many of you. Um it’s from the thongs and subs workshop last year where we basically uh built a world called uh Southeast Asia which is really a world of like uh distributed AI and blockchains in souththeast Asia or at least inspired by that where things get a bit wow and you have this kind of neoanimist world where things come alive. Uh, I hope I’m able to actually play a video with screen sharing enabled. Let me see if sounds enabled. I hope so. We’ll find out.
12:18 Okay, so there’s a video here. Um, I’m going to try and play it. And Timber, if the sound doesn’t play, just kind of like wave or interrupt me. Uh, so let’s Is the sound going coming through? Great. Okay.
12:36 I don’t hear it. I think it’s maybe a little quiet or not at all.
12:53 Sorry guys. Let me try and do that again. I think the share didn’t have that enabled. My bad. Not expected to be going through. Uh let me try that again.
13:06 Okay, let’s try again now. Is that better? Okay.
13:15 [music] [music] In a world bound by spirit and code, every soul is born with three animals.
13:36 One for the day, one for the month, one for the year. These are not symbols.
13:44 They are living intelligences. Keys to planetary knowing.
14:03 Speaking on [music] behalf of Troop Back League, we have a responsibility to be balanced in how we manage the commons. [music] [music]
14:28 Across generations, heirlooms [music] became the most precious object in a family line, containing [music] the intergenerational wisdom and folly of the family series.
14:59 [music] Those born on Sunday are protected by the noble Garuda. Half man, half eagle, a being of righteous. Born on Monday are born on Tuesday. Wednesdays children carry wisdom and memories. I was born exactly at midnight. They said I had to be one, but I was born both. The glitch in the system is what lets me thrive in the shadows, switching freely between meek and terrifying.
16:06 All right, time to the next slide. There you go. Okay. All right. So, uh, thanks for sitting through that. Like, uh, this was made in about April last year. So you can kind of tell from the quality of the slop that you know it’s it’s not made right now but like uh we we tried to like hand write a lot of the the the videos and stuff in there. So like despite the sloppy production quality like this was all concept art uh we hope that some of the ideas in there were interesting and we definitely found them quite interesting. We you saw a lot of the text describing that and that I wouldn’t bel labor too much of it right but as we looked at the different videos that the different groups had created the what you the video you saw was kind of like a synthesized trailer video drawing from a lot of them right there were many different kinds of like interesting so these were kind of like the the starting rules that the group uh put together in the workshop that kind of like set the basis as the common kind of like I guess like laws of physics or laws of shaping what the world could be uh and like uh I think you saw this um in the end of the video as well that the the world was one that was kind of you could say like haunted. We kind of started thinking about artificial ghosts uh out of this the the ghost machines contest last year kind of came out of this as well and the kind of the a way of defending or hardening the commons through this haunting was kind of a premise of this. So all these videos were built. We kind of uh they kind of crystallized into this name Southeast Asia which we only came up with at the end. After that, uh what we were able to then do like and we we actually did like a kind of like a performance enography like a fictional enography presentation uh when we played this in Bangkok was if we actually look at the world that we created and kind of think through it and say like if if we treat this fiction as real, what patterns would actually need to exist for these things to happen, right? So this is kind of like the fictional professor that we that we came up with and kind of like you know she had a whole presentation that ended up with this thesis kind of like in a kind of almost I guess like a grad student uh like a professor kind of way looking at the things and observing some of the different kind of like protocol patterns in these things that and maybe like speculatively uh extended like you know like what offer the thesis about what this world could be. Uh so that’s that’s a bit of that world like uh it gives you a sense of kind of the process of like making some sort of world like having all these things in there. If you go to this website you’ll see like a bit more stuff there essay and a bunch of other things around there. So that’s kind of exhibit one if you like from the work we’ve done that gives you a sense for the reverse imagineering method and the protocols that we able to observe out of it and infer. Uh the second world I’m going to talk about is called snow. Uh and it’s a world that we built for climate fiction. uh uh partly for uh micro connection week last year. Uh and so the premise of snow uh I won’t I wouldn’t go through too much detail right is basically like it’s called snow because uh it’s a strange strange and snowy Southeast Asia uh where the weather has gone so crazy that you sometimes get snow uh upon the petty fields and it’s also one in which like many of the large scale institutions in the world have collapsed right so you get a setting that’s maybe a bit like this right with snow on the rice fields and like uh ruins but also like uh a lot of like tee theming life around it right. This was the world that we called snow. Uh and like the snow is a backronym also for the a strange new opportunity world where the the people you see in this world are not just like lamenting the collapse of the big institutions but it’s also like an orientation around what opportunity exists here and how do I use that to live and survive today but also maybe build out a new kind of future. So this was an orientation for like really like the the hero of this world is really like the everyday smallmedium entrepreneur. These are the people uh the the forces the the species the human species the that that repine the human ecology uh in this in this in this world. So like the the kinds of things that we’re building com combining new technology with old things are kind of like where we felt that if there’s parts of the world that really vulnerable to climate collapse uh these are probably the protagonists you have to empower to get some sort of outcome instead of waiting for some grand institution that might already be gone to try and save them. Uh and kind of like the the protocol analysis part of this that we got to was initially was kind of like wow this this person is like the the street vendor with some technologies is going to be able to do it. But as we thought more about it, we realized that well how do they get this technology in the first place, right? We realized that this was actually an opportunity for a supply chain kind of intervention into the kinds of like world like uh that if these people have the spirit and the capability and the ingenuity to kind of rebuild back how do you supply them with the the technologies maybe the mesh technologies or the the supply chains for like cheap modular solar panels very adaptable technologies and like what are the protocols to enable those kinds of infrastructures to exist that allow very plural decentralized kind of like uh rebuilding from the edges uh kind of thing to work and we end up calling this world one of like a Shanghai climate agency for those of you who are not familiar like Shanghai is a term that’s been used a lot in analysis of the Shenzhen hardware supply chains where you have this real ecology of many different suppliers and the kind of like uh like if you read the book Apple in China uh that gives you a sense for kind of like how there’s both this kind of like Apple’s development of the supply chain of China by training all these expertise but also this parallel flourishing of this whole ecology of different suppliers for like everything from like uh glass panels to GPS sensors and like these parts and this kind of ecology of different suppliers that allow a different kind of like uh capacity to manufacture electronics but in this world become co-opted to enable kind of like climate adaptation in a very likeme small person everyday person driven kind of scale uh and like so it’s finishing off with this world uh like uh that’s kind of some of the themes of it like uh this was this and like uh so in the world you saw like we were experimenting with video so you saw a bit of video and like the Southeast Asia site has a lot of concept videos for that. Uh this second one kind of like we’re we did an exhibition kind of like of the world last year and uh I’ll just show you briefly like one of these um you can see I just switch the screen share to a different piece to give you a quick sense for like some of the things that our team is playing with for this. Uh so let me pull that up real quick.
22:35 Um here I think it’s this one. Okay. So like uh this is kind of like an interactive like prototype that one of our team is building to demo at a conference or something just to kind of as an experimental sort of thing where we’ve taken the world we’ve built some like LLM stuff behind it. Like it’s it’s obviously possible partly because LLMs exist and we play with them. I don’t I’m not saying it’s perfect yet but we’re kind of exploring like interactive media. you can kind of like jump into different things, ask questions of these folks uh and like uh you know go back to different zones and kind of like have a pick through adventure kind of things. So some of the media we’re doing uh we’ll probably like uh once this is a bit more polished share a bit of that. But this gives you a sense for the the kinds of like uh different kinds of media playing that that’s happening with this. And maybe through that we actually get ways to uh basically uh find new protocols or infer new ideas because we get different things elicited through the interactions that are a bit richer that way. I’m going to switch back to the screen now uh and start talking about the third world that we that we built. I’m going to share today.
23:38 So uh a few months ago uh Cank managed to do a first uh kind of extended project in Shanghai. So we were in Shanghai for about a month in May. Uh out of a process of like siling for the solar punk and artificial imagination lab looking at frontier Chinese technologies and the kinds of solar punk futures they might offer for the global south while being mindful that technology adoption is often very double-edged. Uh we’ve built this world called the 67th world. Uh and it’s uh it’s not just because of the meme. There’s some layers uh behind it, right? Like the logo here is actually like the Chinese 7 and the English seven kind of like a yin-yang kind of cycle uh that’s there. Uh and we presented this world at a final show uh in early June and I’ll talk a bit about some of the elements of the world in kind of a bit more detail. Right? So a lot of the research for that month had been talking about longevity technology and basically automation. Right? So I think the the the 20 or so people we had in the world building workshop, right, really got deep into that, right? Like what happens when we can live indefinitely. What happens when everything gets automated, right? But our planet is still kind of like in a in a very sick condition, right? And we kind of began to think about extending these [clears throat] into like logics where like you have you can live forever but like to to have the right for society to decide you can live forever.
24:59 There’s a protocol around earning the right to live and maybe it’s contributing, maybe it’s respect. Uh so there’s a few more different uh aspects here of this world. I won’t go too long because um want to be conscious of time, right? And then there’s a whole bunch of different aspects of this world that that were developed out of that, right? Like there was a world in which you can live forever. Work is automated. So like a lot of humans search becomes not about struggling to survive, but actually a search for purpose and opportunity, right? And it’s kind of almost this video game where like surviving is okay, but to like really achieve things and like get XP or whatever, you have to kind of respawn frequently. Uh and this was also shaped by this kind of like interesting alliance between like uh people who can live forever like in this world they called the LTS or the long-termers right like uh and they to manage this world without eating it have to essentially uh ally with the unborn generation the seventh generation in many cultures right so they advocate for the seventh day and then you have these so there’s a whole much bunch more stuff here about the kinds of governance institutions hybrid ones that kind of organize the world and how they create a system of shifts kind of like gigs or sorts and like also gifts where you can kind of like contribute a major scientific finding or something else to do that. So a lot more things here we’re actually working on how do we organize this and publish it in a richer way but for the purposes of today I’m just bringing it up to show some of the protocol search uh reverse imagineering process that we got out of this. So the final show we did for that for this particular month was uh trying to say that if this is a world where the search for opportunity is the key right the best setting to do it and we wanted something interactive would be a career fair. So we basically imagine what a career fair would be like uh in a postjob world where opportunities still exist but it’s taken different forms uh and we kind of stage it right. So this is some of artifacts from the from the thing we had this kind of like welcome kind of like note at the beginning we had some kind of like evocative like lore from the from the world in there.
26:55 These are some photos from the day. Like we had about three rooms this size of this like kind this massive gallery and kind of like a a lot of the different creators were basically staging different job boos from the future. Some of them uh and because it was interactive uh we had a lot of personality tests in there. I guess maybe that’s something in that that we can protocols for trying stuff out or something. Uh and this is an example of one of them. There’s a QR code here that if you want to try it out for yourself, you can scan. But like this was one example from the from that world that got us to this. Uh so that’s some of the background uh from here like uh you can try this out if you want but I really want to go through now like to get to the end of this first half right to kind of reintroduce this as a talk about really like a methods of uh protocol and protocolization studies. Uh and basically like what I’ve tried to show is that through a few different worlds right we’ve gone through a process of like researching different kinds of themes and inspirations and then building certain kinds of fictions around them right but I also want to highlight that uh we found that we got to really interesting ideas for uh what kinds of what kinds of protocols in this world would have to be and then like maybe if we kind of flip it uh if we want a world like this what kinds of protocols would we try and build to enable those outcomes to maybe be a bit more likely to happen right we also started thinking a bit about, you know, like what what each world was essentially trying to protocolize, right? And so like this allow us to kind of think about protocolize kind of like combined protocolization stacks or solutions for different kinds of like outcomes in different uh scenarios. And so are these perfect? Probably not.
28:28 These were three kind of exercises done by a small collective. But we hope that the the method may be a useful addition in the arsenal of finding different ideas for like what do we build, what do we protocolize and what do we take uh forward. So that’s the end for part one. Uh I guess I can kind of probably open up for some Q&A on the first half of the presentation. uh and then if we want to kind of like once we’re done with that we can then transition to the more like group chat about like uh some of the stuff that cunk has been doing and maybe the connection to the larger protocols uh journey. Thanks.
Daniel Schmidt argues that mazes are a minimal formal instantiation of protocols, not just a metaphor, using his own maze-drawing history and games to illustrate concepts like hard vs. soft protocols (physical walls vs. crossable paper lines), scale-entangled vs. scale-lined navigation, and stigmergic memory. He demonstrates an ant colony pheromone simulation, a multiplayer infinite maze with shareable 'pebble' markers, a maze-design platform separating protocol-author from protocol-navigator with heatmaps of friction points, and an art-gallery maze as medium. Venkatesh Rao joins to explain his 'clockless clock' maze, a topological map of thought-space (rat/goat/crow vertices) designed by Schmidt to represent arrested development and spiraling toward nirvana.
Nicolás Madoery presents 'divergent protocols' as a counter-model to standard protocols that converge toward homogenization, arguing that AI and robotics now function as infrastructure (not tools) through which culture becomes 'liquid' and infinitely re-versioned. Drawing on examples like AI-generated Argentine folklore, a dancing folk robot, and his PIACH framework for cultural organizations, he proposes protocols that preserve diversity by naming what is lost, keeping source names, and leaving room for noise rather than optimizing transmission.
In this issue of Protocolized, a Luminian protocolist named Selene describes life aboard a civilizational satellite where a grand game called the Mosaic—a glass boardgame designed to hold civilizational tensions in equilibrium—structures daily ceremonies and intellectual practice across eight circles of disciplinary expertise. The issue also announces a talk on Public Intelligence with Kevin Kelly and updates on the magazine's science fiction contest.