/now

🏗️ Building

• RBS — developing the institutional foundation for a long-term ecosystem around culture, informal education, research, and the development of knowledge societies.
• NCO — turning a coffee shop into a distributed experiment in community, informal learning, and meaningful third places; increasingly exploring how the model can extend beyond a single location.
• SkyLabs — building an independent research and science education institution, beginning with astronomy and gradually expanding into broader scientific inquiry.
• Palapan — building a digital space for living heritage: helping cultural knowledge, traditions, and ways of life remain active, discoverable, and capable of evolving.
• Heisen.biz — developing practical systems for organizations that need greater clarity in how they understand themselves, make decisions, and operate.

These are not separate projects to me. They are different institutional expressions of a broader question: how do ideas become culture, and how does culture become durable institutions?

🔭 Research

• Developing a research programme on deep-time Southeast Asian history, including Sundaland, prehistoric migration, palaeolandscape change, and the cultural consequences of the end of the last Ice Age.
• Developing a general framework for understanding landscape transformation under changing sea levels, with the first paper now being prepared for publication.
• Continuing work in cosmology and fundamental physics, while gradually shifting my research centre of gravity toward Earth history, archaeology, and human societies.
• Investigating how culture, institutions, education, and research compound across generations into societal progress.
• Exploring connections between archaeology, anthropology, mythology, linguistics, astronomy, and surviving traditions of the Indonesian archipelago.
• Asking whether many societies traditionally understood cosmology, ethics, ritual, ecology, and social order as an integrated way of life rather than as separate categories such as “religion.”

🤔 Thinking About

• How societies become knowledge societies, and what has to exist before universities, laboratories, and formal institutions can emerge.
• Indonesia Emas 2045 vision: whether the incoming peak of the demographic window can actually translate into sustained development, and what kind of culture are required.
• How institutions shape culture, and how culture eventually reshapes the institutions that follow them.
• How informal spaces can contribute to the production and transmission of knowledge.
• Whether AI can become more than a productivity tool: an extension of human organizations, institutional memory, and collective intelligence.
• How ideas move from individuals to communities, from communities to institutions, and from institutions into enduring movements.
• What gets lost when living traditions are reduced to labels, religions, ethnic identities, or museum artifacts.
• How a single intellectual worldview can become a network of institutions without losing its coherence.
• How to build institutions that can carry an idea farther than their founder could carry it alone.

✍️ Writing

• Writing about culture, institutions, knowledge, civilization, and the transition from traditional ways of life to modern systems of belief and organization.
• Developing the idea of an age before religion — not as an absence of spirituality, but as a time when cosmology, ethics, community, ecology, and daily life were not yet separated.
• Documenting what I learn from actually building institutions, rather than merely theorizing about them.
• Turning research, experiments, and observations into ideas that can be tested, discussed, and eventually built upon by others.

🎯 Currently

• Finishing the research work that matters most for the next stage of my academic trajectory.
• Making NCO economically sustainable while developing the underlying mechanism beyond the café itself.
• Establishing the intellectual identity that connects my work across humans, systems, and the cosmos.
• Building institutions around that intellectual centre not as separate ventures, but as different ways of working on the same larger problem.
• Moving between the practical world of businesses and communities and the slower world of history, anthropology, astronomy, and fundamental questions about civilization.
• Building more than I'm consuming. Writing more than I'm speaking. Researching before concluding.