Indigenous Knowledge and Radical Psychotechnologies - A Conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I think that 90% of the technology we have as humans is psychotechnologies, and I think we're losing a lot of them. We're losing a lot of the ones that have continuity going back, and that's the strength of a psychotechnology, is that it's ancestral as well, and that there is a continuity of practice from people learning in communities together.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan. In this week's episode, I'm speaking with Tyson Yunkaporta, who is an author, academic, educator, Indigenous thinker, maker, arts critic, researcher, and poet. He's a member of the Apalachee clan in far north Queensland and has ties in the south. His born country is Melbourne and adoptive and community cultural ties all over from western New South Wales Perth. Tyson carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. He's the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, published last year, which is a remarkable book about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science, and spirits to Schrödinger's cat. In the book, Tyson takes a look at global systems from an Indigenous perspective and asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation, how this affects us, and how we we can do things differently. Tyson is also an advisor to the Consilience Project founded by Daniel Schmachtenberger and Zach Stein.

Hey Tyson.

Yo, how you doing?

Good, good. How are you?

Yeah, pretty good.

Thank you so much. It's a genuine pleasure to be able to talk to you about this stuff because I've seen— so I discovered your work through Luca. Perry, and also through Dave Snowden.

All right.

So I kind of, I was listening into the yarns with Dave and Beth, which were amazing. And then obviously read your book, Sand Talk. So I think there's so much interesting stuff in there as we look around for, yeah, we're in a bit of a mess, right? Let's, let's face it. And I think people are looking around for different ways to consider the whole thing, right? Because we can fall into a bit of tweaking. Which doesn't actually do much. And I think people are looking for some— in a way—

thinking and twerking. Throw a bit of twerking in.

That keeps it fun for sure.

Yeah, yeah, all kinds of window dressing.

Yeah, but I think like there needs to be some more radical thinking in a way, like in the root, like the root of that word, right? In terms of going back to what are we doing as educators? What are we trying to set up for our young people, right? And I was just— one of the things I was thinking of for you is you've got kids now, young kids, and you've had kids and you've seen them through. Maybe we can start because I've got 3 kids myself and just watching them go through the system as it is. How do you navigate that kind of tension for yourself as a dad and thinking about where they are? They're going to mainstream school. Are you keeping them out of the system?

It's funny. I've spent a lot of decades just helping out homeschoolers. Like, I still do it if homeschoolers contact me. I'll give them a few hours, like, help them out. Poor buggers. I wouldn't do it myself. For me, it's got to be community schooling. If you're taking a kid out of the schooling system, well, then you're not sending them to the public schooling system because, you know, oh, it's terrible and all that kind of thing. You know, I mean, it's just, it's like the kid being on lockdown for their whole life half the time. You know, unless, you know, unless Unless you're incredibly well-resourced and you've got a lot of leisure and you can just like, if you're that privileged anyway, then holy crap, you can do whatever education you like. Yeah, don't send your kid to school. You want to take them and, I don't know, get, who's the conductor for this season of the, you know, symphony orchestra or whatever? I'll call him up. You can do what you want. You can, you know, give your child an amazing education if you wanted to do that. But I think people who have that much resources didn't get that way by stuffing around, so they're not going to have time for that. They'll just get a nanny or governess or something. Better still, let's get rid of him, send him off to boarding school completely, we don't have a look at him. So I don't think anybody's doing it right, you know. So for me, yeah, it's— it'd be great if, you know, I lived in a community of people who had their act together and were really grounded, and, you know, I had my extended family around me and they no longer had the pressures of day-to-day survival and Suicide and constant deaths and elders dropping like flies. And, you know, most of our people are under 25 years old now. You know, it's a young population because old people are dying and everybody else is, you know, doing a lot of breeding. So off we go. In the ideal world, yeah, that'd be great to be able to reintegrate children back into the community and back into our worlds of work. Which are also integrated into our community in an internal economy, that'd be fantastic. That doesn't actually exist anywhere on the planet. So that's what we need to do in evolutionary terms with our learning, all our ways of being as human beings. We're all patterned to do that, but we're not going to be, we can't do that right now. So it's just, I don't know, it's like everything else. There's heaps of poisons that I don't like my kids to have, or be exposed to. And I'd love to have them in a place where they didn't have to breathe toxic air. That'd be lovely. But, you know, the fact is, that's the reality and the future for certainly the rest of their lifetime, however long that's going to be for this planet. It's going to be toxicity. And, you know, I don't want to raise a bunch of crunchy kids who, you know, the first time they eat a peanut, they drop to the floor and start bloody twitching. You know, it's like, you're gonna have to be exposed to toxins. Yeah, you read all the histories like Caesar's histories and stuff like that. All that— I always think about those Eastern princes who would have a little bit of poison every day to make sure that, you know, when someone tried to drop a bit of cyanide into their vena, they'd, uh, they're ready for it.

No, the reason I ask, I think, is because, as you say, it's kind of just a reality of the choices we're faced with. And in my world, it's very easy to just get lost in this discussion about everything that's wrong with education. But, you know, I've got kids.

You have to draw the line somewhere. And it's good to actually base that on facts.

Yeah, and you've got to send them somewhere.

Facts that are shifting from moment to moment. I mean, you can draw your line ideologically and just go, well, that's where my arbitrary line's going to go because, you know, that's my brand. I'm this, I'm a Marxist or I'm a frickin' anarchist or I'm a libertarian or, you know, I'm conservative or whatever. It's like, oh God. And look, that's what we'll have to get to, the reality that education and children is the frontline of the culture war. And the culture war is global now. And the frontline of that, the trenches, is schools and classrooms. Everybody projects all of their poisonous shit onto that. And that's just like, ugh. Look, it's just something that kids have to get through in order to get out and actually try and find a way to navigate the rest of the world. And I've just got to support them to get through that. Yeah. Horror of their schooling.

Yeah, but it's interesting, I think, as well, the flip side of that is that the horrors of life as we perceive them, we then often will see education as this perceived solution for those ills as well, right? Like, yeah, when you start thinking, because it's the front line of the next generation, there's so much weight that we also put on it kind of instrumentally about what we could do with education, how could we use education to generate and to create the society that we want to see. And you see that all the time in all sorts of of different ways, right?

Yeah, and it depends on what narrative you choose, historical narrative, because, you know, either schooling was invented by the Prussians in order to facilitate, you know, well, nationalism, but also, um, to be able to make industrialization and militarism scale. And it's like a horrendous human domestication technology that, you know, makes sure you can get millions and millions of people all compliant and, you know, doing what they're told against their best interest. Or It's a real liberating mechanism for workers and that the education was developed to be more than just what you needed in terms of basic calculation, et cetera, for your labor, but was actually there to make sure that you could read Dostoevsky and stuff at night. And so you could be digging coal, but you could be at home discussing Homer. I'm not talking about The Simpsons. And that people would be able to think and you'd have a working class who were philosophers and you'd have that dream that came out of the United States It's one of the founding fathers. They all look the same to me. I can't remember which one, but one of them said that democracy is not possible without an educated citizenry, like a very well-educated citizenry that could understand very nuanced topics and issues and discuss them and make good collective choices together. So it's either one of those things that you're supposed to believe, but the fact is both of them are true at the same time. I often choose, you know, just only because I'm an asshole, I often choose the education is evil pathway.

Yeah, I know. In the chapter in your book, Advanced and Fair, it's just, it's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Just totally.

Yeah, yeah. Because I make it really clear. It's true. It's all true. Yeah. But it's also absolute bullshit. You know, like you can look at the entire historical field and for every one of those facts that is just a horror that, you know, that's where eugenics started, everything, all the worst stuff started. Out of the people who invented education, like behavioral sciences, all these kinds of things, like behaviorism, you know, stimulus-response, or all that kind of thing. All the worst things came out of the time. But at the same time, for each one of those facts, there is an opposite fact that is also completely true, you know. So I, I believe the actual truth, if you listen to all of it, is that education is the field upon which everybody projects everything, all the things they feel the most. So yes, it's all their hopes and dreams, but it's also their horrendous fears.

Yeah.

So you end up with, you end up with moral panics. Like, they either start on that battlefront of the culture wars right there in the classroom, or they inevitably come into the mix there. Well, everybody's thing, if they believe it strongly or they're trying to push it in the public space, they'll always say the same thing: they should teach it in schools. You know, anything that somebody wants to say it's important, that's how you say it's important— they should teach it in schools. So we're always like abusing our children by projecting all of our shit on them and forcing them to do it, and forcing these poor bloody teachers— every 5 minutes we flip the whole curriculum and tell them, no, we're doing it this way now, no, we believe this now. No, you have to teach that now, you know, and it's whatever. And it's usually, you know, just popularity contest, bloody metrics, you know, from polls and shit like that that's driving it all. And then most of those are manipulated anyway. So that's usually, you know, it's whatever ends temporarily. Somebody wants to bloody, you know, pump and dump a bunch of stocks in this kind of thing. So we're going to get people arguing about that for 5 minutes because that'll contribute to it and blahdy blah. It's kind of all bullshit, and it's awful, and we have to be in there.

Yeah, one of the things I'm interested in though as well is in all of that mess, there is something like, I mean, you've kind of said it, but there's something really important going on, right? And one of your, like, I've heard you reference psychotechnologies quite a few times, and I think, I think there's something Totally agree on all the fear that we project and all the aspiration we project. But then there's also this thing somewhere in the middle about what is it? Social reproduction, passing on knowledge, distributing cognition and teaching psychotechnologies, passing them on. You know, that I think, I think there's something interesting that's going on in education with those things. So maybe, yeah, just to go back a step. What, yeah. How would you explain What are psychotechnologies?

You look at maths. What is the technology of maths? So where's that? I mean, yes, an abacus or a calculator, blah, blah, blah, but these are just peripheral. They come out of the technology that is maths, but it's ephemeral, right? So it's a psychotechnology. It's a technology that exists as a body of knowledge and practice that is thousands of years old. And every generation it's passed down with more and growing. There's upgrades, there's upgrades every generation, and even within a generation there's upgrades all the time to this psychotechnology that we inherit. It's, it's freaking exciting. Most of the technologies in the world are psychotechnologies. So, you know, people fear this apocalypse of what would happen if there was an EMP from the sun, uh, like a solar EMP, which we're overdue for, by the way. By about 80 years at the moment. We were supposed to have had one a good while ago. The last one, like, just blew up all the telegraph lines back when telegraph was the internet.

Yeah.

So we're overdue for an EMP from the sun. So that'll be interesting. But, you know, everyone sort of thinks, oh, if all the technology stopped, we'd be stuffed. But I think that 90% of the technology we have as humans is psychotechnologies. And these are for everything. And I think we're losing a lot of them. We're losing a lot of the ones that have continuity going back. And that's the strength of a psychotechnology, is that it's ancestral as well. And that there is a continuity of practice from people learning in communities together and from children being embedded in communities. Not just children, but learners. So I mean, so you learning your discipline, your best learning would happen in communities of practice. This is why most of our good learning in our education only comes with a postdoctoral research. Have you ever noticed that? Like, your real learning comes in your postgrad because that's when you're finally free to learn like a child. We've got the whole education thing backwards. You should be starting your postdoc when you're about 5 and just working your way backwards.

Love it.

Into the specificity there.

Yeah, yeah.

You know what I mean? But yeah, it's communities of practice. That's the real thing. Communities of practice work because there is intergenerational stuff going on, but coming from lots of different lines and lots of different narrative pathways from diverse people. And diverse traditions in the psychotechnology that you're learning.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? It's just, it's lovely. All the disciplines are like that.

It's brilliant. No, I totally agree. Can I ask you about literacy specifically? Because, yeah, that's an interesting one because you talk about literacy, Tim Logan, you know, we weaponized literacy and Protestantism together to cause this shift to hyperindividualism. Right. If I'm summarizing you correctly.

Yeah. Or we were liberated by it. Both of which are true.

Sure.

Sorry, keep going.

I was just gonna say that the literacy as a psychotechnology is obviously phenomenally powerful because it allows us to share and distribute our cognition and our understanding of the world in a highly efficient way. Right. But at the same time, you had this, the fact that more people were taught how to read and write allowed them to be more self-contained and to read the Bible primarily on their own so that they could then have their own personal relationship with God. And therefore then it kind of pushed down this path towards individualism. So it's kind of an interesting, again, like dual thing going on that on one hand it's just, it's incredible and communal and it kind of explodes outwards, but then at the same time it's also narrowing down to this much more individualistic thing that's happening.

I think that's— it's almost a natural law, like the more agency and empowerment you get, the— you have to sacrifice connection. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, unless everybody is being uplifted, empowered, then yeah, it's kind of— I don't know. Yeah. I mean, there are most of these natural laws, you're— you're— it's, it's a seesaw and you're sacrificing something for something else. And this comes right across to all technologies. So, you know, even in computing, if you make gains in speed and efficiency, then you sacrifice complexity and diversity within your algorithms and programming, et cetera. Or the more complex something becomes, the slower it becomes. Yeah. Which is tricky when you want faster, bigger, better. You always sacrifice complexity and diversity. And I guess that's a natural law. Something that happens everywhere. So even in education, you get that.

Maybe that's how we've kind of sped so quickly into this dead end, but it's also, I don't know if you know Iain McGilchrist's work, The Hall of Mirrors, like he talks about, we're kind of, we're stuck in this hall of mirrors because it's all very left brain, more efficient, kind of focused, detail-oriented. And we kind of get ourselves stuck in this. Yeah, we want more efficiency, more kind of speed, and we keep sacrificing this other thing that we can't even— we almost can't even name anymore. We can't even describe it. And I think there's something I really would like to ask you about, that kind of push towards more efficient individualism, because I think, like, if you pull back out of that, what even could be an education system that doesn't do that, right? That doesn't prioritize more—

that's, that's interesting—

stimulation for the individual.

Yeah, well, I think most big drives towards efficiency and when we co-opt psychotechnologies, you know, in unhelpful ways or damaging ways, in ways that go exponentially, you know, bigger and more complex and just destructive, usually that's for extractive purposes.

Yeah.

And I guess the, the original, if you're looking at the whole Protestantism thing, you know, the individualization of faith, the driving force behind that, and they inherited that from Catholicism too, because that was the reason why the Catholics Catholic Church originally changed the structure of extended families and broke things down to nuclear families and then made sure that legally individuals could own property instead of families so that it's easier to extract someone's wealth. So it was about extraction by the church from people. And it became, that was facilitated quite well through the printing press and people all having access to literacy so that they could read the Bible themselves. Themselves and have an individual bespoke relationship with God instead of a community one. So a lot of the driving impetus behind that individualization of culture, faith, spirituality, and using this pretty genius bloody psychotechnology of literacy, it was an extractive imperative behind that. It's interesting, most of the so-called, the stuff that's sold to people as liberation, empowerment, et cetera, it has these inducements built into it.. But ultimately the goal that's lying behind it— and Dave Snowden says this all the time— it's like, you know, there's the stated goal and then there's the real goal with institutions. And so the real goal in this case was to be able to extract more wealth for the church from people— wealth, lands— get more people to will the lands to their church on their death, or their, you know, their estates, or their gold, or bloody whatever else they could. It's, I mean, it's also easier to control people. It's easy if people are divided and people are individuals. It's easier to control, you know, 1,000 individuals than a community of 1,000 people. Yeah, but it's easier to control 10,000 individuals than it is to control a good strong family of 20 people, I reckon. Um, so, you know, you've got to break those families up, break those clans up. You've got to put that, uh, divisiveness into them. And I guess you can see that same lore again that I mentioned computing. Your speed and efficiency of extraction increases as you decrease diversity and complexity there. So, yeah.

Interesting. The kind of fiction of that, right? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but would you say the kind of fiction of that is that there is no such thing as the individual? Because I've heard you say, as an individual, you don't really even exist, right? You only exist in relation, in a web of relations to everybody, everything else, the land.

Well, that's, um, so yeah, that's only, that's only through the lens of the psychotechnology of Indigenous kinship. Also a psychotechnology.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But through, from another lens.

But it's exactly, but it's a useful other lens. And I think that's what I was saying at the beginning about people are looking around for alternative. I think that's, that's, it's kind of a different way to frame the situation we're in right now. That's what I find interesting about it is that, like, for example, I've spent quite a bit of time in a few different African countries, and I'm really interested in the kind of ontology from different African traditions, thinking about, you know, what is an individual? Where does an individual start and end? And does such a concept even really exist in the same way that I, with my very kind of Protestant roots, have this kind of deeply ingrained in me, right? And so I just think it's a really Yes, it may be an alternative psychotechnology, but it's really important, I think, right now to hold that lens up, to look through it, to think, how can we help make sense of—

It's funny because, you know, really complex, very socially dense, kind of interdependent relationality that I'm talking about, that can only exist if it's at the same time every person within that is, is like rapaciously individualistic as well, if that makes any sense. Because otherwise it's just a hive mind.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know what I mean? And nothing, nothing can get done. So when we were messing around with evolutionary computing, we ended up making these really baroque bloody algorithms and they were really interesting, but they couldn't do anything because they were just freaking insanely complex. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

These planet-sized algorithms and it's like, well, what can it do? Well, nothing. Maybe God could use them for something, I don't know. But it's funny because the basic unit, I mean, so in our kinship systems and in our social systems, you're still fabulous. You're like, "Ngay ngay, I'm me and nobody boss blah me, nobody boss me." And nobody can boss you, no one can tell you what to do. You're completely free at the same time as being totally bound in obligation where you can't exist.

Yeah, that's not it. I do.

Those things are always— there's always a tension and balance between those two things, and you're always like, you know, asserting your, your unique individual fabulousness at the same time as getting slapped down for that, and the needs of the group. Yeah, I'm popping up, and if you go too far and it swings out of balance and you, you go too far into the narcissism You'll get really flogged. Like, we get, you know, so shame is the first line of defense mechanism.

Yeah.

Um, you know, in our system. But any— and we get that a lot. People complain about it a lot, but I can see the need for it. It just translates badly into, you know, an economic system where everyone has to compete to survive. It becomes like lateral violence a bit more than, yeah, just sort of productive shaming.

Yeah.

But yes, you translate that into this economy where, you know, our entire education system is about preparing us for the workforce, about creating a caste system and deciding, you know, through this sorting hat of testing, like, who's going to get to be in the top 10% and have a relatively comfortable life, and who's the other 90% who's going to be fucked. You know, that you can imagine, you know, what it's like, you know, as an Aboriginal student, you know, who starts to get good grades or who is reading, or, you know, and you And God forbid you get out and you land a good job. For a start, you don't get to keep your own money. So, you know, I get to keep about 5% of my disposable income and the rest of it just goes to family and it has to. And there's no way to not do that. There isn't a way out of that. Yeah, so I guess the long way around sort of saying, yeah, you're this fabulous individual and you can do stuff, but you're also going to get smashed down in shame.

Yeah.

Doing it if you go too far and you don't take everyone with you.

Yeah. What, one of the things I was really interested in was when you were talking with Beth and Charles Marshall, she told the story about the emu and the platypus, I think, about shame in relation to learning. And I found that really interesting because we're, there are more and more discussions in education about how failure is good and you learn, you know, productive failure. We learn from failure, encouraging that in that kind of learning narrative. And you know, you can see that there's, there's in a way for a child to say, you know, try some stuff, don't be afraid to try, just, you know, you get it wrong, you keep it, makes sense.

No mistake.

Right, exactly. But for the just interesting contrast to that, you were talking about the fact that in the Aboriginal culture, you were taught that you don't try it until you know you're gonna nail it, right? And until you know you're gonna make, get it perfect. And the shame, there's a shame element there in, I mean, Chelsea's story about the guys going off fishing and that they were bragging that they were going to catch loads of fish and feed the whole clan, you know, the whole village. And then they, they didn't, they failed and they were totally shamed. But I mean, I can, I guess I kind of hear that narcissism piece of like the ego and the narcissism keeping that in check. But then there was this also this interesting element of, yeah, how do you get better at something if you can't ever try it? If you've got to be perfect the first time, that's how that kind of— Well, that's it.

You've got to step into our metaverse, bros. Our Paleo XR training programs. It's better than how Neo learned bloody kung fu. Well, it's not better because it's not fast. It takes a long time. But you have to be in relation, so profoundly in relation to the person that's teaching you to do that thing that you're inhabiting their experience. Well, so acute observation, but it's not just observation with your eyes. You have to inhabit their practice while you're watching them doing it. And that's listening. And it's using your eyes, but it's using more. It's your entire being. So if you're not watching, you know, that fellow throw the spear, you know, if you're not really, really watching and inhabiting his practice, if you're not in good relation with them, then you won't learn it the right way. And then when you come to throw the spear, you're not just being shamed for not having learned that properly, you're being shamed for being in bad relation, not being in right relation. And that's the thing, that's true relationality. That's not just quality time with your kids. It's not just, yeah, oh, we're spending some quality time together, or I really love you, because that's irrelevant. I got heaps of family members that I love at all. I've got some that I hate, like I loathe intensely, but I'm in good strong relation with them still. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like relationality is not about how you feel about people.

Yeah.

That's irrelevant. Like in our world, I don't know. So I've got people, people in our community, our Aboriginal community, who I've worked with before. We've had to work on things that have been really important for community and we just don't like each other. Like, you know, a personality clash or whatever you like. But, you know, just there's that agreement that that's irrelevant. We have to be in good relation in order to make this work. The work that we're doing is important. We have to be in really good relation. I need to know you inside out and you need to know me inside out. And it doesn't matter if you like what you see, you know, you're just there. So, you know, we have a strong, strong relationship and that can never be broken. And whatever they need, I'm there for them. Whatever I need, they're there for me. You know, it's somebody who, you know, if you're going to hang yourself, like, you know, you can call them up and they'll talk you through it and talk you out of it. You know what I mean? And you don't even like them. You don't have to love the people that you're in good relationship with. Sorry, that's a really complicated aspect of it, but it's true. So we're really talking about the trial and error pedagogy and why that's being in bad relation. It's like you don't learn by, by trying shit out and failing, you know. You learn by, you know, watching someone really close and really being in strong relationship with them, a master. And if you watch real close, then the first time you sit down, it's Tchaikovsky, you know, like you, you nail it. You can Rachmaninoff the shit out of that the first time you tried if you really, if you're really watching them, and you're supposed to. You have to, you have to do it right the first time.

Yeah.

Otherwise, shame, you know, you don't learn, you don't learn from that. What you learn from that lesson is that you need to be in better relation.

Yeah.

And you go back to that, and then that's how you lose the shame, then is coming back into good relation.

Yeah, interesting. The reason I'm interested in it, as one of the things I said to you previously in the communication, just was about the educational act. Like, I think is Obviously that's at the heart of what goes on, whatever the structure, the system is built around it. There is an interaction, there's an act between a learner and a teacher, you know, whatever you want to call them, right? A master and a student, but there's something going on there. And I just, so I find that really interesting that what that act looks like, just again, from different lenses, right? If you have, it's difficult to scale that. What you've just talked about, and it's difficult to speed that up. So we get back into this like efficiency and speed issue.

That's it. Because that's something else, I think, that Zach Stein calls teacherly authority, is the closest thing I've heard to what I would think of as that respectful relation, you know, with the teacher and learner.

Yeah. And I was having this interaction today about teacher, even just the word teacher, that a lot of the narratives that are coming out now around how we need to reimagine education actually undermine that role of the teacher as master or that teacherly authority, because it's all about learning, right?

It's all about me, it's punitive, it's militarized, my learning and all of that. If I say to you, I'm going to teach you a lesson, do you say, oh, goody, this person's going to help me? You're like, no, this guy's going to beat the shit out of me. Like, that's a threat.

Yeah, yeah.

You're going to learn your lesson.

Exactly. But, but I think what you were saying about the Prussians and all of that history, that, that has what has weaponized that idea of teaching towards that, I think, because when you go back to the etymology of the— I like that because I think it's, it's like showing or demonstrating. It's like, I'm going to show you the world. That's the act of the teacher. Or, and maybe that's the act of the master that you were just describing. It's like, I'm going to show you whatever that means. And again, it's not just looking or it's not just listening, but it's being. There's a depth to that based on whichever lens you're looking through, right? But there is a demonstration, or no, a pointing to, or a role modeling of a way of attending to the world, or this particular skill in the world, or this particular thing that I'm learning.

Yeah, I think, I think it's not just— it's not about just replicating those skills and practices over and over over the same way either. It's not about reproducing exactly what it might be the first time. But, um, and you can see this in most of our technologies. Yes, the psychotechnologies, but even, I mean, in for something that you can measure, you know, materially, the material technologies are the best things to look at. And we look at particularly for that, that kind of innovation and the evolution of these technologies over time. You look at women's, women's practice, because women are the engine room of innovation in our culture. Like, I don't know, I don't, I don't know if it's because of some bloody biological thing that they're more creative. I, I don't think so. I think it's because of the tighter, uh, the tighter cycle. It's a, it's a shorter cycle. Um, most of the Aboriginal men's cultural things, um, when you make them, they'll last for a few years. I mean, there's some things that last several generations that you'll make, and most of the things you make, well, they'll last at least a year. But with a lot of the female technologies, especially the fiber, fiber craft, these things might only last for a few weeks or a season, you know, at best a year, you know. So there's more of a constant practice and a, and a tighter cycle of when these things need to be replaced. So because there's a kind of obsolescence to the fiber technologies, That's where you find the cutting edge of innovation and culture. And so you find every woman, like they're inheriting something. They're inheriting a tradition of weaving down through a female line, but the current woman, you know, the current woman in that line, how she's doing it, it's, you can see the continuity in the design, but you also know it's hers.

The iterations are quicker.

Yeah, exactly. You can see the iterations are faster and faster. You see it in motion, the tweaks they make and the little innovations they make, something they do differently with the dyes, a different pattern where like the most amazing things emerge. So it's kind of like you have to have that continuity, you know, through that, the psycho technology of that weaving knowledge going right back thousands of years through that generation. And you're holding a continuity of a design, a pattern that is, that is identifiably the women in that line, but at the same time you're elaborating and uniquely you're that, I mean, anyone can look at that basket and say, "Oh yeah, that's Audrey, that's her one." That's one of her baskets because you know straight up. So you elaborate, you do your own thing, you have agency, you have all of that, but at the same time as being grounded in that communal and multi-generational.

Two things going on again.

So, two things again.

Yeah.

Everything you look at, there's a push-pull between that. So, I mean, they're kind of, if you look at the twin narratives of education I mentioned right at the start, either it's empowering and liberating or it is like a massive horrendous meat machine that's like making everybody exactly the same in uniform and cookie cutter into a big sort of factory hive of a nation for social control. And the thing is, like I keep saying, both of those things are true. So there's kind of a push-pull there. And I don't know, maybe when we see education as a site of struggle, you know, in a culture war, you're seeing that constant tension and struggle between the idea of the collective and the individual.

Yeah.

So, you know, your extreme left and your extreme right, basically.

Yeah, completely agree. I think, I mean, I think there's a, there's a massive problem of scale. I think in, in, I think that's such a compromising force because as we were just talking about, right, that educational act between two people whether a master and a student or two students working together, whatever, one demonstrating something to the other, that can be deeply personal and deeply relational. And it can happen within both of those kind of bigger structures and narratives you were just talking about, right? That exists and it goes on. And I know it goes on even in the most kind of oppressive of these Prussian structures, right? But I think, yeah, part of our problem is we've just, we've got these massive entities. I mean, you know, students, schools with 5,000 kids in, right? How do you get any kind of deep relationality going on in a school with 5,000 kids? I've, you know, no idea. Those interactions still happen, but this massive entity is just, I think, deeply compromising. And then you've got obviously the massive structures of nation and and collective identity around that.

At the same time, and here's where you get that struggle then between centralized authority and the distrust of institutions and then decentralization and distributed authority and all that sort of thing. And of course, my personality would lead me towards the distributed model. So straight away I look at the bell curve, that distribution, and I see that some of the top schools, the top performing schools are smaller schools.. And that, you know, I'll be like, ah, you know, so these big schools, they do less, they don't do as well. You know, so I'm looking most of the middle of the curve, the bell there, and I'm like, oh, these are all these giant schools, and then the absolute best schools are smaller schools. All right, well, that's what we'll do, we'll spend billions of dollars. Well, this is what happened in the States, you know, they spent billions to break up these big schools. So they were like, yeah, let's do even better, let's tip them right over the edge and we'll break these big schools up. Into smaller schools. And they did, but it was— well, for a start, they didn't look at the other end of the distribution and see that some of the worst schools were small schools as well. So, you know, that was just a correlation, not a causation of educational excellence. Um, but also then they suddenly had, you know, so they had all these properties, you know, the massive schools, they would have, you know, a massive department, you know, for you know, physical education, or for music, or, you know, a science department that just had the cutting-edge shit. So which small school gets that, you know what I mean? So you ended up with, you know, a whole bunch of small schools, so 90% of the kids are not getting access to the cutting-edge scientific equipment. And then, then, you know, there's just this 10%, and you know which 10% of the kids are getting funneled into that school too, you know what I mean? So you end up with all these unevenly distributed resources, and most of the kids just, um, get smashed. Look, but this, uh, largely this is the goal as well.

There's so much individual competition that actually no one wins really, right? Even the winners come out with— the supposed winners come out with, with a strange sense of self and a strange self-understanding in relation to this highly competitive system.

So the winners aren't individuals, within the culture or the country or the population that, you know, we're sort of naming these countries, countries and their sovereignty, you know, all these nations that they're kind of irrelevant. You know, it's really, you know, some people are privileged, you know, within that, but it's, it's only relative privilege and only temporary privilege. There's, you know, there are bigger things moving, you know, there are oligarchs who, like, you could count how many of the oligarchs are from this or that arbitrary bloody demographic designation or whatever, and then tally up all the numbers and go, "Oh, look, this group's doing better," or whatever. But in the end, it's important for them to keep reinforcing all these divisions so that I keep having these feelings about you every time I talk to you. So we never quite get our shit together and realize, oh, hey, everything they've done to you, they're about to do to us. Oh, they've started doing it already. Okay, cool. Oh, we're all pretty much ultimately in the same boat. And in 10 years, there's not really going to be any meaningful difference between us. We're all going to be absolutely part of a huge, massive underclass of most of the people on the planet. And all right, okay, my bubble isn't going to last forever. And Everything's really going downhill. Yeah, it's just irrelevant. It's so irrelevant, all that stuff. If you look at the arc of history and then follow it through to where it's going, then, you know, there's other stuff we need to be getting on with rather than trying to tweak a system that we think is going— I mean, look, and this is what I want to finish on, end on, that The system that we think we have and that we're still training people for and designing curriculum for, it's the system that was like 20 years ago. It doesn't exist anymore and it's not going to exist again. You know, it's— everything is changing. You know, pretty much I think most people who are going to have to be on some kind of universal basic income and I don't know, they're not going to get that for free. They're going to have to work for it. The only thing you're going to have to sell is your data and your eyeball hours. I think the main career for most people in this society that we're living in, the global bloody West or whatever, in all these colonies and motherlands and fatherlands that make up this minority of people on the planet, most people there in the short term are going to be working in evaluation. So, you know, if you are highly educated, then you'll be doing, you know, peer reviews for scientific journals and reviewing, you know, arts and culture, you know, paintings, which will become some rich person's capital, etc. And yeah, if you're undereducated, then you're going to be doing reviews for donuts and chocolate bars and TV shows and sporting events and stuff like that. Yeah, basically our work is going to be evaluation because that's not something that AIs can do yet and probably won't be able to do. I don't think it's possible for an AI to do that, to evaluate things from the human standpoint and the human experience. It could approximate it, but it just can't be irrational enough to work that out. There's no algorithm that could be as irrational as we are. So yeah, that's what we're going to be doing in the short term. And then, you know, in the longer term, of course, you know, things will keep winding down and winding down. And then, you know, there's a lot of different skills we're going to need in community building and lots of amazing biology and science stuff that's going to be needed for the big cleanup, the 1,000-year cleanup. And really, if there was anybody around who wanted to make an actual curriculum that was designed for the actual world that our children are going to be you know, living through right now, then, you know, that's going to involve some very different things. You know, it's not going to be about preparing anyone for a workforce that no longer exists. It's going to be how to survive really, really difficult things, how to solve problems, how to form communities, you know, how to do mutual aid, how to, you know, work with what you have around you to make technology systems, you know, all these sorts of things and deploy. Deploy the psychotechnologies.

A different set of psychotechnologies.

Pass on through. Yeah, but even a lot of the same ones, all the, a lot of the stuff that's evil and a lot of the stuff that will be discontinued, a lot of the stuff that we think will finish when the obsolescent technology crumbles and all that sort of thing, these are coming down from long, long traditions and disciplines that that's still there and that's still in people's mind and they're ready to pass it on. We have awesome gene genealogies of psychotechnologies, all of us as human beings, that, you know, it's just an absolute supreme joy to pass that on within communities of practice, you know, where the entire community is just embedded, you know, it's embedded in the entire community, in the entire communities together. And, you know, our children are in our lives and in our worlds of work and in, you know, just everywhere around us. That's where it will go eventually. But, you know, of course you can't build a curriculum for that, for the world that you want to happen. But, you know, there are certain things that are definitely happening and will definitely happen.

Yeah. You know, thank you, man. I appreciate— I mean, we've gone way over time, so I apologize. No worries, brother man. But yeah, thank you, man.

Sorry, dude.

Thank you, man.

No worries.

Bye.

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