Humans On The Loop: Wisdom for an Age of Magical Technologies
Michael Garfield
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Collective Futurecrafting: Play, Trauma, and The Duty of Care with Mathew Mytka
✨ Like/Subscribe/Comment where you listen! YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts ✨ Become a member for our reading group, community calls, and years of members-only recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry. Our next call is this weekend, May 2, at 2 pm MDT! This week I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka (Website | LinkedIn) — a self-described “Earthian living on and learning from the Country of the Bidjigal, Gweagal and Kamay clans of the Dharawal Nation, in Sydney, Australia.” Mat is a moral imagineer, social entrepreneur, UX designer, educator, artist, and public policy advocate. Cofounder (with Alja Isakovic) of the the inquiry-driven social venture Tethix and mission steward (with Gemma Palmer) of Collective Futurecrafting, Mat has over twenty years’ of product, project, and program management experience, designing and running real-world relational experiments everywhere from startups to federal government initiatives, Fortune 500 tech companies, and grassroots communities. He also makes delightfully weird code-as-art projects like The Ministry of Futility, a bureaucratic adventure game where players navigate a maze of pointless decisions. In short, he’s precisely the kind of incompressible generalist I look to as a model for how to live wisely in our age of accelerating weirdness. Mat and I met in 2024 in the group chat that spawned the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server and immediately realized a common thread ran through both our lives: a commitment to fostering our collective imagination aimed at ecologically-grounded, mutualistic, more-than-human futures. In today’s episode we riff on themes from the Tethix blog and podcast, including: • How do we embrace the lunacy of tech?• What should we do with the time that new technologies save? (if they even do) and• How do we nuture weird online communal gardens where we can play together? We also draw from the Tethix codesign principles, product ethos, and elemental ethics documents. Along the way we explore the fundamental problems of scale and institutional misalignment, the value of ritual, and the return to embodiment. ✨ Become a founding member to access my online courses, including Jurassic Worlding and How To Live In The Future. ✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org ✨ Music: “Scalar Reconfigurations” Chapters 00:00 Intro 06:02 Starting Over With Play 08:05 Mat’s Origin Story 13:56 Online Performance and Anxiety 18:24 How Tethix Began 40:07 Teaching The State about The Duty of Care 46:26 Collective Futurecrafting from Circles to Bioregions 47:05 Start With What Exists 48:34 Pivot Beyond Tech Ethics 50:08 Weird Gardens for Online Community 57:42 Composting The Leviathan 01:01:48 Trauma, Empathy, Care 01:13:11 Agency Rituals and Closing This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe
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