/now

A snapshot of what I'm focused on right now. Updated occasionally, on purpose.

Last updated: August 2026

🏗️ Building

RBS — developing a broader institutional framework around culture, informal education, research, and the long-term development of knowledge societies.
NCO — turning a coffee shop into a real-world experiment in community, informal learning, and the design of meaningful third places.
SkyLabs — building an independent research and science education institution, with astronomy as the starting point.
Palapan — working on living heritage: how cultural knowledge, traditions, and ways of life can remain alive rather than becoming museum pieces.
Heisen.biz — designing practical systems that help organizations understand themselves, make better decisions, and operate with more clarity.

Investigating how culture, institutions, education, and research compound into societal progress across generations.
Exploring the possibility that many societies traditionally understood their cosmology, ethics, ritual, ecology, and social order as a way of life rather than as a separate category called religion.
Investigating deep-time Southeast Asian history, including Sundaland, prehistoric migration, and the cultural consequences of the end of the last Ice Age.
Looking for connections between archaeology, anthropology, mythology, linguistics, astronomy, and the surviving traditions of the Indonesian archipelago.

How societies become knowledge societies — and what has to exist before universities, laboratories, and formal institutions can emerge.
How institutions shape culture, and how culture eventually shapes the institutions that replace them.
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 to build institutions that can outlive the people who started them.

Writing about culture, institutions, knowledge, 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 the experiments, failures, and observations that emerge from actually building institutions rather than merely theorizing about them.

Building several things at once, but increasingly trying to understand how they fit into one larger system.
Moving between the practical world of businesses and communities and the much slower world of history, anthropology, astronomy, and fundamental questions about civilization.
Trying to turn scattered ideas into institutions, and institutions into something that can continue without me.
Building more than I'm consuming. Writing more than I'm speaking. Researching before concluding.