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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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