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Walter Lippmann (The Good Society). This was written in 1937, prior to I, Pencil and “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

Sometime in 2020, I wrote this:

THE RICEPUNK MANIFESTO: source එක

WHO ARE WE?

We are those from the teeming lands.

We are chameleons. We eat rice and burgers. We drink arrack and whiskey. We are the East and the West, the ancient and the new, the bastard lovechild of machined denim and handloomed cotton.

We are paradoxes. We live chaotic lives in chaotic worlds, born into difference, and we carry difference with us. We shift under identities that fall apart on closer examination. We take labels and discard them. We are at home in the highest office and the lowest tea-shack on the road.

We are shapeshifters. We live through freedom and intolerance; individuals and communities; unity and difference; and we thread the grey needle between these lines every day of our lives, as we have for thousands of years.

We have no American dream, no stiff upper lip, no #eatpraylove, input-output myth. We are those who are detained at airports. Our governments betray us, and those with friends in high places run amok. We live and die knowing our deepest voices will be drowned out by the shallowest of those elsewhere. When they are heard, they are pigeonholed into caricatures, robbed of all nuance.

WE ARE RICEPUNKS.

Ever since the first days of mass media the narratives we have seen, in paper, on screen, have relegated us to the role of court jesters and zoo exhibits. Our cultures are by turns quaint and full of exotic wisdom, and in the next breath they are savage and backward. Our tales are bastardized by both the patronizing and the excessively woke, turned into cannon fodder in battles we care little for.

We are diversity taken to the thousandth power – not in the weak checkbox just-another-uniform crap of the West, but diversity born of new world orders colliding head-on with old orders that trace their roots through centuries, that embed themselves in every facet, from language, to art, to music, to politics.

We are societies bound not by one utopia, or two, but by tens, hundreds, thousands. We worship not one god, but millions. We are gleaming cities with police states and sprawling slums built by democracies.

We are pride and humiliation, scattered and united, by turns modern and advanced and by turns ancient and decrepit, an assembly of systems that stretch across thousands of years, a Frankenstein’s monster stitched at scales never fully grasped.

WE ARE RICEPUNKS.

Our parents are people that have dwelt in our pasts; burrowing into our myths, reminiscing of times when we were great. We are here to turn the gaze outward. To imagine multi-cultural, multi-polar worlds, not built around one truth, but several. To imagine new world orders; to describe ten thousand utopias, each different from the last; to bring variety to a world sorely lacking.

We are here to take back the narrative, to show the world our side, to break our stories out of the zoo they have been put in to and help them regain their rightful place in history. Our difference is a competitive edge, not something to be ashamed of.

We understand that this task is not easy.

We understand that much of what we want to say will not be heard. We might be born into a rigged game, where the house always wins, and the cards have been dealt.

But the rapid democratization of information, the power of social media, the ready availability of tools and technology for the production and distribution of our stories have made it possible for us, now more than ever, to fight our battles. Our stories will be heard, one way or the other.

Let us play.

I was pleasantly surprised, and then astonished at the reception that this thematic document of mine received (see Seed). Most notable, Giti Chandra wished to include it in her course Fantasy Violence: Body, Event, Narrative, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay referenced it in his papers (see Chattopadhyay, B. (2021). Manifestos of Futurisms. Foundation, 50(139), 8-23.)

And of course when a document such as this receives attention from an audience of n > 1, there comes a time when some clarifications have to be made, especially when it comes to manifestos. Otherwise, they are, at best, dangerous, and at worst, confusing.

First and foremost, ricepunk is an aesthetic positioned somewhere between post-cyberpunk and solarpunk. It is a reaction to both the world I live in and the fiction I consume. Having worked in policy and journalism, I chose the term as marker for certain themes:

1. Centers on South Asian styles of relationships.
2. Introspects on structures of governance and community; acknowledges the different mythologies and narrative engines that drive different people’s behaviour; and makes and attempt to see both the hard and soft infrastructures of life in a given world.
3. Cherishes hybridity and hybrid cultures; showcases both hackers of culture as well as people who find a wholesome embrace within it.
4. Acknowledges the shit sandwich.

This Ricepunk manifesto is a living document that I maintain as a useful framework for my thinking around certain types of fiction that I want to create. It is maintained largely for my own use and is inclusionary rather than exclusionary: if you see yourself in these words, you’re welcome to hop on the wagon, and in Creative Commons fashion, build upon these thoughts; if not, that’s perfectly fine.

Also, please excuse my extremely odd use of footnotes here. I will come back and clean them up later.

Let’s begin by first examining the gorilla in the room: Cyberpunk.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s take TVtropes’s entry on the subject:

The originator of the “Punk” genres, Cyberpunk is a Speculative Fiction genre centered around the transformative effects of advanced science, information technology, computers and networks (“cyber”) coupled with a breakdown or radical change in the social order (“punk”). A genre that is dark and cynical in tone, it borrows elements from Film Noir, hard-boiled Detective Fiction and postmodern deconstruction to describe the Dystopian side of an electronic society. It is often used as a synonym to the related trope “Techno Dystopia”.

The plot will more than likely take place 20 Minutes into the Future in some City Noir, Industrial Ghetto or Crapsack World that tends to be marked by crime, cultural nihilism and bad weather, where cutting-edge technology is abused by everyone for the sake of selfish profit and pleasure. (“The street finds its own uses for things.”) There is a very good chance it will take place in New Neo City.

Heroes are often computer hackers or rebels, antiheroes almost to a man. These characters — “criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits” — call to mind the private eye of detective fiction. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the “punk” component of cyberpunk. On the other hand, major villains are almost inevitably Police States or multinational conglomerates led by powerful businessmen with a number of gun-toting Mooks and corrupt politicians (or even an entire nation) at their beck and call.

Cyberpunk is a genre I began in (see Numbercaste, The Inhuman Race, The Salvage Crew). As I mature as a writer, I have begun to frame certain objections to the genre:

1. Cyberpunk is an incomplete framework for dystopia. It focuses blindly on a very libertarian, hyper-Hayekian future. As a canvas for dystopia, it positions the monetary cost of something as the reigning frame in which power is used and abused. I find this attractive but not relevant to much of what I have seen, talk about and explore.

   I know where it comes from - a specific time and place and zeitgeist in the US of A meeting the growing power of Japan - but it’s simply not a large enough frame. For context, I live in Sri Lanka; a country whose recent marks on history are civil wars, riots, racism, demagogues, nepotism, political and economic collapse, all amidst incredible natural beauty - see our work Appendix / Watchdog and this article by RestofWorld for detailed documentation on the subject.

   Sri Lanka - and, indeed, many of the countries I’ve worked in, particularly in the Global South - is a reminder that the abuse of power comes in many flavors, under many political umbrellas and types of governance; for example, we have an excellent and functional free healthcare system, while at the same time, journalists and activists are hauled off by the police for questioning.

   Not all apocalypses are triggered by gun-toting mooks, either. As I once explained in an email, ‘we’re living through a boring apocalypse [1]. To call this a shitshow would be generous. The simple fact is that a month ago our Treasury had collapsed to the point where a single Kardashian could run the country; people were dying in fuel queues, and we were raiding the Presidential Secretariat. This month, it’s activists being rounded up and tortured and bodies washing up on beaches. On the surface, we have civilization - until we fail to pay for the next fuel shipment. What civilization persists is one we cannot afford, with nepotism, corruption and idiocy turning state-owned enterprises into a vast field of debt rotting under the sun.’

   In short, this is not the only way to organise a society; this is not the only way the world falls apart.

   [1]Liu, Hin-Yan, Kristian Cedervall Lauta, and Matthijs Michiel Maas. “Governing Boring Apocalypses: A new typology of existential vulnerabilities and exposures for existential risk research.” Futures 102 (2018): 6-19.

2. The inherent nihilism and unhappiness of the genre is depressing. I recognise that is is a position against the relentless, naive and sometimes stiflingly indulgent techno-optimism of science-fiction leading up to that point.

   However, much of the nihilism is from the perspective of ‘high-tech low-life’, or, to put it as it is, poor people. Poverty in cyberpunk is a driver for its stories. Poverty is used as a frame to depict both protagonists and antagonists as an other - or rather, cockroaches, surviving in a hellscape, resilient but not something to envy or aspire to. The poorest are often the ones with the most modifications: the least human, the most inhuman.

   Having lived in conditions that eve some cyberpunk characters might find depressing (LKR 7500 a month for three people, you can imagine how meals and rent worked out, or didn’t), I have a beef with the inhumanity-linked-to-poverty here. I’d like to bring in one of my favourite authors to start the conversation:

   “He could hear his granny speaking. “No one’s too poor to buy soap.” Of course, many people were. But in Cockbill Street they bought soap just the same. The table might not have any food on it but, by gods, it was well scrubbed. That was Cockbill Street, where what you mainly ate was your pride.” ― Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

   I lived on Cockbill Street for years. Technology or not, it’s a truer depiction of poverty than the cyberpunk genre often provides. Life continues, and even with the associated nihilism that comes from seeing your options reduced to nothing, those at the very bottom of the ladder find community, things to take pride in, things to look forward to. While desperate circumstances often drive us to desperate measures (PS: thanks to Dr. Pinto at the Accident Ward, General Hospital, for patching me up), I object to the inhuman aesthetic that cyberpunk injects into poverty.

   Cyberpunk’s nihilism, interestingly, takes an extra step: despite its framing of money as the sole pivot point of opportunity and happiness, it typically shows that the nihilism and unhappiness continues all the way to the top. This is largely untrue. Firstly, research into the subject almost universally demonstrates that financial instability and poverty equals higher levels of distress in daily life [2] [3].

   This isn’t to say that happiness is a simple metric. I’m objectively far, far better off than I was when I dropped out of school to work; it doesn’t mean that I don’t experience unhappiness. My point is that it’s not a shitshow all the way through. This may not reflect the experiences of many people; they reflect mine. Humans find ways to find meaning and connection in the things we do and the people we associate with. Life continues. The table might not have any food on it, but it doesn’t make us any less human, and I want to touch on these things without soaking everything in cheap neon and people-as-cockroaches.

   [1] I also object on economic grounds: body mods ain’t cheap, and it’s typically the wealthy who can afford them, not someone with barely enough money to pay rent.

   [2] Jachimowicz, J. M., Frey, E. L., Matz, S. C., Jeronimus, B. F., & Galinsky, A. D. (2021). The sharp spikes of poverty: Financial scarcity is related to higher levels of distress intensity in daily life. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 19485506211060115.

   [3] Santos, M. E. (2013). Tracking poverty reduction in Bhutan: Income deprivation alongside deprivation in other sources of happiness. Social indicators research, 112(2), 259-290.

3. Cyberpunk is weirdly game-theoretic.

   To wit: zero-sum games, in which each participant’s gains or losses are exactly balanced by those of other participant.

   However, in the process of working on http://witness.scifieconomicslab.net (and conversations with Alberto Cottica, who shaped much of my thought around social contracts I hadn’t considered plausible before), I came to realize that much of what we actually find exciting - in stories, in history - are examples that profoundly violate the tenets of game theory.

   The hero isn’t a hero because their gain is perfectly balanced by the villain’s loss; we treasure them because they go against all the odds and lose more than most for a gain that they might not even see. Moments of a Studio Ghibli movie aren’t precious because they’re calculating; it’s when people go against their natures to be cautious or selfish and reach out to another human. When a parent shields their children from bullets at the cost of their own lives, or a stranger is given kindness on a long and lonely road, it isn’t a zero-sum-game being played.

   In short, many of our stories are not bounded by rationality and game theory; many of our most treasured behaviours aren’t, either. This isn’t a Samwise Gamgee who helps Frodo to Mount Doom.

   So what do we do then? I have now spent many words dismissing cyberpunk. But the goal is not to bury cyberpunk, or to praise it - it has a particular zeitgeist, it is extraordinarily effective at examining parts of a world where Hayekian economics rule, and it looks goddamn spectacular. My idea is not to change the tool, but to pick up another.

Let’s look at another possible tool: Solarpunk.

Solarpunk is a genre of Speculative Fiction that focuses on craftsmanship, community, and technology powered by renewable energy, wrapped up in a coating of Art Nouveau blended with African and Asian aesthetics. It envisions a free and egalitarian world with a slight bend toward social anarchism. Standing as both a reaction to the nihilism of Cyberpunk and a solution to a lot of the problems we face in the world, Solar punk works look toward a brighter future (“solar”) while deliberately subverting the systems that keep that brighter future from happening (“punk”).

The genre was coined on Tumblr in 2014 when a single post swept bloggers into an excited frenzy. Like the Tumblr community that fostered the genre, Solarpunk also tends to feature a high level of cultural awareness, gender equality, self-expression, and artfulness.

I’m not going to spend as much time critiquing Solarpunk as I am with Cyberpunk, because for one, it is still a nascent genre - there’s just not been enough time for it to set its aesthetics in stone.

I broadly like what solarpunks set out to do (except when they refer to themselves by the unbearably cringe hopepunk). It’s a swing back to the optimism of science fiction from an earlier time, except a lot more culturally aware out outside the Americana aesthetic.

However, I generally find it hopelessly naive and smacking too much of primitivism. It often shies away from deeper introspection of power structures and governance, making the assumption that enough good people will make things world. Just as cyberpunk limits itself with its corpo-libertarian worldview, I find that solarpunk limits itself with its (less explicit) bent towards social anarchism, neatly skipping over economic underpinnings, assuming a sort of return-to-nature bohemian aesthetic.

It lends itself to some absolutely gorgeous aesthetics (see this piece by @CJugendstil on Twitter), but I want to know who’s making all that steel and plastic. Somewhere in the back is a factory and a sweatshop. As many of us from the ‘Third World’ can testify, going solar and staring starry-eyed at each other does not make for a society that actually functions as both physical and social infrastructure. It does not build resources; it does not set safeguards set in place to deter bad actors; it does not automatically bring about the kind of serious social organization required to make big things that work for a lot of people.

My analysis of this may be proved wrong. Indeed, there are ways to make solarpunk work - one only needs to look at Marinaleda in Spain, or Vietnamese co-ops, or the Sarvodaya movement in Sri Lanka, to understand how people form robust collectives that get around standard capitalism. I just don’t see that thinking here, only the aesthetics. As any country that has been through an Independence movement post-WW2 will illustrate: vibes are good, but vibes aren’t enough.

Now that we’ve insulted everyone, let’s start to define Ricepunk.

Ricepunk is a particular post-cyberpunk frame that I use to think about stories for my own work. In a nutshell, it:

1. Centers on South Asian styles of relationships. This, of course, is simply because I care about such things. I loosely define this as the things anyone from the SAARC (or even ASEAN) region will instantly relate to, even in conversation with complete strangers: collectivist cultures where: 1. individuals are typically defined as much by their relationship to others as for their own achievements (ie: this is the son of so and so, or don’t you know who my parents are?). 2. in-groups and loyalty to in-group norms is a very big thing (see myTEDx talk on homophily and how it’s terrible sometimes). Being an individual is difficult on a social level; deprogramming is difficult.3. group and social norms -especially family and adopted family - are often favoured over individual desires, with a general social push for compromise. This does not mean protagonists compromise, but simply that the push be recognisable.4. working with others is seen as a critical skill; loners (as I was for much of my life) are not exactly punished, but looked upon as somewhat . . . defective.

2. Introspects on structures of governance and community; acknowledges the different mythologies and narrative engines that drive different people’s behaviour; and makes and attempt to see both the hard and soft infrastructures of life in a given world.

   What does this mean? It means that we ask questions like: who built these roads? With whose money? Where does the electricity come from? What kind of economy sits underneath this fictional zeitgeist? What do people believe their lives should be like, and how do these beliefs differ? How do these differences emerge in the social makeup in the world? How does physical infrastructure affect communities and vice vera? What laws and policies exist in this world, and what beliefs do those laws sit upon, and who enforces them? Who produces food? And who gets caught in the margins of all this, and how do they hack their way around?

   Ricepunk worldbuilding acknowledges uneven distributions; Knowledge, skills, technology, access, wealth, power: these things, and others, are not equally distributed, even in the most egalitarian societies, without extraordinary effort. This strain of thinking lets us impose a few boundaries:

3. Has no cheap utopias. Vibes alone don’t build system or defeat them. Even near-even distributions are difficult to achieve and impossible to do so without extraordinary effort (and often cruelty: see the history of Singapore, or for a more SFF version, LeGuin’s 1973 work The Ones Who Walk Away From The Omelas). No social system has been devised that keeps everyone happy and fed. Only children, animals, prophets and pamphleteers believe in One System That Works For Everyone.

4. By the same rule, unhappiness is not equally distributed. No simple evil kingdoms, please. [1] And while we’re at it, let’s iron out corporations-as-ultimate-holders-of-power. Business doesn’t exist without people and relationships and a degree of public infrastructure (whether social, physical or both) to make such promises easier to deliver on. Amazon needs roads, needs contract law to be enforced, needs regulations and an operating environment that prevent startups from legally blowing up warehouses and kidnapping executives. The Medicis relied on their reputations and family connections as much as their wealth to have the kind of power they exercised. Even one of the most unstable trade environments I can think of - the old Silk Road - required high degree of trust and merchant’s reputations for fair deals to operate, and required kingdoms spending resources on maintaining their ends of the infrastructure.

   I hesitate to say no minarchist kingdoms - such a state has never existed in a stable form throughout history, but may feasibly exist among a population of libertarians or cats in a situation that allows Coasian bargaining.

   The idea here is to have no lazy thinking about people’s conditions and societies. Instead, Ricepunk tries to have a reasonable degree of necessary coherence and motivating logic at the bottom [see Seeing Like a State (James Scott), The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs)] as well as the top [see the Arthashastraya (Kautilya), Leviathan (Hobbes), Das Kapital (Marx)].

   This is not a requirement for kingdoms nor communists nor for perfectly explained theses of the social contract; just that there is a certain amount of thought injected into how fictional societies are structured from the top as well as at the bottom. Often the top (a fairytale kingdom where princes hold balls every other day and fairy godmothers turn vegetables into vehicles) might be a completely different picture at the bottom (overworked peasants struggling to keep up with the crown’s exorbitant expenses, as well as semi-sentient public transport that occasionally turns back into pumpkins).

5. Cherishes hybridity and hybrid cultures; showcases both hackers of culture as well as people who find a wholesome embrace within it. In this it inherits from an incomplete thought I scribbled a while back, after seeing someone insult another for their ‘mongrel’ use of a particular language:

   …all if not most, of the inhabitants of our world are hybrids; not of one culture but of the amalgamation of several, whether by conquest or by osmosis. And as such, their habits, behaviours, identities, expressions are a mix; sometimes intentional, especially where the performance of sorts is required for them to function in the particular sub-sect of society; sometimes unintentional, brought about by the fortitous interlocking of behaviours from cultures or templates originally not designed to function together.

   This I posit almost as an anti-thesis to a particular strain of the conversation on authenticity, that demands that the behaviours of people both fictional and nonfictional conform to rigidly expressed stereotypes in search of the “authentic”; a search that leaves many of us – real or fictional – painted into intellectual boxes of Orientalist nonsense.

   These divisions of authentic/pure or not are often used as a controlling expression, often by those with power on those without; there is an intellectual link here with the systems of hierarchy and organisation that seek to control hybrid chaos, from caste systems to notions of racial and ethnic purity, to notions of ownership of facets of expression. Hybridity means that by default, we acknowledge that our cultures are proverbial boiling pots of behavior patterns; very few of us are truly authentic to anything but ourselves, being a select few ingredients floating in the mix; and we are under no obligation to be otherwise.

   This is the pretentious way of explaining it. The simpler way is to say: we’re all hybrids. Purity is for distilled water and about as interesting. We eat rice and burgers. We’re on the no-gatekeeping side of the appropriation debate. Deal with it.

   This may, on first reading, seem at odds with the first point about South Asian cultures and relationships. Hardly so; quite a degree of tension arises from the innate conflict between those norms -especially group attempts to enforce some narrative of how things should be - and the practical adequacy [2] of hybridity.

   This hybridity includes, but is not limited to human + AI collaboration (see OSUN / The Poetry Machine, the The Salvage Crew and The machine that bleeds). If humans vs AI is a valid trope (as is so often in fiction, stemming from Capacek’s RUR all the way to Luddite movements and Terminator), hybrids are equally valid representations (see Kasparov’s Centaur Chess, modern-day Go players, or even yourself, reading and consuming this information your ancestors could only describe as magic).

6. Acknowledges the shit sandwich. Very little of the world comes to us without both grind (cyberpunk) and passion (solarpunk). Ricepunk tries to be a little bit more real about this experience. There is hope. There is despair. There are people trying their level best to find their own personal balance between the two. Somewhere out there, someone is winning, and someone is getting the short end of the stick. No society has as simple a difference as a Left-Right axes - progress or lack thereof can exist along multiple axes in a multidimensional space. [3] Blanket good-or-evil is the province of children, animals, prophets and pamphleteers. And, sometimes, epics [4].

To summarise: not as drearily edgy nihilistic as cyberpunk, not as vibes-and-butterflies as solarpunk; a great deal more thought into how societies work and continue to work.

Footnotes

[1] Rather ironically, a great example exists in the Mahavamsa, in the form of the Elara vs Dutugemu battle. which is otherwise rather heavy on the propaganda. The Sinhala hero, Dutugemunu, is such a gigantic asshole that his name literally is Dushta Gamini ie: Gamini the Cruel. Elara, the Tamil king, is famously noted to be one of the most just rulers to ever run anything in Sri Lanka, right down to the man tying a piece of rope to his toe to make sure that any being in his kingdom could wake him to demand justice. They meet, Dutugemunu kills Elara, and the Mahavamsa can find no justification for this act other than to say ‘well, Elara was Tamil, so yay! Um, rejoice now, we’re the good guys, we totally won.’

[2] Sayer (1992: 69) as being able to: ‘generate expectations about the world and about the results of our actions which are actually realised … The reason that the convention 1, that we cannot walk on water, is preferred to convention 2, that we can, is because the expectations arising from 1 but not 2 are realised … It is not that our knowledge of water doesn’t work, but rather that the nature of water make 1 more practically adequate than 2’.

[3] In Sri Lanka, for example, a functioning free and universal healthcare system exists alongside racism, nepotism, and economic collapse. Famously, the LTTE - a terrorist group - had both an Air Force and a functional judiciary, as well as a lot more egalitarian attitudes towards women; they also had child soldiers and were prolific with suicide bombers. Singapore, an example I’ve used here, is both incredibly safe and functional, and has a great deal of intelligent people working in policy (I’ve met and worked with a lot of them) - and its democracy is a joke; it was build by a dictator with a single vision. North Korea is a dictator with a single vision, and that vision is largely starvation. America is a shitshow on Twitter, but my god those people have no idea how much stuff actually works in that country.

[4] The Last Ringbearer, by Kirill Eskov, casts the Tolkien account as a “history written by the victors”. Eskov’s version of the story describes Mordor as a peaceful constitutional monarchy on the verge of an industrial revolution, that poses a threat to the war-mongering and imperialistic faction represented by Gandalf (whose attitude has been described by Saruman as “crafting the Final Solution to the Mordorian problem”) and the racist elves. I personally find it hilarious. This isn’t to say that the epic can’t be Ricepunk, but the nature of the epic is often to exaggerate and depict the good versus the evil, so the two are very awkward bedfellows.