I'm gathering these reflections on a beach in Darwin, the last great Australian city.

'Great Australian' things are inherently problematic. I once heard an entertainer reflect that there aren't many countries in the world that you can be 'un' in, and Australia is one of them. Un-Australian. Un-American.

Why would I label Darwin this, or use such problematic words for a place that doesn't exist in a way that seems framed as favourable? Well, there are layers to love. But if one is to love them, then they must be loved atop the proper foundations.

Larrakia is the proper place name to use for Darwin. It is 'proper' because it is its oldest name and the name shared with its people- those who are Larrakia as much as are from it. You cannot know a place nor speak for it unless you are grown from and with it.

Children of modernity no longer understand this. We have been brainwashed by the promise of objective reason.

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An open letter to members of the Collaborative Technology Alliance and neighbouring communities.

When I first met Toad Dell- a brilliant non-binary communitarian activist and permaculture practitioner who co-founded PermaQueer Australia and now serves on the board of Permaculture Australia, they had just participated in a Social Permaculture education course. In response to my request for review and reflection upon the material, their response was a single word: 'static'. The descriptor caught me by surprise. Static? What does that even mean?

Let me preface this piece by saying how profoundly grateful I am for that single word, and how much faith I have in our futures that it came so readily to Toad.

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The planetary regeneration community is coming up against some hard edges.

Recently I was tagged into a Twitter conversation as a "regen nerd". Though a label that brings with it some discomfort, it's also easy to appreciate how it could be applied to me. Certainly I'm present in communities of practise which heavily intersect with such themes.

In the same thread a bunch of accusations against Regen Ledger surfaced, reminding me of similar accusations I made against the SEEDS Network over a year ago. I suppose I've made myself known as somebody with an interest in the topic of decolonisation / uncolonising because folks in that conversation are starting to ask me for my input.

So I'm writing this here, once, because Twitter is a terrible medium for reasoned dialogue and because I actually don't owe anybody my emotional labour to help them sort their shit out.

Still, I owe that debt far more than any Black person who has been harmed by these organisations. Mostly because I, too, have been called out on White Supremacism— in my case by a fellow White collaborator.

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These define our aims, hopes and dreams; and thus, the kinds of groups we are seeking to collaborate with. The guiding questions we used to light our way began simply:

• What anchors or waypoints help us make coherent decisions about who to align with or what to work on?
• What makes something a clear no?
• What are the attractors we/you are looking for?
• How do you know it when you see it?

What follows are some of our answers to these questions.

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The following attempts to distill the shared context we have developed over the last year and a half. The guiding question motivating this work is, “what is it about the confluence of digital technology and global economic circuits that needs to change?”

Economikit emerged in reaction to a debt-creating engine meant to produce capital from capital, in a negative loop reinforcing the system’s self-perpetuation. Our work lives as a set of experiments responding to this situation.

Here we are, in the collapse of American Capitalism, along with the rise of Black Lives Matter and the tide of social awareness in the White world. Movements of consciousness-raising and techno-utopianism become entangled in the promise of Bitcoin, blockchain, and other distributed tech.

But are these technologies anything other than the last gasps of the Western mind to make some “good” of the materialist and separatist mindsets that they’ve become beholden to under Scientism? Can technology ever be generative and sustainable, or does it inherently depend on externalising the suffering of other beings? Is trying to engineer our way out really a valid path forward, or is this all just spiritual bypassing?

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