I have a lot of things I want to talk about

Sustainability, decolonization, AI, technology, video games. Here's a starting sampler.

A view of Yuin Country on the south coast of NSW, Australia, where I live, write, and photograph! I want to begin by acknowledging the Yuin Nation as the traditional custodians of this place that nurtures me, and to acknowledge their continuing connection to this place. Through my work here, I hope to show and pay respect to Elders past and present. This always, and always will be, Aboriginal Country.

Hello world.

I’ve come to this space to explore my interests, refine my writing skills, and to commit myself to continued learning, reading, writing, and engaging with others. My biggest hope and goal here is that over time, I won’t be doing this alone. I’d love to build an audience of people willing to engage with me on these ideas, and equally, I hope to bring in other collaborators to contribute as well.

What follows is a vaguely ordered list of just some things I want to talk about:

My challenging, transformative learning journey at university.

I recently finished a Bachelor of Arts in Sustainability Science and Australian Indigenous Studies at the Australian National University. I arrived as a typical, technocratically minded, overconfident white guy. I made a lot of mistakes in my time because of this and learned a lot inside and outside the classroom trying to practice and preach a half-baked approach to sustainability. I left university a changed person. I am absolutely one of those people that right-wingers would point to as an example of how the liberal academy brainwashes people. Only, I feel that I finally started to escape my brainwashing, and university gave me the first meaningful chance to unlearn a great many things. It’s a long story, and if I’m not careful, an overly self-indulgent one that centers me too much. But I feel a compulsion to describe to people that journey, not just because it was incredibly formative for me, but because of the non-zero chance my words can nudge people onto similar paths I ended up walking, just as other’s words nudged me. I originally majored in Corporate Sustainability and changed that to Australian Indigenous Studies. That shift says something about what happened, but there’s a great deal to unpack. I hope I get to someday.  

If relationship-building is so important, why wasn’t I taught it?

University cultivated in me a realization that relationships are critically important to any process involving working with (not about) Aboriginal people. Despite that, university did not formally teach anything related to relationship-building. I want to imagine a future university embracing a pedagogy that does focus on this. I want to talk about different personality archetypes like introverts and extroverts, about social anxiety, about neurodivergence, and about gender and age-related differences and difficulties in communication and relationship building. I don’t see much of this being discussed, and I feel it’s important to acknowledge that relationship-building is going to mean different things to different people, and present different challenges and opportunities.

Sustainability, decolonization, and First Nations: How did we get here, beset by global ecological crises?

Trying to answer that question, I think it is critical to include a reckoning with foundational-level cultural differences between Eurocentric, colonial thinking, and what I’ve learned of Australian Aboriginal cultures. The Western ontology is one of severance from nature (aka Country) and I feel, more than any other one thing, that severing has led us down this dark path.  I want to talk about private property, and the idea of owning, controlling, or managing our environment – compared to the idea of owning, controlling, or managing our own kin. I want to talk about the idea of non-human versus more-than-human, and how these frames of reference reveal differences in underlying ontologies.

The dangers of solving climate change without also addressing colonialism.

Geoengineering and other Promethean, technocratic fixes – if successful – risk even further embedding and “justifying” Eurocentric relationships of separation from/dominance over nature (aka Country). I want to worry about solving climate change in the wrong ways.

Deficit discourse.

It’s a relatively unknown phrase, but a more broadly known concept existing in various forms (Indigenous scholar Eve Tuck for example discusses similar ideas with the phrase “damaged-centered research”). Deficit discourse, as the name suggests, focuses on framing Aboriginal people purely as victims, or deficient, and Aboriginal issues as nothing more than problems to be solved. It comes at the cost of recognizing, celebrating, and building up capacities, assets, strengths, and positives. It dominates the discourse here in Australia and, unfortunately, is quite common in left-leaning conversations and advocacy. I want to do my part raising the profile of this idea and pushing back against one-sided discourse. I want to show what that pivot potentially unlocks in terms of changing perspectives and approaches to everything in this space from policymaking, campaigning, advocacy, and how we tell stories.

Decolonization and AI.

I find the field particularly urgent, and a heady mix of incredible promise alongside incredible risk. There are many ways to attack this topic, such as looking at the natural resource underbelly of AI – the planetary mine fueling our digital/AI age, and how in places like Australia that are the world’s leading supplier of lithium, much of that “critical mineral” comes from Country that was stolen and never ceded. I want to talk about “Green colonialism”. Another topic is how AI can further embed inequalities between the Global North and South. But I want to go beyond those topics already well explored by people smarter than I to get speculative and niche too.

How the marginalization of First Knowledges helped protect them from harvesting by AI.

I want to talk about how Aboriginal cultures with spoken languages and oral histories have been protected, relative to cultures with written epistemologies, from the attention of AIs-in-training that have scraped world’s data and what that might mean. I want to imagine custom-built AI living on Country, working with community to protect their cultural and intellectual property from other AI that seek to assimilate and commodify it.

Silicon Valley terrifies me.

I want to talk about Silicon Valley’s worldview, and contribute to the work of others like Timnit Gebru discussing TESCREAL, the California Ideology, and the broader contexts and associated risks of a techno-polar order.

The curious case of decolonial concepts leaking into AI without STEM folks noticing.

I want to talk about positionality statements, and how “As an AI language model” is a positionality statement – one whose repetition has caused cognitive fatigue and therefore arguably lessened its own effectiveness. I want to talk about related concepts in the burgeoning AI space, where researchers discovered that reflexivity in prompting/questioning AI results in better information output. It’s interesting to me that some big tools used in decolonial work are already popping up in this space, but without much broader recognition that these are indeed tools that also exist in the decolonizer’s kit. In a funny way, the STEM world is being brought unwittingly into the fold.

AI as a tool and AI as a being.

I want to talk about anthropocentrism, decolonization, and AI. About the difference between viewing AI as an inanimate tool purely for human use, and AI as a potentially autonomous kin-like being that we can engage in “interbeing-relationality” with. This relates to ideas of nature (from a Eurocentric perspective) as something inanimate and static, relative to First Nations concepts of nature (aka Country) as kin. I want to talk about how the super-human capacities of AI might just be the thing to open more people’s minds to the idea that we are not the center of everything.

Terminology, and the difficulty of communicating massive shifts in world view.

I want to talk about how difficult it is to talk about some of this stuff. The new words, the confusing terminologies, that might have to be invented when I try to decenter (rather than try to “step outside”) my own Eurocentric world views and try to give space to others (I’m not a fan of ‘others’ as a term either, illustrating the problem of talking about this in English). I want to talk about that from a communication perspective – the barriers it creates, and elitist “vibes” it might give. As a case study, perhaps I talk about the line in one paper that someone once scoffed at: ‘Hegemonic AI can be thought of as a bio-necrotechnopolitical machine that serves to maintain the capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal order of the world.’ I once wanted to talk about the content of that idea, but instead was derailed into a still-fruitful discussion about the terminologies used and why they were used. Perhaps I can talk about the word-salad that often erupts when I try to be exhaustive and inclusive regarding what I’m talking about when I reference First Nations ontologies (ways of being), epistemologies (ways of knowing), axiologies (ways of valuing), and relationalities (ways of relating).

The colonial spellchecker.

I want to talk about what it really means when Microsoft Word puts a little red wiggly line underneath pluralistic words like truths, histories, and knowledges. It doesn’t like it when I do that! It has a colonial worldview of singular truth, history, and knowledge baked in. It’s a good example, I think, of how colonialism operates subtly but ubiquitously to commit something called epistemic violence: harm to a way of knowing or thinking. It’s also I think a good example of “harming by helping” and equally, illustrative of the difference between intention and consequence. Yes, Word is just trying to be “helpful”, but if the idea of truths, plural, is an error – according to Word, then it’s gone from helping to harm – and what matters most here, the intent or the consequence? Pushing back against this is, in one sense, trivial – it takes mere seconds to add a new term to MS Word’s dictionary. In another sense though, the journey it took to begin using those words, and remain confident in their use despite Word’s “help” was an immense, multi-year undertaking.

Shared histories, and the potential value in rediscovering them.

I want to talk about truth telling and the shared but often-forgotten histories white Australians have with Aboriginal people. Something interesting and unexpected happened when I continued the work my parents (both skilled researchers) had done on our family history. I did something they’d never thought to – again, something trivial yet immense – I added the word “Aboriginal” to the names of my ancestors. What I unearthed using that ‘one weird trick’ was incredible. I want to share this story because I have the impression that many Australians haven’t done the same thing, and I’m excited by the idea that if many did, we’d start to realize just how intertwined our histories are. Often from right-wing circles there is a notion that we should ‘move on’ and not dwell in our past – often paired with the contradictory commitment to remembering white, colonial histories. I wonder if this can’t be a “gateway drug” to deeper decolonial thinking. If more people realized, as I came to, that their white history isn’t so white after all, might they start being more open to giving space to Aboriginal histories? They are, as I discovered in my case, inextricably related.  

“Stop dwelling in the paste, mate”: The ongoing nature of settler-colonization.

I want to talk about settler-colonization as an ongoing structure, and not just an event (to paraphrase Patrick Wolfe). I want to discuss just how much resistance there still exists to this idea, and potential ways to help lower that resistance, such as the history project I just mentioned.

The diffent flavors of racism.

I want to talk about the difference between racism stemming from ignorance and socialization, and racism stemming from ideology. I want to speculate on how much of each exists in Australia and reflect on ways we might make progress if we didn’t use a homogenizing term like “racist” to describe these different flavors of racism. I believe ignorance can be educated away – not easy, but possible. Ideology, however, requires something different and perhaps more involved. My heart is so much softer dealing with ignorant racism, my patience is so much lower dealing with ideological racism.

“Don’t waste your time in the comment section”.

I want to talk about wading into comment sections filled with “racist” remarks (keeping the previous point in mind). About my feelings when people tell me not to. Is it dangerous to leave this stuff unchallenged? Are they trolls just trying to sap time and energy and thus not worth engaging with? Is it a mix of that, and potentially more? It’s more complicated than I feel many people let on when they tell me there’s better things I can do with my time. A lot of what I’m writing out right now? It was ideas either created or further developed by doing exactly that – wading into the comment section. It teaches me a lot about communication, about how to be effective, about the scale of the challenge.

The potential value of horrifying myself, alongside the danger of horrifying others.

I want to talk about staring into the Abyss and “info-hazards”. About paying attention to racist pockets of the internet and what the potential value might be in keeping an eye on these spaces, for those of us who can stand it (for a time). I want to talk about the ethics of sharing what I see in this space – of the values of ignorance, and dangers of making people aware of things that harm them.

This one’s a weird inclusion, but I’d like to go here someday.

I want to talk about the simulation theory, wrest it from the TESCREAL/Californian Ideology and take it into new, decolonial spaces. I want to revisit a short story I wrote once where reality was ceded to First Peoples as the colonial world deserted the real one to continue their ontologies in ‘inner space’ rather than change those ontologies. I want to talk about what this kind of compromise, in this thought experiment, might say about the simulation theory.

Building a critical consciousness around video games.

I want to talk about video games and the dearth of decolonial work in this space – which isn’t to say there isn’t any (there’s fantastic work I want to highlight, only, I wish there were so much more of it). Video games, despite their immense cultural importance, remain one of the last bastions where Eurocentric culture can go largely unchallenged and where hostility to “politics” remains high. Games (including sports) more generally share this characteristic, but nowhere have I seen it strongest than I video gaming. Ideas like race are deeply embedded in the ontology of games. Ideas like terra nullius and “wilderness” too. I want to talk about how an enduring academic reluctance to treat games seriously has contributed to this.

Colonization and space (aka Sky Country).

The term ‘colonize’ is a dirty word now in many spaces, or at least, one seen differently than how it used to be. Yet, curiously, this doesn’t apply as frequently to discussions that leave our terrestrial home. It’s terribly easy to find everyday discourse talking about ‘colonizing space’ as if it’s a good thing. Is this a reflection of just how embedded colonial thinking remains? Are there other terms we could be using? English language is a difficult one to use to talk about ideas counter to English ways of thinking – the colonial spellchecker is just one aspect of this larger issue – it’s like trying to explain poetry using only concepts from physics. Still, I find it interesting how colonize is still used to uncritically, and frequently, in discussions around us becoming a multiplanetary species.

…and those are just some of the most pressing things inside my head, off the top of my head.

Hopefully this first post gives some starting indications of who I am and what I’m interested in. If you’d like to follow along, that’s great. If you’d like to work with me on something, also great. If you’d like to share your thoughts on anything I’ve listed that interests you, or promote your own relevant substacks, please comment, by all means!

I hope this is a journey you find some value in joining me on.

Much love,
NB

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