Assignment Task

Lines in the Sand

I’m standing at the edge of a lagoon near the small town of Nyngan in central New South Wales, talking to Aboriginal children about their futures. These bright tomorrows go under the rubric of ‘learning and earning’, a program that has been developed elsewhere using a predictive process I am not familiar with. I’m here to sell them that vision: I’m supposed to be a role model, telling them they can achieve anything if they work hard and show up and smile a lot. So I show up for this excursion to Nyngan. I smile and get to work trying to teach black kids in the bush about their bright economic future while grounding them in the proud traditions of their past. In the sand I draw lines to represent the scene laid out before us across the lagoon and beyond—three lines representing the river, the old disused railway bridge and the newer highway bridge. But you can’t really understand those unless you understand the different eras and economies that used each of them as part of a supply chain, so more lines are added to represent these elements. You also need to know what happened before that; map out all the relationships and you might see a pattern that represents the future, because all time is one time. But when I do that, the future I’m seeing and the future I’m selling are two different things. There is an old rusted fish trap on the bank, left over from mission times. Beside it I sketch out the shifting economies represented in this vignette— traditional river-based economy, to mission economy, to riverboats transporting cotton and wool, to rail doing the same after the river was destroyed, to the highway with oil tankers and trucks filled with low-grade ore buzzing past. From settlement onwards, locals in each era believed the system to be stable and planned their futures around it. They thought, ‘We will farm sheep!’ and invested all their money and training and time in that, raising their children in it. They thought the incredibly abundant pasture would last forever, not being aware that these fields had been carefully cultivated by the Aboriginal people who were custodians of the river country, and that the cessation of this custodianship combined with the introduction of rapacious sheep would destroy this resource completely, along with the topsoil. They didn’t count on the industry becoming dominated by a few giants that would squeeze them out, either. Economic refugees from that catastrophe thought, ‘We will become shearers!’ and invested all their training and time and effort in that career, raising their children to follow the family trade. But the work was variable and not well paid. Some got jobs on the steamboats shipping wool along the rivers, or on the docks. Children had aspirations of becoming steamboat captains. We can all be steamboat captains if we work hard enough! People were trained and educated and built lives around this as though it would last forever. But when the scrub was cleared and the last of the topsoil ran into the river, it silted up and the steamboats stopped running.

Railway! Human ingenuity to the rescue! There were no longer as many sheep or as much wool. They planted out cotton and other things in the depleted soil, brought fertiliser on the trains to coax crops out of the dead ground. Copper was mined and transported. Children had aspirations of becoming train drivers. We can all be train drivers if we work hard enough! People were trained and educated and built lives around the rail and the cotton fields as though it would all last forever. But those train tracks now are twisted, rusted, abandoned. Years later, most had to admit that farming was not viable on this devastated land-base and left in droves. Suddenly there were agricultural towns in the region with a majority Aboriginal population again. With the alarming potential of these lands returning to their traditional custodians, policing became the only growth industry in the area. But the next layer of bridge and highway did well for a while. The last of the copper was doggedly scraped from the earth; oil and gas were found further inland and people became miners riding a boom. Infrastructure projects for the mines would provide jobs forever! Children had aspirations of leaving school as soon as possible and earning more than the school’s principal just by holding a stop sign in a mine. No particular skills or knowledge were needed. They bought quad bikes and jet skis and discovered new and exciting uses for the choked and muddy river. At the end of the mining boom, as construction jobs dried up and unemployment rose and interest rates fell, the next generation of infrastructure—towers with broadband signals—offered hope of new lands, . Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk : How indigenous thinking can save the world. Text Publishing Company. Created from griffith on 2024-04-25 00:17:55. Copyright © 2020. Text Publishing Company. All rights reserved. cyberspaces to colonise. Children had aspirations of IT careers and moved away to the city, where they served coffee and rubbed the bloated feet of baby-boomers while finding entertainment, if not employment, in their electronic devices. In their digital ghettoes there were endless new worlds and resources to discover and this could last forever, without limits. Or at least until the rare earth metals required to power their devices ran out. I tell those children who are thinking of dropping out of school and going to TAFE or trying for a job in a supermarket that these economies fall apart fairly regularly and you don’t want to be on the bottom of them when they do. I look around at their faces, either blank or scared or angry, and realise that nobody wants to hear this. I need to show them how to read patterns and see past, present and future as one time, and let them navigate the system themselves.

Stem themselves With another group of young Aboriginal protégés in Western Australia I take them on regular excursions walking country with Noel Nannup, who is a local Elder here. He says things like, ‘It is going to rain in twelve minutes,’ and the kids time it on their phones and laugh in amazement when his prediction comes true. He predicts events like an annual emergence of flying ants from the ground, then follows seasonal signals, winding through the bush with us to stop under a tree, then snaps his fingers—Now!—as the ants explode out of the ground in that instant.

What can I do with that? Say it is amazing and ask him to tell the kids stories about growing up in the bush? Ask him to make us a damper and show us how to throw a boomerang and tell the kids they can follow their dreams and do anything? Nah. I ask him to explain the patterns of his thinking in making predictions, and whether the kids could apply those patterns to contexts beyond the bush. So he shows them his process of pattern thinking and even shares how he uses it to follow stock markets and economic trends. His process is all about seeing the overall shape of the connections between things. Look beyond the things and focus on the connections between them. Then look beyond the connections and see the patterns they make. Find the sites of potential risk and increase, like judging where the ball will go in a football game.

Later I do a workshop with those Western Australian children on the monetary system, reminding them of what the Elder showed us. I get them to make a pattern from this symbol: The pattern over the next hour spreads intricately over a massive sheet of paper, in between reading, viewing videos and talking about the structure of the monetary system. At the end of the lesson they have to find patterns in the random, complex image on the paper and align these with patterns they discern in the monetary system. They are a little alarmed at the sustainability issues that emerge in their analysis`

One student in particular develops a high level of understanding of pattern thinking that he can apply to most problems. In another session, he is present on an excursion to a beach that is eroding into the sea and must be fortified with concrete and sandbags to protect the buildings and property there. The children are asked to design an engineering solution to the problem.

It seems as though this boy is not engaging with the task. He stands under a clump of she-oak trees and stares out at the sea while the others draw and build models of walls and spits and elaborate engines. A non-compliant student, looks like. Misbehaving. Maybe I should punish him, humiliate him in front of his peers until he complies with the work task. He is not achieving outcomes. Not delivering against performance indicators to close the gap. I walk over and ask him what is going on. ‘Well, it’s all fucked,’ he says. Maybe I should pull him up for inappropriate language. Instead I ask him what he means. He talks about what he’s learnt from Pop Noel about the she-oak trees and underground freshwater flowing beneath them where they grow like that on the coast. He points out those flows into the sea and tracks the subtle movements of the sand out there in the tides and currents, tracing the pathways of constant motion all along the coast, infinite white grains swept up and deposited on new beaches in cycles of cleansing and renewal. He points out a spit in the distance that has been built to block that flow and Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk : How indigenous thinking can save the world. Text Publishing Company. Created from griffith on 2024-04-25 00:17:55. Copyright © 2020. Text Publishing Company. All rights reserved. keep the sand on one beach for its residents, noting that new sand can’t be deposited here now because of it. He mentions dozens of other constructions like this along the coast, and the dredging of sand further out to sea to deposit on the beaches and maintain them as real estate and public facilities. Then he turns around and points at the buildings, observing that they are mostly made out of concrete, which is made mostly out of sand, much of which is dredged from the ocean floor leaving holes and gouges in the seabed that fill up with sand again. That the sand moves around in its cycles, but never makes it back to the beach. Or worse, the seabed slumps into those holes and the beach then collapses further into the sea. ‘You can build all the levies you like, but those fuckin’ buildings are gunna go back into the sea where they came from.’ Well. As I always say, if you want to find the next generation of great thinkers, look in the detention room of any public school.

For this yarn I made a boomerang etched all over with this symbol. Trends and surprises emerge within the whole design, and what seems like chaos has patterns and shapes that you can only discern with a holistic view. Contemporary science is beginning to understand this way of knowing through chaos theory, complexity theory, network theory and fractal geometry. It is becoming clear that complex systems are adaptive, selforganising and patterned with a logic that can be discerned and used for trend analysis and predictive technologies. Second-wave automation, artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies seek to harness this complexity. But it is a complexity that cannot function through external design and control. You could create a mechanical ballet by programming a group of rolling robots to move in sync. But your program would be a closed system designed from the outside—one robot would get bumped an inch out of place and the whole thing would fall apart. You can do it cheaper and faster Yunkaporta, T. (2020). Sand talk : How indigenous thinking can save the world. Text Publishing Company. Created from griffith on 2024-04-25 00:17:55. Copyright © 2020. Text Publishing Company. All rights reserved. just by letting a dozen of those little vacuum cleaner robots loose together in a space to move randomly. At first they will just clean the floor individually, but over time maybe the rhythms of creation will begin to move them together, as they start to dance in patterns that are more startling than anything a single programmer might design, like schools of fish in the sea. Consider boids, which are digital objects that move on a screen. When you place a number of boids on a screen with three or four simple rules telling each to match the velocity of the others, move randomly and avoid collisions, after a while they will begin to move together as a group in complex patterns resembling the flocking of birds. These patterns cannot be programmed, but must emerge within the system organically—a process that is called ‘random’ in western worldviews but is in fact following the patterns of creation. Similarly, effective artificial intelligence is not created simply through programming—it is more efficient to program a simple AI and let it loose on a complex system of data. As it moves through the data, it becomes a learning entity and programs itself autonomously.

A blockchain cannot be designed externally as a closed system or it will stagnate—it must comprise individual nodes that remain autonomous, operating freely in a selforganising system of users. The internet also developed in this way. These kinds of digital innovations that are currently disrupting top-down global economic and social structures are built on the reality of complex, selforganising systems rather than the illusion of centralised control. This has implications for the management of all systems, particularly social-control systems. Community members, like boids, birds, fish or nodes, need to operate autonomously under three or four basic rules, selforganising within groups, spaces and data sets to form complex learning communities. The patterns and innovations emerging from these ecosystems of practice are startling, transformative and cannot be designed or maintained by a single manager or external authority. They cannot even be imagined outside of a community operating this way. This is the perspective you need to be a custodian rather than an owner of lands, communities or knowledge. It demands the relinquishing of artificial power and control, immersion in the astounding patterns of creation that only emerge through the free movement of all agents and elements within a system. This impacts the way we are managed and governed.

This kind of cultural humility is a useful exercise in understanding your role as an agent of sustainability in a complex system. It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realise your true status as a single node in a cooperative network. There is honour to be found in this role, and a certain dignified agency. You won’t be swallowed up by a hive mind or lose your individuality—you will retain your autonomy while simultaneously being profoundly interdependent and connected. In fact, sustainable systems cannot function without the full autonomy and unique expression of each independent part of the interdependent whole. Sustainability agents have a few simple operating guidelines, or network protocols, or rules if you like—connect, diversify, interact and adapt. Diversity is not about tolerating difference or treating others equally and without prejudice. The diversification principle compels you to maintain your individual difference, particularly from other agents who are similar to you. This prevents you from clustering into narcissistic flash mobs. You must also seek out and interact with a wide variety of agents who are completely dissimilar to you. Finally, you must interact with other systems beyond your own, keeping your system open and therefore sustainable. Connectedness balances the excesses of individualism in the diversity principle. The first step in connectedness is forming pairs (like kinship pairs) with multiple other agents who also pair with others. The next step is creating or expanding networks of these connections. The final step is making sure these networks are interacting with the networks of other agents, both within your system and in others. Interaction is the principle that provides the energy and spirit of communication to power the system. This principle facilitates the flow of living knowledge. For this, you must be transferring knowledge (and energy and resources) rather than trying to store it individually, with as many other agents as possible. If the world ever experiments with an actual free market rather than an oligopoly, this would be the perfect system to facilitate sustainable interactions. Knowledge, value and energy in truly sustainable

Networks of interaction are prevented from remaining static and unchanging by the final protocol. Adaptation is the most important protocol of an agent in a sustainable system. You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other agents and the knowledge that passes through you from them. This knowledge and energy will flow through the entire system in feedback loops and you must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked. An agent that is truly adaptive and changing is open to sudden eruptions of transformation, in which the agent may temporarily take on the role of strange attractor and facilitate chain reactions of creative events within the system. You can see these principles embedded throughout Aboriginal culture. I can see many of them just looking at our first-person pronouns. In English these are I/me and we/us. In Aboriginal languages there are many more, including pronouns that are translated as: I, I-myself, we two, we but not others, we altogether. Repeating the plural ones twice can mean ‘It’s up to us’, but repeating ‘I’ twice can mean ‘I go my own way!’ There is a balance between self-definition and group identity. These two are not contradictory but entwined, and there are names for all of the roles you occupy as an agent of complexity in Aboriginal society. You perform these roles alone, in pairs, in exclusive groups and in networked groups. Our languages are expressions of land-based networks and facilitate communication across all of these individual nodes and collectives of nodes within and between systems. In Aboriginal English there is a very useful term to help us draw lines in the sand between these roles, asserting both boundaries and connections. The word is ‘lookout’ (a term I believe we originally borrowed from Cockneys), which is not a warning but refers to a person’s appropriate sphere of influence and accountability. If a person is being pushy and expecting you to get involved with their frantic business in an effort to control you, you might say, ‘That’s not my lookout,’ or ‘Nah, that’s your lookout.’ Your lookout encompasses all of your reasonable obligations and activities within your pairs, groups and wider networks. By reasonable, I mean any tasks that reflect the other protocols of a sustainability agent— leaving you free to be different from others, receive and transfer knowledge and transform in response to shifting contexts, while acting as a custodian and defender of these things.

We have looked at Emu story, but it is also worth looking at stories from the northern hemisphere to discern the patterns of narcissism that prevent the functioning of sustainable systems. The word narcissist comes from a Greek story about Narcissus, a man who fell in love with his own reflection in the water. A girl called Echo was in love with him, but she was cursed to hang around and repeat only his words forever. This is what you find with these narcissist flash mobs—one loud person will start shouting silly things and attract followers who repeat those things without thought. Not all strange attractors are benevolent. Narcissism isn’t incurable though. Survivors of this plague emerge without any memory of who they really are, needing support to begin again and relearn the nature of their existence, their purpose for being here. They are like children and leaving them to their own devices at this stage is not advisable. Entire cultures and populations recovering from this plague have been left like orphan children with no memories of who they are, longing for a pattern they know is there but can’t see. They grow up eventually, but it takes a long time if they have no assistance. There are so many adolescent cultures in the world right now, reaching for the stars without really knowing what they are. Adolescent cultures always ask the same three questions. Why are we here? How should we live? What will happen when we die? The first one I’ve covered already with the role of humans as a custodial species. The second one I’ve covered above, with the four protocols for agents in a complex dynamic system. The third one, us-two will look at next.