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Tamson Pietsch:
Welcome to all That We touch. I'm Tamson Pietsch,
director of the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS.
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Matt Ryan:
And I'm Matt Ryan, a researcher in social and political sciences,
also at UTS.
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Tamson Pietsch:
And this is a brand new podcast from Impact Studios.
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Matt Ryan:
Okay, Tamson, let's talk about the title,
All That We Touch.
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Why did you choose it? What are you getting at with this title?
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Tamson Pietsch:
Well, are you telling me it's a bit obscure?
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Is that what you are? Fair enough. This is going to be a podcast about
technology and society,
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and I wanted a name that would capture some of that.
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And I'd been reading Octavia Butler's The Parable of the sower.
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And look, I didn't have to confess. I didn't actually finish reading it because
it terrified me.
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But its key message was one that has really stayed with me.
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Audible archive:
All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you.
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The only lasting truth is change.
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Tamson Pietsch:
And this becomes the credo for us, for the heroine,
as she tries to navigate this entangled,
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collapsing world. And it really struck me as a lovely line to encapsulate this
notion that we are somehow part of the world we
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have made.
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Matt Ryan:
Those are really interesting ideas, and I can totally relate to not necessarily
finishing books that are that grim.
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I had a similar experience with Tim Winton's Juice,
but as you speak about these kinds of entanglements between people and society
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and things that are in flux, that are moving and changing,
it reminds me a lot of Bruno Latour's work,
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and I know that's something that you're really interested in.
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So can you tell me a bit more about the connection you saw there?
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Tamson Pietsch:
Yeah, well, Latour has this similar argument.
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He calls them assemblages or hybrids that everything in the natural and social
world,
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both humans and non-human things interact in in dynamic kind of networks.
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Nothing for. For Latour is pure. Even humans need tools.
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They need language. They need resources.
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They need technologies and institutions to be who we are.
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So humans are not detached from the things we make.
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And in fact, for Latour, it's precisely because of our entanglement in the world
we have created that that human action is central to addressing climate change,
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a situation that humans have created. So there's no kind of world in which
humans and things are disentangled.
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Matt Ryan:
And I guess that's going to be our focus here in this podcast,
right?
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We're going to be focusing on things, often things we take for granted,
things that we're familiar with that shape our lives,
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and also pattern other possible lives in ways that we might not necessarily
think of or notice.
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And it's worth remembering that that is not the way that we've thought about
these relationships,
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particularly in Western thought, over quite a long time.
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The idea is that humanity and human history was defined by its separation from
nature,
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from the material world was the the bedrock of entire academic disciplines like
history.
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So it's you know, it's worth saying that this this stuff from Latour and from
Butler is radical in a way,
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but also in a way that is increasingly,
I think, visible to us today because of the way in which things are getting out
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of control all around us. There used to be a time when we saw trees as trees,
but now a forest isn't just a bunch of trees,
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it's a network of trees and fungi and carbon and soil and microbial life.
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The internet too, that used to be a place of dinky little chat rooms.
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Now it's something that pervades objects in the home,
like fridges and boilers.
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And of course, we can't think about the internet today without thinking about
artificial intelligence and the idea that machines might think for themselves.
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Tamson Pietsch:
So what you're saying is that things are always more than just things.
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Matt Ryan:
Of course, things are relationships between people and materiality,
and the ecology and systems beyond our consciousness.
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Sometimes that it's all relational. It's all in.
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Defined by its interactions.
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Tamson Pietsch:
Yeah. And I like thinking about what this notion of technology means to like,
technology is a kind of tool,
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really, that a human or actually some non-humans make.
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And yet those tools also make us. And it's that way of thinking about the
intersection between the material and the human.
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That technology comes in a way. This is a really productive.
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What we think it's a really productive way to think and rethink about systems
that are affecting our daily lives.
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So this is a podcast about technology, but it's also a podcast about society.
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Matt Ryan:
So all that we touch begins with a series on Wikipedia.
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It's the largest compendium of human knowledge ever created,
and most of us use it all the time,
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even if we're not aware of that fact.
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Speaker 4:
It's become part of the furniture. But Wikipedia isn't just something we live
with,
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it's something we learn from. It shapes how we understand the world.
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But we're wondering what shapes Wikipedia.
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Matt Ryan:
Later you'll hear a very different story.
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It's all about toilets and what we are really wasting when we wash away our
waste.
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Speaker 5:
A society that's disconnected from nature is not exactly going to go forth and
embrace its relationship with the waste it creates.
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Speaker 6:
I think it's alchemy. Turning a waste into gold.
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Matt Ryan:
On this podcast, you'll hear documentaries like these along with interviews and
live recordings.
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All of it grappling with this complex relationship between ourselves and
technology,
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nature and politics. All that we touch,
we change and all that we change changes us.
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So hit subscribe and stay tuned.
