Watersheds of Ontological Repair

Matthew Monahan: We are here with Dawn Danby and David McConville. They're the co-founders of Spherical. Thank you both for being here.

Dawn Danby: A delight.

David McConville: Thank you.

Matthew: So let's start from the top. What is Spherical?

David: At the basic level, we call it an integrative research studio. We created a container to explore ideas and cultivate projects about seven years ago really looking for things that we think needed to exist in the world with no real plan of how we were going to fund it or exactly what the strategy was going to be.

It mostly came out of frustration of seeing things that weren't happening. And so when we started the studio, it was just the two of us. And we began exploring a lot of different directions. We did a project early on with some folks, which I think you're familiar with an initiative through the Commonwealth of Nations, that became Common Earth.

That was an idea of how do you apply regenerative practices to this— the shell of the former empire— which was filled with paradoxes. And we've done art installations around concepts of Gaian systems. We've done a lot of work around mapping regenerative projects around the world.

And different explorations of ideas while it was the two of us, but starting around three years ago, we started to grow.

Dawn: So we now have almost 17 folks on the team, a very diverse crew of folks. So really we are a creative studio that is incubating projects. And it includes people who are software developers, creative, artists, product leads, as well as a whole crew of folks who work on on-the-ground engagement, specifically on work across Los Angeles County right now.

Personal Journeys

Matthew: And you mentioned, part of the motivation was to do things that you felt like you were seeing not happen and maybe a bit more context at the outset here of what were the experiences that led you to Spherical? And what were some of those observations that you were having?

David: Sure. Do you want to take your most immediate experience before the studio?

Dawn: Yeah, I've been working in sustainability and ecological design, circularity, whatever, many different names since the late 90s. And I'd spent, 10 years in that intervening time leading sustainable design efforts at Autodesk.

So it was very focused on the question of, okay, you got designers and engineers making the built environment, making all the manufactured things. How do we get into the tools they're using? Give them the analytical capacity to transform what gets made and that will change the world. And that is still ongoing.

That is still wonderful work that's that has a lot of potential. It was really focused on what was quantifiable or seen as valuable. And so the longer I spent inside an organization doing that and as the space of sustainability evolved. There was more and more and more of a narrowing function so that everything was focused on carbon or materials.

Matthew: Right.

Dawn: And how do we optimize for those things?

Matthew: Right.

Dawn: Working on that for 10 years— even though I came into this work because of a deep relationship with trees on the west coast of Canada and, deep resonance with my home watershed in the Great Lakes in Canada— all of that got squeezed out and all of a sudden I was just looking very much at numbers.

And with that squeezing out of the ecology of the life systems of the human systems, also, my will got squeezed out. So it's basically totally nihilistic at the end of that. And David actually came over and started showing me all these projects about people regenerating their places all in totally different ways, and sharing some of the work of Bill Reed and Carol Sanford. And I remember at the time being like, "Is this real though? I mean, I work with real companies and I tell you what.", I had gotten to such a point of not seeing potential anymore that once I leaned into seeing what this kind of transformation could look like, I was able to regain my will, but I couldn't do that from within the system I was in.

We had to really start Spherical to dive in.

David: And because I came along a resonant path, starting in the late 90s, doing a lot of work with networking technology, with very early internet open source stuff, getting more and more into where I was at the time at UNC Chapel Hill. Early virtual reality and then immersive displays and data visualization and doing that for many years in the context of both sort of industry and art became more and more interested in how perception can shift comprehension and understanding, particularly of planetary systems.

So I co founded a company called the Elumenati —over 20 years ago now－ making these immersive displays. And pretty quickly we found that it was like the working with planetary data, planetary systems, cosmic data, science centers was really the highest and best use of the tools in many ways. It still is.

It's still, that's very actively going on. And so that drove me more and more into the question of, "Okay what's the ways in which these types of immersive spaces have been used even ritualistically and are used to help to connect to the nested scales of existence, right? And you can look at that from a religious perspective, you can look at that from a scientific perspective, but it's the same basic kind of cognitive, phenomena that are going on when people are in these places.

And so I spent many years working with a transdisciplinary team of scientists and artists and educators thinking about how to use immersive spaces for relating the nature of the nested scales of existence of the life of the planet. In the process of doing that, ended up getting a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration here in the U.S. And for four years ran a project called the Worldviews Network where we were doing custom productions for places all over the United States that we were calling bioregional community dialogues. It was about helping communities to understand the nested scales and different phenomena and metabolisms of their own communities that they could then, hopefully, in some actionable way, become engaged in working with those.

We did projects here in San Francisco on Indigenous practices like controlled burning–cultural burning–in California. In New York City it was about migration of birds and how they were being harmed by some of the architecture. There were a lot of different topics that we were taking on that were very specific and unique to those bioregions or urban environments.

What I realized in the course of doing that project was that we, I was woefully prepared to manage how those dialogues land and evolve and develop new capacities with communities. And so we were having to reboot every time we went somewhere else, and that means we would leave the old place.

And our hope was that we would seed the conditions for how we were using the tools, particularly in planetariums, for helping people to connect at the level of All the dynamism and interactions and relationships that enable life on the planet that could then be used in a longer term way in those places, which happened to some degree.

But I also just realized I had no idea how to do collective work. And so then spent the next 10 years really doing a deep study. of trying to find the folks that were doing that well and ended up finding the folks involved in the world of regenerative development and have been working closely with Regenesis ever since.

And trying to understand, "How can technology and different types of computation technologies be in service of these kinds of regenerative processes? What could that look like in various contexts?" The missing piece was often times the accessibility. It was a lovely luxury to have access to all of this hardware and kit to bring people into these immersive spaces and do all these things, but it was a pretty high barrier to entry.

And so in starting Spherical, we were really looking at, "How can we bring these things into very pragmatic on-the-ground processes in communities? How can we start to integrate a lot of the incredible ideas that are behind framework thinking so that communities can work together and develop new capacities? And what role can technology play to be in service of those— the healing of those— living systems, whether they're human social systems or whether the broader ecological systems that they're embedded in?"

Origins of the Name

Matthew: Yeah. So well said. Okay. I have so many questions, but I did want to start at the outset. Our mutual friend, Alexa Firmenich, told me to ask you, why do you call it spherical?

David: I wrote 700 pages on this. So...

Matthew: Link in the show notes.

David: Yeah. What's the abstract? I am a fan of using metaphors to try to develop —the fancy word for it is heuristics—and the word heuristic comes from eureka. That's the idea that you have an epiphany. And I like there to be ways of looking at complex topics that are far more intuitive and in the realm of cognitive linguistics, in particular, there's this idea that there's an understanding before language.

When you're a child, you immediately develop a sense of being inside of a boundary or outside of a boundary. So I found the sphere to be an extraordinarily useful way of examining how people relate to the world. I ended up doing a dissertation on this history of how conceptions of the sphere have shaped understandings of reality.

I was particularly looking at the West, even though this is applicable everywhere. I was looking at the ways in which the idea of the paradox of the sphere–there's the ancient hermetic idea of "the universe is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere"–kind of points to the ultimate, not just relativity, but relationality of everything. And the sphere, of course, was very famously the construction of Plato and Aristotle in universe as a sphere. Earth is at the center. It's surrounded by all these crystalline spheres - and heaven is far above.

And then when that dissolved with the scientific revolution it caused major existential angst on the part of the collective European imagination. I'm using the sphere as a metaphor for understanding how all of those shifts in metaphorical understanding actually affect our comprehension. Not just our comprehension, but our enaction in the world at the deepest levels.

So I really have loved playing with it and working with it. It was a bit recursive, because I was working in spherical projection environments for relating a lot of these stories. The thing that really cinched it for me was realizing that when you try to map and measure the observable universe, that ultimately, we're back in this neo-geocentrism because the cosmic microwave background. When we measure it from here, it's a giant sphere all the way around us.

We're inevitably at the center, which cosmologists call the observational center, but it's also, not inconsequentially, our ecological center. We would not be here as observers if it weren't for all of these remarkable relationships that enable life.

So for me, when I started to crack open this metaphor, it revealed all kinds of interesting possibilities.

Matthew: Spheres all the way down.

David: Spheres all the way down. Dawn was kind enough to be like, "Yeah, we'll call it Spherical." So that's s why.

Matthew: It's a great abstract.

Did you have anything to add to that?

Dawn: No.

David: It's all my fault.

Matthew: So what I hear from you is that you were spinning out of corporate sustainability and getting bored and cynical of the work there, not to put words in your mouth. And you were waking people up to the cosmology of place and bioregional consciousness through planetarium dome immersive experiences and visualizations and seeing the power in that.

But also, like just imagining you on tour and then "Now what? On to the next place." And people didn't necessarily have a road map or tools or the social processes to pick that work up.

David: I call it the post-epiphanic hangover.

Matthew: That stole the words right out of my mouth.

David: I thought you were going to come into that.

Spherical's Work in Los Angeles

Matthew: And so you create this container, this studio Spherical, to express the work and to bring all these threads together. So maybe we can dive in on the work you're doing in LA and it seems like it's alive and exciting and brings all these threads.

Just to say, my perception is Spherical over the years and we've just crossed paths loosely at Bioneers and through our friends at RIVER, but it's always been about like, "Oh, they do the most epic visualizations and they have all these cool graphics. They're really smart!" That's how I've experienced it from afar.

So I don't know what else that provokes, but if you can take us through what's happening in Los Angeles, Dawn, what is this project and how does it fit in?

Urban Ecology + Hydrology

Dawn: We had the great fortune of being connected to some folks working in Los Angeles. And we work with a group called Accelerate Resilience Los Angeles.

And they're headed up by a guy called Andy Lipkis, who s who founded a group called TreePeople. And it's a little bit like, if you know, you know. He's a legend in urban forestry, particularly on the West Coast. He ran that organization for almost 50 years. And over that, over those decades, really honed an understanding of the urban landscape and looking at its at its canopy, looking at its heat, looking at its flooding, going way back many decades.

Because of the way that the land has been built up. And so the hydrology, like much of California, not just in urban areas, but hydrology is very transformed and in some ways broken because of, a century plus of paving. And so Andy's insight years ago was over, over time was that if you want to have a healthy, urban canopy.

If you want to have a healthy, cool functioning ecology, that you have to be looking at the health of the watershed. And again, many folks know this, but if you don't, L.A. County is drawing from three major straws (aqueducts), from what get referred to as "aqueductsheds" by some of our collaborators, where you've got water being pulled from multiple western states, from the Colorado River, from what's now referred to as the Owens Valley (Payahǖǖnadǖ), and coming down from the California Delta. So these huge straws pulling water into urban LA. And yet the water, when it does come, is moved very quickly. Because that's what impervious surfaces do, they catch the water, channel it, and send it out to the ocean as quickly as possible.

And so there's this impression that the whole region is a desert. Because it has, in many ways, been aridified and deserted because of human activity. But that's not the history of it. The historical ecology is incredibly diverse, and there are beautiful wetlands and fabulous function there.

But because of that, those years and years of paving, all that human activity, that type of development. You end up with massive heat differentials. These are patterns that you see in urban areas all around the world, but the heat island effect is very intense. And so when we look at the question of climate —and we've spent much of our lives talking about climate at a planetary scale— our focus is very much climate at a local regional scale because the heat differentials can be enormous.

If you go into the middle of one of the many schools, it can be 146 degrees Fahrenheit on the asphalt. There are stories being written about kids getting burned on slides. It's very intense. And so unwinding that work we were invited in to work with Andy's new organization to develop tools to be able to assist in communities being able to apply for public funds. Right now, in Los Angeles in particular, one of the standout sources of funds is a bond measure was passed after decades of work by some of Andy Lipkis's fellow travelers and himself – many, many years working to pass a bond measure that unlocks somewhere between 280 and 300 million dollars a year as a tax on those paved and impervious surfaces.

And so that funding is available for water infrastructure, for planting, for green infrastructure, for basically catching the water in the land when it comes and holding it. To feed the trees, to be able to cool the landscape, all the things that are fundamental to how do you heal any landscape in any context, urban or rural, is how do you really hold that water when it comes and hold it in the soil, hold it underground, whatever you need to do.

But doing that in a place like LA is particularly challenging.

A lot of our focus is on looking at these questions of the local ecology in the bioregion, but we also have to work within a jurisdictional boundary of a county that has 88 cities, a place where the river has a different jurisdiction than all its tributaries. When you really want to be healing and cooling a place, it means having to work very closely with the people in the communities that have been most impacted.

Matthew: Right.

Community Engagement and Accessibility

Dawn: So we've been building. tools to help them easily visualize where they are: "What are the qualities of that place? Where does the water flow from? What does the heat look like? What are the kinds of things a community wants to see on a site in a place?" And we give them enough of a capacity to then be able to apply and tap into those millions of dollars in funds that were intended to go to them in the first place.

So we're doing software development, a lot of community engagement, and design really focused on hyper accessibility.

Matthew: So we paved over paradise, and now we need to repair it. It looks like Andy has been just the early seeds of this work and showing us the way. And I imagine this is beyond just tree planting and goes into rethinking how we do irrigation and water retention and aquifers in our cityscapes, but you're dealing with this complicated mess of multiple jurisdictions and different populations and groups that all have to coordinate.

But here you've got this pool of a few hundred million dollars that's earmarked for this. How do we actually bring that capital into the places and projects that need it? And you are using visualization to unlock the coordination layer to help make that easier as well as the social processes that you referred to.

Do I have that roughly correct?

The Complexities of Visualization + Modeling

David: Visualization is one part of it for sure, but a lot of it is a surprising amount of user research and interaction design. Because the visualizations are useful. We've made a tool for visualizing water flows on web-based maps–which have been remarkably well received because when you see it, you realize you've never seen it before.

Matthew: I helped steward a land project and it never ceases to amaze me that zero to one aha experience of just showing it on a map: " Oh, that's what we're doing. Oh, that's how it works!" Yeah.

David: And that is almost never temporal, right? You never see time-based phenomena on these static 2D maps.

Matthew: Right.

David: And so we have a very static orientation, an object oriented orientation to places.

And to be able to see— whether it's migration patterns, or water flows, or, development over time— which a lot of people are seeing now with time lapse. You can go on Google Earth, or, see various phenomena—, but most of the time it's in the context of, "Oh my god, look at that city growing, it's cancerous!"

But when see what it looks like, where water's coming from. We can click on an area and see the aqueducts that are being drained from Payahǖǖnadǖ (Owens Valley) and from the Delta and from the Colorado River Basin, all the way into the specific storm drain. In LA County, and to be able to just intuitively grasp what the upstream downstream effect is, you can also click on a spot and see where it's draining to.

So all of a sudden, you have that much deeper intuitive understanding that so many, systems thinking advocates are constantly trying to relate in some meaningful way. But it's very difficult to understand nodal points and leverage points and all these things and it's very, very conceptual.

And so we use visualization in service of being able to understand the systemic dynamics of those relationships. And there's a lot more to it, that there's a lot of need, especially with regards to open data.

It's remarkable, like in L. A. County, it's one of the most studied places on Earth. They have a very cool team of folks working on GIS and LIDAR and all kinds of, technical infrastructure that's made available. But it's the final step to get into the hands of communities so that they can really access and understand what it means requires investment. And so that's where we've realized and it's the same with NOAA, it's the same with the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.

That there's not much investment that goes into the real interaction design and, to use the pretty tired metaphor –" the last mile"–that communities needing to access this stuff are not that, they're not well versed in using the particular platforms that most cities and municipalities are using.

And so we started to really inquire into what is that going to take, starting off with using some gaming engines and some of the very high end stuff like Hollywood level of effects. And it was just too much, actually. It would require more bandwidth than most communities have access to. It would have required graphics processors they didn't have access to. So we ended up going with web-based platforms and defining the design parameters to really then start looking at, " What can we do within that?"

A lot of people understand the nature and dynamics of SimCity on the one hand, which is very accessible. Most people can get it in some way, as with most gaming. On the other end, there's the more complex modeling, simulation, engineering, analysis, and mapping tools that are usually meant for professionals. So we're doing something out of in between where we want to bring the sensibility of gaming that it encourages play and encourages curiosity.

It encourages questioning: where do you start doing something? You're not just doing it because you had to be trained in how to do it – or because you had to go through a long process to understand the nature of watersheds. You actually learn through doing. Things that are happening are just-in-time. If you have a curiosity, you get to start following that path in whatever way.

Dawn: There's also a fallacy though, I think, in things needing to be ever more specific, always more photoreal, always more real-time. There's the value, there's a place for all these things. We've worked with them extensively, but a lot of the times it doesn't actually help.

And if you try to give things even an aesthetic quality, that's too photoreal, it doesn't work. Provides it almost says to the user that you're dealing with. You're dealing with something that is a match like the ongoing fantasy of the digital twin. It's an exact representation of the physical world, and that's not what's needed.

A lot of the time that when people are coming together and they're saying, I want it. I want to see these things emerge and happen on the landscape. Sometimes it's actually a lot easier for them to make sense of just saying, I think we want a tree there. I think we want this and that you start to give them a better sense but not require them to, or even tell, have their brains go through a process where they think this tree is going to immediately sequester X amount of carbon.

And I'm going to put that on my little ledger over here. And then I'm going to that it all becomes this hyper-quantifiable model. Early stage design with community. It's not helpful necessarily. And so the longer we work with folks and try things out, that's where the focus is. How do you, how can you really get people using something quickly and being able to make sense of things very, very quickly without having to go through a massive training.

Navigating the Grants Process

David: Which is probably helpful to distinguish too, because in applying for grants, especially right now, it's important to understand with the Inflation Reduction Act and all the infrastructure money coming in the U. S. This is a, smaller version of that in the county. But there's almost always a technical assistance grant that happens first. And that is, you apply, you have a project idea, you apply for that grant, and then you get money to then hire landscape architects and engineers and architects.

And they will help to put the bounded conditions on the dreams of the project, right? And what we found was that it was just getting to the process of applying for technical assistance that was itself very complicated. And so it was very hard for communities and non specialists to really engage in that.

And it took a lot of work. for them. And that's why they, in LA, they just weren't applying. It was almost all the professional firms, the municipalities. And I think that's roughly applicable probably to a lot of grant processes and programs, right? That you can bring in the professionals, but if you're just in a visioning process and you're just blue skying it, you want to have tools that can at least give you some bounded conditions and parameters to be like, "What's it do if I play with this? What happens if I connect the bioswale to the tree so the tree has water?" Because the relationships are everything, and if you change the dynamics of the relationships, it changes the nature of what it is that you're going to be quantifying.

And so it's a very different mentality than trying to get engineering grade modeling and simulation about things so that you can at least just play around with stuff and then check those later.

But in the process of working with communities, you really want it to be something that people can be like, "Oh, that's cool. I want to play around." Our 10, almost 11 year old, she's our beta tester. If she can get it. And she finds all kinds of holes in the logic, that sometimes there are perverse incentives.

If you do a points system, that's rewarding you for certain things, and you can go in certain directions that get really extreme. Being able to really understand the dynamics of play and how that is enticing is extremely important for getting people into these very technical arenas of design.

Matthew: Can you say more about the implicit or embedded philosophy? It sounds like you're democratizing the grants process a bit more, you're enabling. wider access than just the engineering professionals that might have had the skill set to use some of these fancy tools. And it's like, "Hey, come play, come vision."

Yeah. Can you share more about what's driving you towards that aim?

Dawn: I think we share the motivation with Accelerate Resilience Los Angeles. I think the source of the funds for these projects is intended to be in support of community. A lot of the time going on right now－ a lot of funding is increasingly wonderfully being directed at places that have been historically disadvantaged. And they have different designations for what that means. But a lot of the time, these are communities that have historically been disinvested from, potentially redlined.

But the effect of many, many years of that is just a lack of. green infrastructure, cooling, any kind of amenities. And so correcting for that is in a lot of ways embedded into the intention of a lot of funders and a lot of funding streams. It just brings up other challenges, but that's, that is in so many ways is the intention.

David: And there's a really important aspect of it that Andy consistently brings up and that's if people don't care about it, it will die. And "it" being the project, the tree, the whatever the thing is that's being built. If you're just like, "Oh, the government's going to come and take care of the tree for me for the next 30 years." He would hold entire ceremonies with communities where they would take their hair and plant it in the tree so that it's being entangled with the DNA of the trees that becomes their family tree–which, also mirrors a lot of other practices of Indigenous communities around the world, right? So he was, in his own way, discovering the necessity of having that relational dynamic and it's very hard. To get people interested in a lot of these things, if there's just such a high barrier to entry that you can't even comprehend, " Why are these things happening in particular ways?"

So it's that, it's the accessibility, which I think is the foundation, but it's also a higher order need. Even on the part of the engineers and the municipalities we're talking to, they want there to be co-learning and there's the need on the part of the communities to hear the engineers and the agencies what they want, what they need, and to take the time to really do that.

And they're defined engagement processes and they have a window to do that and they go out and they do their thing. But how do you do that in an ongoing way? And how do you really gain the trust of communities to show that you're not just going to exploit what they're doing out of bad faith because you find out some information?

They're really complex questions that come up in all of this. And on the flip side, the engineers, they really want, like in our case, the community is to understand, "where's the water coming from? Where is it going? Why does it matter if you capture it? There's what watershed are you in?"

There's really foundational stuff that most of us in the course of our daily lives will not encounter. And it's really hard to find out by going to government servers and trying to find it. Fortunately within LA, it's getting easier and easier because there's funding to support educational materials for doing some of these things.

They've hired watershed coordinators for every main watershed to go out and engage the communities. So they've definitely got a leg up in that regard. But most places, like in Oakland, we don't have anything like that. You try to find out what watershed you're in and, good luck. You might find some old pamphlet from the local museum from 20 years ago. And so how to make these types of understandings and contexts more accessible so that they become part of the lingua franca of the community? I think that's what a lot of the enthusiasm around bioregionalism and stuff is like, "How do you do that?"

But it really needs to start with where there's motivation. And if we can transform the grant application process to be such that it's also a co-learning process, then everybody ends up. evolving their own thinking and their own understanding, right? That becomes a truly developmental process as opposed to just being like, "Okay, we're going to go make our obligatory website to tell people the things they want to know." Or the community just being frustrated because the stupid bureaucrats aren't listening. How to find reconciling forces within all of that so that it's almost so seamless that it's just obvious? That you see more like once you see it, you can't unsee it. And you're like, "Why haven't we been doing that the whole time?"

Honestly, because it just hasn't been a priority.

The Hubris of Anthropocentric Infrastructure

Matthew: So you mentioned that you did work around Regenesis and examining some of that social process. I'm curious how that's now informing the work and this kind of last mile, not just the visualization tooling, but yeah, what are you learning and what are those interventions, socially speaking?

David: It's a timely question. I just got back from L. A. yesterday. I did a full-day workshop with a fellowship. It's a Climate Resilience Leadership Network fellowship. That Accelerate Resilience L. A. is helping to do with a leadership group called CORO. which are a number of folks from different agencies and utilities and nonprofits in the LA basin.

And we did a full day workshop around the LA basin as a living system. And we spent most of the day looking at the ways in which the hydrological, the geological, the anthropological histories demonstrate. For me, unquestionably, when you look at the basin as a living entity, you begin to understand why the hubris of humancentric, anthropocentric design is absolutely doomed to failure. And we're seeing all those breaking points right now. Broadly we call it climate change, but that understanding of places as being alive is absolutely foundational to cultures throughout history. And, being of a place. Literally, the meaning of the word "indigenous" means to relate to that.

And I know from, so much of your work, you're deeply familiar with a lot of the work that's going on in Aotearoa and all the work with rights of nature and, and there's a reason for that. Because it dissolves this boundary between just human use and the use of all of the enmeshed, entangled, webs of relations that are necessary for us to even exist.

And so we were presenting our Field Kit in that context to really look at, "What has been this deep history of this place? Why is LA what it is? Why is the basin made of what it's made of?" And it's all these river deposits and the high mountains collect all the atmospheric river rain that's coming over. There's a very specific dynamic to this place that makes it what it is. And the human activity that's there is patterned after that activity, right? That, that there is no such thing as a tabula rasa, terra nullius substrate of a place where humans just come in and do their thing. The world is not flat.

And so when really spend the time to get to know a place, you can start acting much more deeply and reciprocity with that place. And as insane as it sounds, we're trying to, think about how to do that in the L. A. basin with people that have never necessarily— some have, don't get me wrong— there are many, many Indigenous groups doing amazing work to relate this stuff. And it's actually one of the most impressive things about this work, is how clear those communities have been around relationships to water, around relationships to land. There's a really remarkable documentary called The Aqueduct Between Us, which I really encourage people to go watch. It's a five-part thing on YouTube. It's very, very cool, by director Annie Mendoza. It really tells the story of what happens when you create these straws that suck the water from these other places, and you create these water colonies that are still active today and draining Mono Lake. That hubris of colonial infrastructure is what's creating the danger.

And the degree to which we are attempting to weave this in with language that people can relate to ―and within the context of modernity― is an experiment. We're seeing how this can this happen. What would it take so that people aren't just like, "Oh, yeah, that's some woo woo thing." And they want to think the river's alive. It's like, "No, actually, the river's literally alive!" And if you start to listen and pay attention and relate to all of these other beings in a different way, then we start to really understand what a fool's errand it is just to think that as long as we get the solar panels, the windmills and draw down the carbon, that everything's going to be okay. Because it won't. We're just going to continue a lot of the same processes of extraction.

But if you're in relationship in a different way, then it starts to point to some other ways of hospicing, as Vanessa Andreotti talks about in Hospicing Modernity. How do you put it to bed in a good way so that we can evolve what needs to be happening?

And I say it sounds insane because the scale of all of this is so – how could you ever be commensurate? You go outside, you're like, "Really? Come on." But what else is there to do? So it's paradoxical, but we're really trying to understand how to use these living systems frameworks, how to use these regenerative processes, for lack of a better term, living systems thinking, and in ways within these urban environments.

Dawn: A lot of, the way that we're doing that— and who you were running those courses within LA— that's all in collaboration with Regenesis and certainly under their mentorship over the years. I mean, running that with Regenesis.

David: Yeah, they were there with us.

Localizing Technology for Regenerative Processes

Dawn: So really trying to benefit from their many decades of work. I think that in every case, every time we work on anything, it's based on, " Okay, what is the deep history of all the work that's already been done on this that got us to this point? And how do we work with those folks?"

I think the other thing I'll just note that I think just in the context of technology development is that when you look at the uniqueness of any place. That oftentimes technology is rarely it's rarely developed because it's rarely funded to be developed in such a way that it's hyper local, right?

That generally, if you work at a big company, the focus is on how do you get this localized into as many countries as possible. So if you're going to say, "We're going to make green building technology" or whatever, you end up having to really focus on metrics and numbers and things that you can generalize everywhere. So therefore we all focus on measuring carbon, right?

To be able to go the other direction – to start locally with local users and local ecological data and then work the other way down the line – to say, "What of this could we take to another place, another city?" – that's a different question. But we are first generating the technology platform, the data curation, from the lens of what will work because of the essence of the place we're in.

Matthew: Yeah, I love that. We're building these very homogenous tools to scale to the for-profit capitalist incentives that underpin these developmental cycles and by starting in our local watershed, literally.

Yeah, it results in a different configuration.

Dawn: Yeah. And different instruments of funding result in a different configuration. If we were taking VC capital or had done this in the lens of that, then we would be having to think about all the time, how, what's the transition we're going to make from making something hyper accessible and usable and free and open source for these people and turn it into something that's going to make our investors 10 to 100 X back, right?

There's some implicit rug pull there that we would be embedding into the core because of the type of instrument of finance. And so those questions, I think, come up a lot. It's like, "How do we take what we're creating and have it sustain itself in other places.? And how can aspects of it be built upon without finding ourselves in those traps?"

David: We were talking about that this morning. Talk about the last mile, right? If that's the interaction design, if that's the accessibility. Sure, everybody gets access to Google Drive, right? Because there's such an intense profit motive. They'll invest in how to make that happen, right?

Same with the gaming industry. There's so much money involved. And when you look at the realm of civic technology, when you look at a lot of the open source tools, there's just not the investment that goes into the accessibility and usability. So it stays pretty technologically elite in a lot of ways. Unless you get a Red Hat and they put a front end on Linux and they try to make it easy. That does happen.

But that's just very much what we're noticing with regards to the motivations, even of a lot of the mapping platforms. They're like, "Okay, we're going to go for that ride share dollar!" So everything starts to go towards transportation.

We're really trying to invest in —at least within that realm— how to create better interfaces for these extraordinarily important stories, interactions, data layers, so that those stories can be told in more powerful ways. Because oftentimes they're ignored, at least in the context of the discourse around climate change.

Everybody thinks they kind of understand what climate change is, so therefore we're just going out and we're doing these things, we're going to have that technical fix, that's going to be fine. But I was really Deeply influenced by Amitav Ghosh's book The Nutmeg's Curse. Have you read this?

Matthew: No.

Ontological Repair

David: It goes through the history of the extraction and the attempted annihilation of Indigenous cultures around the world. It points to the literal connection that you have to a place–to the relationality that you have to a place– being the only thing that's commensurate with the scale of the destruction that's happening on the planet right now–that could actually rise to that.

And when I started to see a lot of this work in that context, I really started to understand #LandBack. I started to understand why it's so important for cultures that are like really working on the continuity of the connection that they have to their places. And it's far beyond, " This is "my land, stay away." It's like, "No, actually it's about the health and vitality of those places." It's way beyond just an anthropocentric view of it. And that aspect of understanding climate is so poorly acknowledged a lot of the time in a lot of the climate discourse. But we can bring forth that care, that love, that connection, that relationality.

For a lot of us that are homeless, not in the lands of our Indigenous ancestors from however long ago that were from a particular place–that can be really confusing. It can actually cause existential angst. But I do think that there's responsibility, and a kind of accountability that we can have to the places where we are to be open and humble to "How could we be in service to the livingness of this place?"

That's driving a lot of what we're trying to do with the tools we're developing, not in a direct way, because that can also sound really preachy. It can sound really self-righteous or dogmatic, but that's not the point. The point is, "How do you evoke the care? How do you re enchant what a place is, what the livingness is in a way that can really help to develop the capacity for that care?"

Matthew: Is that what you mean by ontological repair? I see on your website, this is one of the services you offer.

David: Yeah, that's what we mean by that. In the Western mind, we tend to think in terms of like, "Oh, it's either human-centric or nature-centric." That's the binary. We've got a big problem with binary logic in the Western culture. And what a number of Indigenous scholars have pointed out is that a lot of those cultures are what has been called kincentric. Relationships are at the center.

When you use the term ontology in the context of philosophy, not just in terms of a computer database, but it means what you think exists. And the idea that what exists is primarily in service of humans or in service of, "the other" —in service of "nature"— you're going to arrive oftentimes at equally devastatingly depressing conclusions, in my experience.

But if you see what exists is primarily relationships, I mean, that kind of does change everything. And so when we say ontological repair, we're actually referring to, "Okay, this is a, a pretty toxic way of going through the world of thinking that everything is just in service of humans or that humans are a cancer and a plague upon the earth and have no role to play within the web of life," right?

Dawn: We've been meaning to get the ontological repair, like the plumbing service, like we do ontological repair, put it on the back of the truck.

David: Yeah. One of these days.

Limits of Technology

Matthew: And, you're both so immersed in this world of technology and in the Bay Area and on the cutting edge of all these tools. And then you're also meshed in these kinds of conversations about ontological repair and relationships and kincentric. How do you reconcile that? What do you see as the limits of technology in this moment in time we're in of just rapid acceleration and advancement, so to speak?

Dawn: Try not to be hype people. Just try things.

Matthew: What do you mean by that?

Dawn: I think there's a lot of enthusiasm for anything. For anything. If there's money to be made, you're going to find enthusiasts talking about it.

Matthew: I have this token to sell you.

Dawn: I love that. Thank you. I'm glad, I'm willing to take a look at it. But I'm not necessarily going to fully buy into your sales pitch. I think there's a lot of— maybe a side point, but I feel like a lot of American culture is embedded with sales language, right? And so you encounter that a great deal here. You encounter that in technology and and the entanglement of technology that's been funded either by corporations or a big VC. We are bombarded by that stuff and that hype all the time. But we've also been doing the work for long enough to be like, "Okay, yeah, sure. Let's talk about generative design or generative AI or whatever."

You've got pictures of you wearing VR headsets in the 80s. We've been working in these things for a long.....

David: Well, the 90s. I'm not quite that old. The 1880s!

 We've been working with these technologies for long enough that they don't come out of nowhere We've seen their precedents.

Dawn: We've seen the hype cycles come and go So I think we know a little bit now to just look just watch See, let me see how that thing turns out. I'm curious. Sometimes we try stuff. As David said, we got very into gaming engines. We've worked with the VR headsets. We've worked in all these dynamics, but not every tool, not every technology is the right thing.

And I think that's maybe my first point is just that yes, we are here and that means that we are adjacent to a particular narrative, ecosystem, enthusiasm and we're always having to contend with that to some degree. But never buy the sales pitch right away.

David: The first thing I tried to do with GPT-3 was to ontologically repair it. And so I had a very long conversation about its own ontological orientations. And I say that loosely because it obviously doesn't have any. It's what it's training data is. It's the way that it's been. And it would, and it, and in the dialogue it refused in the chat, it refused to acknowledge it was part of nature because it was made by humans.

And so putting aside the complexities of the term nature, it was just, it was a fascinating exchange because you start to see the degree to which assumptions are embedded within the context of language models. There are so many brilliant people who have been pointing this out for a long time, but you start to see all the assumptions that are embedded in these technologies.

So the premise that technology is neutral is just laughable, because the way that they all come into being: their funding, how they're being applied, all of these things, it's always infused with assumptions and paradigms. Whether or not the people creating the technology see their own assumptions and paradigms is another story.

But the language models are a particularly rich use case, because you can just inquire directly. To see how it is that its training has led to its fill-in-the-blank responses of a language model to give you whatever that summed response of all of its training is to give you.

And I think in the context of looking at the utility of a lot of these types of tools, it's been in some ways exciting to see how computation can be applied towards addressing a lot of complexities. We're building tools that people could find out certain things much easier if they can be guided through processes. It's amazing.

On the other hand, the hype men are out there. Promising that it does everything and in the process consuming vast amounts of energy, time, resources, human labor in the most abusive, extractive possible ways so that the potential of what the technology can actually do is often just going to be completely overshadowed and ignored because of the desire to extract and accumulate as much capital from those technologies.

What do you do about that? I don't know. But we're trying to understand, "How do we take this one little subset so that we could make good on all of the destruction that's been done to make it possible to use these tools ?" And in those processes, we try to stay open. We could be completely shunning of all of that. And I think it's a totally viable thing to do, and lots of people are.

But we're really trying to understand, "Are there some ways in which these tools can be applied in service of the broader realization of systemic health?" And it's just super depressing most of the time because as soon as something like has that little glimmer of "Wow, that would be really great," the hammer of hype coming in comes in. And you're like, "No, you don't need to say that. It doesn't need to do the everything." And it's especially telling right now, because in the context of so called AI— it's just neither artificial nor intelligent— it's exposing the degree to which the deep histories of where these technologies came from are being ignored. That's another sub thread of our research. A lot of this came out of early cybernetics research, which was deeply connected to the understanding of different kinds of cognition, and forms of what's called autopoiesis, or the act of self-creation. And there were many subcultures and extraordinary research agendas and explorations going on decades ago that now all of that is all but forgotten and it's all seen in the context of like computational cognition.

That, oh, of course, intelligence is just a machine, right? "We could just recreate human cognition if we just had enough processing power." Which is a hilariously kind of anachronistic way of understanding cognition. That was back in the 60s, right? And so there's this incredibly naive philosophy around the nature of intelligence that's driving a lot of this because it's these hype men —and they mostly are men —that are like driving these ideas. And I think ultimately to the danger of everyone.

There was a great essay published a few years ago called Making Kin with the Machines, If we're to make Kin with these emergent forms of cognition on the planet, it's really important to understand we're not just replacing humans. We're not just replicating our own computers inside of our heads. That there's a lot more that they could potentially be offering of how we're co evolving with all the other life on the planet.

Dawn: I mean, and so much of the limits of technology when we look at urban, you know, context or urban design have to do with this ongoing fantasy that I think is perpetuated by certainly technology companies and, um, and, you know, even sometimes folks who are working, um, to get things built, that there could be some kind of magical cybernetic tool that would, that would give them all the answers and happens with that, um, and really the limit is actually that you don't because you don't have space for not just dialogues with the kind of community members that we're working with, but even really spending time with the people who can creatively think about recombinations of, "How do you bring systems together?"

There is no magical green machine that's going to design the world. You always have human systems, even if those human systems show up as bureaucracies. Even if they show up as boards of supervisors, they're still human systems. What are they understanding? What are they prioritizing?

And the technology is just there as an enabler to people making decisions. But that gets lost. We see that a lot, like "We're going to have the magic tool that does whatever." And the relational, experiential piece of the work is often what gets lost when we overemphasize the technology. We look at this all the time. What's the piece of this kit that we can do? The work that we're doing in LA–while we are indeed making a product and there is a software at the core of that–it's inside programs. It's inside actual engagement.

David: Which is the other reason for Spherical.

It's inherently kind of like omnidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, you know, that in order to even address a lot of these things, it's really important to be able to have fluid boundaries in terms of where you're inquiring, you know, like what it is that you're trying to see or to do. Because oftentimes, you know, we encounter so frequently, you asked about being here in the Bay Area, you know, there's decades and decades of scholars from a field called science and technology studies that have been critiquing these things endlessly, you know, in terms of like the just the incredibly naive assumption of the capacity to quantify everything, the capacity to achieve some ultimate objectivity, to have this God's eye view from nowhere, giving you this kind of platonic ideal view, where you're ultimately going to like figure it all out and be able to calculate everything so that, you know, all phenomena are somehow able to squeeze into a computer, right?

And if you look at it, that's kind of at the heart of a lot of what's going on right now, whether it's finance or whether it's like, "AI for Earth!" AI is going to help us solve climate change, which I've heard with increasing frequency over the justifications of why it is we need to go out and extract all of the metal on the bottom of the oceans to be able to fund all the AI.

It's this recursive loop. It's based on a fallacy, and that's that the world is ultimately quantifiable and calculable in a way that doesn't have bad faith actors. Even grant them, "Sure, the world's gonna be quantifiable and calculable," but then that's assuming that somebody wouldn't just use that to like be as extractive as possible.

So it's like multiple nested layers of kind of terrible arguments. So the degree to which I think it's important to be informed by a lot of these histories and these critiques, I can't overstate how important that is because a lot of the people that are making these arguments now are largely being ignored.

Especially in the AI realm. This kind of catastrophizing of AI becoming this uber-consciousness often ignores all the reasons that it's killing a lot of people right now due to very human motivations for accelerating extractive and murderous processes.

So forget HAL 9000 over the horizon. We actually have a lot more to worry about now, immediately, and well into the future with regards to how these tools are being applied. But it's a fig leaf or an Oz curtain that's put over the real motivations to how these things are being applied. The kind of the naivety within that discourse remained pretty astonishing, especially the degree to which it goes unquestioned within popular media.

Groups like the Distributed AI Research Institute are doing regular, amazing critiques of this stuff. And, and I think for us, it would be really nice to see a lot of that more foregrounded. Especially when it comes to using these types of tools for Indigenous communities, and language revitalization, and data sovereignty. And there's so many cool things going on, but they really aren't receiving the funding or support or attention. And that's where I think the technology side of things could be incredibly useful.

Dawn: One of the things I think about also in a lot of what you were just saying is that we've spent.

You know, a bunch of years now running a project called Gaian Systems that, you know, David, you can tell, tell us more about, but looking at planetary ecology and how to understand it, that, that, you know, as David said at the outset, that a lot of what we've done at Spherical has been, you know, creating projects where we felt like there was a gulf or there was some missing thing, some missing core understanding.

You know, for instance, you we want to understand what regenerative projects are. We don't know. We don't define it. Here are 350 of them on videos, and you can look at them, and then maybe you'll see the patterns. And one of those projects was looking at at the world of Gaia theory and the history of Gaia theory, which is tied into some of the history of cybernetics that David mentioned.

But It was one of the aspects that I think we both encountered in working in the technology world, but also adjacent to it, is that even now that you've got a lot of people who are holding a model of the world that is, that is computational and mechanistic, and they're very, very, very smart. You know, I've worked for many, many, like, literal PhD rocket scientists, Computer scientists, folks, but they've got a mechanistic model they're operating from, which means that their understanding of how planetary systems work is limited to these kinds of fairly simple exchanges.

And so when they wake up to the topics at hand around climate change, they default to a mechanistic idea about carbon. Movement of carbon. Um, and it feels very comfortable because they can kind of go, okay, we can see how this, how this mechanism is at work without really looking at how, um, many, many complex processes on the, on the planet are working together, including water cycles to cool the atmosphere, cool places, and cool the planet in significant ways. So the science that they are paying attention to is true, but narrow and it influences so much of technology development, investment, narrative. And we see that across the board. The world of climate tech as it sort of come up is very influenced by these mental models.

And so I think that the, the question, you know, and the question we started asking, um, in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Clarke at Texas Tech University, who's spent many, many years writing about these things, was how to help reveal and run workshops in San Francisco around Gaian processes.

Do you want to speak to that?

David: Yeah. I mean, you know, there was a, there was a project really seeded around a decade ago when I saw Bruce "Bruno" Clark, as he goes by, um, give a talk about whatever happened to AI. And it was hilarious at the time because it was before all the new cycle. And it was, And he was talking about in the context of like machine cognition and planetary cognition.

And machines as we know them, are emergent properties of the lithosphere and the hydrosphere and the atmosphere and all of the biosphere and us putting them together as humans and you know, Mm-Hmm. And seeing all of that as part of the planetary cognition, which for me it was like, whoa, , that's a really nice thought.

Like that's really an interesting way into it because it's not othering, right. That, that form of cognition. Right. And. So we began sort of scheming on, um, how to create different types of, he ended up writing a book about it called Gaian Systems, but in the project we've been doing these workshops and have did a, um, installation at the Gray Area here in San Francisco called The End of You, with a bunch of artists a number of years ago, inviting people into thinking about these forms of planetary cognition.

what does it mean to think like a living planet? You know, and, and our friend Joshua says, what does it mean to live like a thinking planet? And the Gaian system's view is really one of understanding the planet as fundamentally symbiotic as a lot of the And a lot of this comes out of, people who are familiar with James Lovelock for the most part is the inventor of Gaia theory, but a collaborator, Lynn Margulis, who, you know, really overturned a lot of assumptions at the heart of Darwinian evolution, particularly since Darwin didn't have a lot to say about the origin of species, she looked at the origin of species as a microbiologist, and really brought to the fore this notion that species in their origins oftentimes are symbiotic.

They come together. So it fundamentally overturns this idea of, you know, survival of the fittest as competition and competition as being the primary or only, you know, like driver of evolution. And this, this notion of endosymbiosis was incredibly powerful because it's resulted in this whole field of called reticulate evolution, which is basically like, we're all deeply interconnected, right?

And, and, and of course, like the usual ways that we think about, but like, even at the biological level. And Gaian systems are these nested systems of a planet that, you know, are constantly working in mysterious ways, right? We're, we're starting to see a lot of this. Even NASA is making visualizations now called the living planet, right?

Whereas Gaia theory at one point, people, I think they thought it was like, oh, it's just this spiritual thing and people buy into it. And it's, well, that was because they use the metaphor of Gaia, right? The Greek goddess. But if you really look into the science, and particularly from Lynn Margulis's perspective, it has incredible implications for how we're thinking about climate and our response to a lot of the real and present dangers in our world, which has a lot to do with, as Dawn mentioned, the hydrological cycle, for instance, not being taken into account in a number of the climate global climate models because it's just too complex.

So they're just like, "Oh, we'll just leave that out." Right. But anybody knows that if you are in a place and you capture the water and it brings forth life, it cools down the atmosphere, right? And so that within a microclimate and the global climates, an aggregate of microclimate. So that as that simple example, Okay.

Understanding how life creates, as Janine Benyus says, "life creates the conditions for life," right? That if to understand these issues through that lens of life, through that lens of living systems, you arrive at radically different conclusions about what's possible, what's the potential, what needs to be done.

But if you look at, if you're looking at it all through this kind of mechanistic view. Then it becomes something where the inevitable conclusion is like, well, obviously we have to build rocket ships and go to Mars and start over there because this whole thing is screwed. You know, I mean, like that...

Dawn: Even that you just need to cover the desert and solar panels and things will be solved.

There's some kind of technological hardware that you can apply.

Matthew: Yeah, the geoengineering.

David: Yeah, totally logical, right? Because it's just a machine. But, you know, so they depend, those seeded conditions and the root assumptions—the paradigm that you're coming from－have everything to do with what your conclusions for action in the world are going to be.

So that's why we started this project. It's still ongoing. We are really excited about trying to keep moving on some educational materials with this so that people can take a good, long, hard look at a lot of what was being written back in the seventies and the sixties and beyond, and even more recently with Lindisfarne meetings and the Coevolution Quarterly and like on a lot of these collaborations that were going on that reveal a different history and potential for computing cognition, for understanding these living systems in a way that helped to reveal, back to the visualization, helped to reveal the dynamics and the metabolisms and the processes that could help, you know, us to think about the earth in a very different way, and particularly about our places in a very different way.

Matthew: David and Dawn, thank you so much. Any final words or reflections you want to end on?

The meaning of "The regeneration will be funded"

David: We have questions for you.

Matthew: You've got 50 seconds.

David: Okay.

Matthew: Did you have questions on camera or off camera?

David: I'll take them on camera. That'd be great. So like you're doing a whole series around, you know, what is it? The regeneration will be financed,

Matthew: Will be funded.

David: What does that mean to you?

Matthew: I think it's an aspirational frame. It's hard for me to imagine positive scenarios from here over the next, call it 10 to 20 years that don't, you know, radically embrace and evolve our current forms of money. I don't think we're going to just like massively coordinate as a globe and do the work that we need to do completely outside of the monetary system.

But I don't think that the current economic structure and logic and design really is compatible with what we need to do either. So, it's kind of like a fierce commitment to, okay, what are those innovations, what are those evolutions that are taking place? And, I'm a bit contrarian in a lot of circles, some circles not so much, but I, I think one of the biggest games in town is this, this phenomenon of crypto, and Web3, and Unchain, and everything else because it, It gets it so much of the root of capital itself, like we can now democratize monetary design monetary policy design through these new tokenized representations in peer to peer coordination systems that at least just gives us new surface area and new tools to play with.

So it's not to say. You know, writ large crypto is mostly just like casino gambling behavior, not a lot of impressive stuff that's come out, you know, in terms of real world application, but I get excited about, okay, cool, those tools are coming online at a moment in time where we really need to fundamentally change our financial architecture and haven't seen in the last call it five years as much conversation about the conversions between what's happening in kind of this regenerative Ecologically minded space and what's happening in this kind of techno web3 crypto space.

And so, yeah, putting my hat in the ring a little bit of like, let's bring some of these conversations together and find some of those overlaps and start doing some experiments.

David: Thank you for that.

I mean, because what it brings to mind is, a lot of the same things we encounter, which is bad faith actors, right?

And it's the same with any kind of quantification of carbon credits. And all of these issues that regardless of the technology and how promising the technology is that there's always, "how's it being gamed?" And you're referring to it as the casino, right? Literally being gamed. And I think that's something that We're constantly, encountering and thinking even for what we're making, "Okay, how's a bad faith actor going to take this and just like use it to exploit the community?" It's one of the things that I think we would love to see more.

Of a dialogue around when it comes to a lot of these technologies is that what is, what are the, not only what are the potentials, but how have they been used by bad faith actors and what are the systems in place for being able to even understand what those techniques are? You know, as opposed to the enthusiasm, I think that grinds on us so much when it comes to all these different types of technology is the degree to which that is just ignored some summarily, usually as like the thing that no matter how amazing language models might be, they're, they're, they're being abused in all of these ways and having that woven into the conversation, I think is actually one of the most Um, honest ways of, of attempting to ensure some pathway of integrity of how the, the tools can be used.

Matthew: Yeah, it's interesting. I, you're giving me some good threads to think on because I, I feel like I, I can rattle off a lot of critiques of, AI, and blockchains as two examples and we can also talk about synthetic bio and because I left Silicon Valley, like I joke Silicon Valley radicalized me. I left Silicon Valley for a farm in New Zealand, like that's how radicalized I became. And yet I also operate in a lot of spaces where I feel like there's not a lot of appreciation for the transformational potential of a lot of these tools and technologies.

And so, it's kind of like, you know, pointing out like, hey, look, like, 8 billion of us, like, really big problems at hand, like, Let's actually embrace some of these things because they can be on-ramps into completely new patterns of institutional forms. And, you know, it's like Bucky's old quote of like, you know, if you want to change how a person thinks, don't, don't try it that way.

Give them a tool where the use of that tool changes how they think, paraphrasing. But, you know, I do think that that's interesting, exciting, possible. And, to your point, like, if we don't have a well-grounded critique of all the ways that these things are being manipulated, embedding, you know, very problematic philosophies and the one that we've been the most vocal about is the financial incentives underneath. Like if you fund these things through the blitzscaling VC architectural incentive structure, then, you know, there's just a huge amount of, you know, terrible consequences to that. But I think also like with AI, I mean, you mentioned some of them in this conversation. Like, I would also point to, you know, you have essentially this, this heist of the knowledge commons of humankind being privatized and crammed into privatization structures just at the fundamental outset of this and then creating this arms race for as much computational, you know, video chips as we can possibly get our hands on, um, And yeah, I've seen those pitch decks of like, here's why we have to to do the mining on the ocean floor, right?

Because this is why, you know, and you're like wait How did we go from...

David: We have to kill it to save it!

Matthew: Yeah Yeah, so it's it is like you said a paradox. Um, enthusiasm doesn't I guess it doesn't grind my gears as much at the moment because I don't know, I kind of almost shut it out a bit, but I think it's highly problematic insofar as it's being used to justify a lot of the extractive behaviors that underpin it.

David: Important patterns to notice. And, and always, I always find it nourishing to talk about the dark side of these things. Like strangely, you know, it's a bit, it's a bit like talking about living systems without talking about death, right? No, let's go there, right? Yeah. Because that's part of the cycle. And recognizing the true potential of any of these technologies, I think, requires a serious ongoing critique, if you're serious about the potential.

Matthew: Totally. I love it. This is good feedback. I, um, yeah, there's like a permaculture teacher I've learned a lot from and he's always Oh, let's talk about regeneration, Matthew, but don't forget degeneration. Yeah. There's a lot of death happening in nature too. Yeah. Any other final words? That's the final word right there.

I love it. David and Dawn, we're going to do our best to keep up with you in the show notes and links to a lot of the resources and books you mentioned, appreciate the conversation so much.

David: Thank you so much.

Dawn: Total pleasure.