The Other Others

Chels Marshall is a Gumbayngiirr woman, a marine biologist who works across multiple disciplines with Indigenous Knowledge Systems applied through a complexity/systems thinking lens. Her PhD was on Indigenous Knowledge Systems and climate change. We've worked together on the Regenerative Songlines project and will soon be working together in the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University.

Beckett Carmody is a Bundjalung/Lama Lama fella who is one of the most exciting thinkers I've met in a long time. His Indigenous process of inquiry is uncut, undomesticated, but he employs these oldways processes with complete rigor and integrity, utilising a kind of natural experimentation methodology, in which you can see him verifying and falsifying findings and running complex simulations that are non-digital and involve mapping data sets onto naturally occurring cyclic processes and then observing them in real time. His thinking and practice blow my mind.

A yarn from a couple of lockdowns ago (important to know about time lag because of the seasonal knowledge in the yarn). Victor Steffensen is an Indigenous musician, film-maker and expert in the ancient tradition of caring for land through the use of fire. He is the founder of the Firesticks Alliance and author of the book Fire Country: how Indigenous fire management could help save Australia. A very interesting idea to emerge from this yarn is Vic's notion of 'allowances' as opposed to the idea of 'affordances', based on the way plant species share resources with each other. I'm interested to frame future cybernetics yarns around how things change if we say 'allowance' instead of 'affordance'. 

Yarning with Johny Mair, one of those rare beasts - an actual self-made man. An Australian ex-pat who went from casual labor in Brisbane for six dollars an hour to banking and investment magic in the US. He's the co-founder at Ethic - Sustainable & Impact Investing. I'm often rolling my eyes at the idea of sustainable finance gurus, but not this time. We yarn up about billionaires in space, our cold takes on Gamestop, and whether shareholder-centric market ideologies can be used to leverage change in the world. And Johny catches me stealing a joke from Bill Burr.

Angie Abdilla (Palawa), Megan Kelleher (Baradah), Rick Shaw (Gamilaroi) and Tyson Yunkaporta (Wik) tell the story of our work so far for Oldways New, in the IPAI (Indigenous Protocols in Artificial Intelligence) group. We share this work as part of our protocol of transparency and open collaboration, and invite suggestions as we reach a very sticky point in our project. We know how to develop something that could be groundbreaking, but now we must ask - should we do it? Is it even possible to be accountable for the externalities and knock-on effects of a new innovation?

Bruce Pascoe and I yarn up the blackfellas' futures market, the prisoner's dilemma, trust dynamics and the thinly veiled Daddy issues of settlement. We absolutely don't mention the culture war. Well, maybe once, but I think we get away with it. Bruce refuses to advise me on a writing project in which I need to make torture and dark ops just a little more up-beat to fit with a jolly musical score. But that's always been Bruce's problem, no moral flexibility.

I was in a bad mood so my mentor, Worimi man Deen Sanders, threw me a bone and ran a bit of a thought experiment on how the maximum power principle and pos/neg feedback loops apply to billionaires who own the supply chains. Is there potential for equilibrium? We didn't arrive at a solution, but we did come up with a kickass name for one. And we had a good laugh, too.

Free range research yarn with Dr John Davis, head of the Stronger Smarter Institute for many years, now moving into our Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab as a leader. We talk about Bunya nut story and interspecies communication as a methodology and economy, ranging through many topics, from solar panels in the Sahara to how to honor two conflicting conclusions at once and still remain productive. We'll figure out how Indigenous thinking can save the world yet!

Dr David Reser and I talk about our inter-cultural bromance that has grown out of memory science experiments over the last few years, starting with our initial meet-cute nerding out over cranial nerves, 3d printing, dot paintings and Hannibal Lecter. This bromance has survived two culture wars and a recent controversy in which our experimental research paper (comparing the Ancient Greek Memory Palace technique with Aboriginal memorisation techniques) was turned into divisive click-bait for culture warriors.

Prof Yin Paradies talks about his evolving research moving from anti-racism to a deeper intervention into the true causes of structural inequality. We also look into the usefulness of intentional communities as safe-to-fail experiments in generating distributed governance patterns that might be replicated fractally over time, as The Wheel grinds slowly to a halt. Yes, we talk about Game of Thrones too...