The Other Others

A peek into our wanjau process of collective sense making, applying the Ko-design methodology we've been working on for a couple of years to a textual analysis of medical disinformation.

I've recorded more on this topic (medical disinformation) this month, but the platform AI keeps taking it down - probably because of keywords and the incapacity of machines to know the difference between bunk and debunk. Anyway, my recent research has led me to believe that those radicalised online may be experiencing a similar ontological and psychological condition to displaced Indigenous people, and may benefit from the same treatment protocols Tracey Westerman devised for Aboriginal patients who are heartsick for Country.

Sara Kian Judge, Yuin woman and artist, discusses how autism helps her work with bats and sharks and see things as the Upside Down People do. We decide it's no longer 'too soon' to take the piss out of Steve Irwin, and reflect on taking responsibility for our more destructive batshit behaviours, while allowing Country to nurture our gifts.

Brother Arpad Maksay catches up to reflect on our yarn in my new book, and see where we've grown to since then when in comes to violence, public violence, and what it means to train for violence in service of a community, and whether it is possible to do this without ableism and a little bit of soft eugenics. Brother Arlo Davis drops by at the end to add some more to this, on Native storytelling and governance, and some knowledge he picked up at the latest Alaskan Federation of Natives gathering.

(Double Interrupted) So my friend Tammi Jonas from the Food Sovereignty mob has helped me start reading again and to work on my interrupting problem. I did okay here, and managed to record a whole episode without stepping all over another person's tongue. We talk about peasants and Naomi Klein's book Doppelganger, because she might be coming on our crappy little podcast soon.

Kisani Upward, Gamilaroi woman, is doing some research on Indigenous responses to natural disasters, specifically bushfires, while I work on my bad habit of interrupting (mostly by excusing it as a 'cultural thing')... Kisani convinces me that the feeling of being homesick while you're at home is not a first world problem, but a 'coping with ontological fluidity' thing.

Guy Ritani (Permaqueer activist, Maori science communicator) asks me, "Any whale stuff coming up for you lately?" Hell yes! A hard yarn about radioactive whales, skepticism vs cultural knowledge, what is real vs what is true, trauma, making sense, and discerning between spirit and bullshit. There are conflicts, maintaining both identity and intellectual rigor in this howling red-faced modernity. No apologies for sound quality - don't be such a spoiled techno-brat! Suck it up and pretend it's the 70's again....

There is more to the disinformation being deployed in Australia's referendum (for an Indigenous voice to parliament) than meets the eye. This episode is something of a diatribe. I'm tying together all our true stories of resistance and putting a firewall between them and the fantasies of white supremacists and disgruntled settlers who are co-opting the language and Lore of our ongoing occupation and struggle, to secure our support in extreme libertarian radicalisation and stochastic terrorism in Australia and abroad. These things have been under-reported, and you can't imagine how extensive and pervasive these networks of chaos are.

Thought experiment as data collection for a research project conducted by expert on digital writing and AI, Lucinda McKnight. I said I'd only give her my qualitative data in yarn form, on a podcast, and she was keen. It was a good idea, but as usual I ruin everything for everybody with my relentless blakpilling...

Big mixed up yarn with Steph Beck and Ben Knight, Indigenous views on relational economics and logical fallacies, and where the two meet in cults and guru-generated content. How can we tell the difference between good faith and bad faith claims, and who has the right to be heard in this world? (Spoiler: we arrive at the idea that maybe bad faith discourse comes from people who have figured out they can skip meaning-making and go straight to change-making/decision-making by extracting authority from nothing, using logical fallacies as discursive technologies of despair...)

Episode art by David McMillan

Pete McCurley, Gumbayngiir wood carver and reluctant blacksmith, makes sense of the cautionary tales we need to find in the Dreaming of metals.

Groovy de-colonial yarn with exo-ethno-botanist Cobi Calyx. Everything from Terra Nullius to Matt Damon.

You're in a proper yarn here, involving you, me, Beckett Carmody, a giant frog, wild cats and a robot. Beckett is finding adaptive Lore to bring cats and weeds into proper relation with place. There may even be room for AI fetuses like language model bots if somebody can tinker with the decision trees a bit. Best yarn ever if you want to learn about proper time, place, story and relation.

Yolande Brown and me are doing voice-work and writing for an animated film, and decided to yarn for a vocal warm-up before studio time. Recorded it just in case we said anything worth sharing. For me it's back-catalogue content, so skip my bits, but Yo says some calming and measured things that are a soothing balm in the world of thinkers and changemakers, that roiling sea of panic and doom and frantic hope.

Carol Sanford drops some pearls for me, you and the world, and offers teasers for her upcoming book, No More Gold Stars.

Warning: Suicide and libertarianism themes.

Deconstructing something I wrote in an altered state, which I don't remember writing, and wondering about the benefits and dangers of altered states. Sure, there are moments of genius that have utility, but you should never make decisions from that state, because you have no discernment. I believe that's why ceremony is secret and separate from daily reality, in our culture. Spiritual and secular realities need boundaries, when it comes to cognition and governance.

Rune Rasmussen returns for a messy yarn about the problematics and desperate need for rites of passage and a return to land-based culture for the Peoples of the Northern Hemisphere. Is it too late? Is it even possible to think about these things while speaking modern languages? Is dialogue and embassy between north and south possible while we are trapped in global economies of extraction?

Intimate yarn between two friends from two different families, cultures and online communities who ended up in... let's say incompatible algorithms, during Covid lockdowns, resulting in horrendously oppositional worldviews. Nothing we can't sort out with a good yarn. Because a yarn is almost like a 'conversation' but without the bullshit. Nobody is 'just asking questions' in a yarn, because you talk from your relation, not your position. The end result is not a resolution, compromise or any of that crap. It's... nah I'll let you listen through and find out for yourself.

Yau! JD, Chels, JMB, Josh and Tyson from the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, live yarn at the Human Kind Festival in Sydney as we work through and develop a Ko-design methodology in which Aboriginal and non-Aborginal people can work better in complexity through nature-informed processes.

Ahmed Buasallay is working on a place-based dialogue process grounded in Arab customary logics, but is struggling in communities on the peninsula where it is becoming increasingly difficult to access nature. He is also finding it challenging to access communities of practice in the Systems Thinking space, and so we also yarn about those often invisible obstacles to change makers and sense makers far removed from the center of the Anglosphere.

David Finnigan is an actor, playwright and game designer raised by climate scientists, here to tell us the story of that time Alex Jones and a million maniacs came after him about a play he wrote about the assassination of climate deniers.

Chaura Chigovanyika is doing his thesis on sustainable development, and we yarn on the question "Are Indigenous People Really the Best Conservationists?"

Enough is enough. I've had it with these MF snakes on this MF plane. (Samuel Jackson)  Parul Punjabi Jagdish, a CEO at AIME Inc, is one of the most accomplished and wise young people I've ever met. We connected last year over serpent Lore from our respective cultures, and in a big yarn by a camp fire in New York, came to agree that snakes may be the foundation of living spirit across the earth, and probably the universe. We yarn about the way they set in motion the phenomenon of regenerative disruption (often mistaken for destruction) in our creation stories, and try to understand pathways to healing and understanding death through the metaphors and learnings that can be found in snake Lore. 

Mark LeVine, author of Heavy Metal Islam and We'll Play Til We Die, brings a friend to dinner - Lucia Sorbera, chair of Arabic studies at The University of Sydney. I don't know either of them, but that's what yarns are for. Some unlikely connections here, finding common cause around developing better methodologies for co-design. A weird and wonderful yarn that kind of dropped out of the sky on us at the last minute. Opening music is Ankh by Egyptian death metal band Scarab.

Great yarn across the drink with proper deadly Irish thinker Manchan Magan, as we continue the Irish-Aboriginal Australian tradition of yarning together about Lore and other important things. I am advised perfectly on my one-off shilalagh-making effort (and how to avoid cultural appropriation in the process). We end up agreeing on a mechanism for keeping bastards away from our business - you know, those ones who come sniffing around because they want to find some bronze-age or neolithic ancestral precedents for their muscular Christianity or blood and soil madness. Really good yarn, made me feel like I got some mojo back.  

Arlo Davis, regular on the pod and my Coriolis Effect brother, talks  through his misgivings about his new job, and what it's like for a Native Alaskan to be the diversity and inclusion officer in a US  university, in an open-carry state. But brother Arlo got rope, he'll be  okay! Arlo's hot tip for Land Acknowledgements: never go higher in a building than the length of rope you have in your backpack in case you have to climb down again. We also talk about the content minorities secretly prefer to consume, and his new book Snow Talk, which mostly only settlers will ever read. Arlo asserts that Indigenous knowledge probably will not save the world, but it will certainly save him, and he's fine with that.

Twitter is not the front line in the culture wars - education is. Top pedagogy scholar James Ladwig and I yarn up about the last two decades of our struggle at the chalk face from the time when things got weird after 9/11, when curriculum became a weapon and students became collateral damage in the culture wars. Those battles were, and still are, a proxy war fought on behalf of billionaires who seek to deregulate all protections for nature and communities, increase extraction and never pay taxes on their hoards of stolen wealth. Education is a site of struggle, and pedagogy is the leverage point for change. 

I guess in the end riches are made of stored relational energy from unequal exchanges. True wealth may be best described as an increase in relations, rather than growth in the surplus energy produced by them. This would be the difference between a growth-based and increase-based economy. We cautiously find ways in this yarn to imagine a pricing mechanism for nature. Dams may be evil, but the water in them is just water. Maybe money is the same way. JD, JMB, Chels 2Deadly Marshall, me and Josh the Gamilaroi bandit awkwardly grapple with fire-side economics and there's not a lot of answers, except to the troubling problem of rich people freezing their heads.

Jason Twill, expert in sustainable urbanism, creative city making, housing affordability and green building economics, in dialogue with Ishnie Dayara Kavindri Dahanayake, PhD candidate in ecology and urban design, working through the messy problems of planning a survivable future. It's hard when an extractive economic model must underpin all you build, and when the powerful cannot think beyond the idea of human societies residing separately from 'nature' areas.

Maren Morgan and Jake Marquez, film makers and hosts of the podcast Death In The Garden share an intimate peek at what it's like to be a millennial in Utah at this moment in history.

Bro talk with Native Alaskan thinkers Warren Jones and Arlo Davis, considering Indigenous solutions to the global issue of lost boys becoming radicalized into proto-fascist networks of 'brown-shorts' gangs online and in the streets. Warren and Arlo are seeking support to revive their community's tradition of men's houses and believe such traditions could be useful anywhere in the world.

Yarn with Dennis Foley, veteran Australian Indigenous scholar, iconoclast, thinker. Brother Dennis reminisces about a lifetime of cultural embassy and inquiry with Native Peoples from around the world, from New Zealand to Taiwan and even Korea. He touches on a controversial paper he wrote a few years back about "the McDonaldisation of Indigenous research". McDonaldisation occurs when an institution adopts the characteristics of fast food chains - efficiency, calculability, predictability and standardization, and control. Foley once made the case that a lot of Indigenous research has come to reflect these traits, and revisits this critique. Turns out there's more to Indigenous Standpoint Theory than simply claiming an Indigenous standpoint...

The Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab team in our third yarn about impact investing in land-based systems of bio-cultural integrity. We're still struggling with this, but we know this is far more useful than struggling against it. John Davis sings us in - Chels Marshall, Josh Waters, Jack Manning Bancroft and Tyson Yunkaporta.

Fresh yarn with Ferananda Ibarra from The Commons Engine, which sits in the Holochain 'ecosystem'. Is it possible to live by the patterns of creation in land, community and online all at once? Ferananda works in economics, governance and the commons, informed by living systems, the feminine and indigenous wisdom. Can truly distributed wealth and governance stand against imperialism and 'the mother of all DAOs?"