Presentation to Melbourne Emergence Meetup 12 September 2019 providing further context for Supervenience Project, interleaving four decades of awareness development with one of local activism and digital photography. Doesn't quite achieve declared aims of bridging Too Funny for Words with Accepting Cosmological Responsibility, but useful starting point nonetheless. Slide 9 is a montage of frames from two minute video of the first of Josie Taylor's two reports cited on Slide 8, as a placeholder for the actual video.

1. Informed Dissent
no secrets and no need for secrets
transparency facilitating ecosystemic diversity sans accumulation & authority
Tony Smith
Melbourne Emergence Meetup
12 September 2019

2. Too Funny for Words
Abstractions, Category Errors,
Epistemic Cuts
Life on an Active Planet The Two-edged Sword
Multiple Paths to Emergence
Constraints and
Degrees of Freedom
Birds and Others Interweb to Facebook
Better than Out of Control
Information,
Maps and Territories
Urban Hydrology out of Sight
Going Down with
the Egg Basket
Self-organising, Adaptive
Codification and
Communication
Exploiting a
Dissipating Gradient:
creaming, trickle down
Dystopian Utopias and
Science Fiction
Towards Healthy
General Knowledge
The Inside View:
knowing when you're dreaming
Verbal Blindness
Accepting Cosmological
Responsibility

3. Informed Dissent
SUPERVENIENCEhow emergent minds and money seize power over matter
Informed by a personal journey to the margins,
tonight explores excesses of privileged accumulation
and potential rescue via technologies of distraction
Words are blunt instruments, dollars blunter
Some things lack balance, others just fail
Once protective, adversarial systems now exploited
Piss and shit are as fundamental as breathing
The water cycle is the blood of the life world
Soil depletion is killing dependencies we don’t know
Terminate Earth Mother Fracking

4. Focused on possibilities of online information systems and in the midst of a few months of consequent career uncertainty, I’d had no idea that
Ricci, his partner and baby were even in Perth before the shooting. On 31 March 1982 my mother and I went straight from airport to hospital.
Over the next several days, while spending much of the time developing lasting friendships with Heather and members of her immediate family,
I also soon learnt just how much privilege a white male 35 had and could use in this then very racist city which I had previously avoided visiting.
Bemusing years on that Perth media had no difficulty finding an unnamed “aunt” who could inject some non facts into an already bizarre story.
Always was, always will be aboriginal land

5. Joan was near the end of typing up a fictionalised account of five years, mostly in East Germany with Ricci and others,
when the Warsaw Pact put an end to the Prague Spring. It should be published even if ASIO deny having related files.
Flew back to Perth from Stellenbosch workshop on Philosophy of Complexity on my 60th, staying night with Heather
and starting track to publishing her autobiography. Advance copies landed later on day of Joan’s second, fatal, stroke.

7. In the wake of social liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s attention spread to
environmental and heritage protection with the support of unions for “Green Bans”.
Beyond the 1967 referendum granting Aboriginals citizenship of the colonial regime,
the 1988 bicentenary and impending millennium catalysed marches for reconciliation.
Police horse attack on protestors at World Economic Forum opening 11 September
2000 at Crown Melbourne overshadowed by events overseas on its first anniversary.
Protests in 2003 against prospect of dishonestly advocated Iraq war had no impact.

8. Electrification of the St. Albans train line was extended to Sydenham in January 2002 with naming rights to the new
terminus going to the adjacent Watergardens shopping centre and a new station at Taylors Road named Keilor Plains.
Initially the line there still went through the middle of a large roundabout on Taylors Road, but that was replaced by a
road-under grade separation in 2007 well before such projects became commonplace.
On 7 May 2009 the Victorian Ombudsman reported on an “Investigation into the alleged improper conduct of
Councillors at Brimbank City Council” leading to the appointment of Bill Scales to monitor the council for three months
and report back to the minister for local government. Meanwhile then Brimbank CEO Nick Foa put a cross on a map at
the geographic centre of the municipality and found it was close enough to Errington Reserve in Main Street East, St.
Albans, that he would make the Reserve his preferred site for a new civic centre aimed at tying together the remnants of
two municipalities which had once been divided by a boundary the length of Main Road. However St. Albans History
Society had already dealt with a proposal by McDonalds to acquire part of the Reserve, diverting them to a better for
passing traffic site on St. Albans Road, and were fully across of the history of Alice Errington’s bequest of the Reserve to
the people of St. Albans. On 12 June and 3 July Josie Taylor’s [2009] reports on the community battle to retain Errington
Reserve went to air during the main 7:00 pm ABC TV newscast.
Meanwhile in mid June the Victorian state government had unveiled a suite of big plans for the western suburbs:
• extensive permanent reserves to protect and recover volcanic plains grasslands
• major expansion of designated urban growth boundaries
• Regional Rail Link (RRL) to separate V/Line tracks from Metro tracks from Southern Cross station towards Bendigo,
Ballarat and Geelong with the latter rerouted via Sunshine and a new line serving growth areas in northern Wyndham
• planning and reservation of an Outer Metropolitan Ring (OMR) road and rail corridor
On 29 June an information session on these initiatives came to Victoria University Sunshine campus for interested locals.
On 15 July the City of Brimbank held a public consultation about the civic centre proposal at Errington Reserve
Community Centre which focused local opposition but also provided an opportunity to raise the implications of the RRL
and growth areas expansion for the future role of Brimbank as central to the western region, a chance to move on from
the end of line reputation that Sunshine and St. Albans had developed. On 25 August Errington Reserve was officially
removed from list of civic precinct candidates. Following an unfavourable report from Bill Scales [2009], on 12
November the Victorian Parliament passed an Act to dismiss Brimbank Council leaving the council to be operated by
State-appointed administrators for almost seven years through to the regular 2016 council election date.
After a year in the job, the administrators decided they needed more local intelligence to inform their deliberations and
chose to set up advisory committees to consider particular areas of council responsibility. The first quarterly meeting of
Economic Development and Transport Committee was held in May 2011 and within six months that committee
progressed to receiving a presentation from the authority charged with delivering the RRL and from council officers on a
market oriented project they had been developing: Sunshine Rising.
—Smith, Tony, 2017 "Brimbank Rising:
From a History of Failed Local Councils, Officers and
Administrators Promote and Support Sunshine Rising"
in Remaking Cities Conference Proceedings 2018
Staying on in Joan’s house
was easier that sorting out
her records, so got directly
involved with local History
Society, Living Museum and
Volcanic Plains grasslands.
Supportive neighbours,
since long gone, opened a
door to aboriginal activists
and helped our 2nd defence
of Errington Reserve, with
old community centre there
soon upgraded to St. Albans
Arts & Community Centre.

11. In the days after retirement birthday from the regularly paid workforce, launched Kororoit Institute through symposium
hosted by Engineers Australia (Victoria). Two well attended open days were backed up by an internal planning workshop.
The first Future Day fell in the middle, having been adopted under Adam Ford’s Science, Technology and the Future.
So we co-promoted and were able to attract Josie Taylor to chain panel and environmental planner Amanda Dodd.

12. Informed Dissent
no secrets and no need for secrets
transparency facilitating ecosystemic diversity sans accumulation & authority
Rebellion
won't be enough
Civilisation faces an
existential crisis of its own making
Need to stop thinking in terms of timeless objectives
and start seeing the interplay of dynamic processes

13. Jason Ball made an impact at
2012 Global Atheist Convention

16. Every step of the blind watchmaker must be viable.
Only mobile animals get to choose a path to meet concurrent desires.
There is no shortage of animal intelligence, but only humans have adapted manipulative
fingers and recursive communications coding to dominate much of the life world, driving
consumption at rates beyond the capacity of the rest of the natural world to offset.

18. Moonee Ponds Creek and
the City of Moonee Valley
right in the firing line of
contested East West Link
Photo Walk via Royal Park
escarpment set pattern for
new environmental activism

20. This presentation invokes a personal journey to
knowing that there must be better ways.
It is grounded in rich experience of natural and urban worlds, of supportive community,
of profound imaginings. It struggled with others' prejudices long before admitting its own.
It learnt than not all dollars are created equal, that schools aren't primarily about
education, and that systems analysis and design skills came naturally.

21. While it can be hard to get
a half decent crowd out for
anything seen as local issues,
broader environmental call
outs get impressive numbers

23. Lynne Kelly’s books reveal
utility and prehistorical
context of Orality.
Marches asserting that it
Always was, always will be
Aboriginal Land
brought a more co-operative
approach from VicPol
March celebrating NAIDOC
attracts even more support

25. Then building on the social optimism and confidence of the '60s and '70s,
in rapid succession from the start of the 1980s:
• confounded online databases with role playing games to reveal the political
possibilities of Public Information, Communications and Access
• learnt just how deep colonial prejudice runs but that (sometimes) bureaucrats could
be told what to do when their system had conspicuously broken
• saw government stupidly demand that a rapidly developing industry speak with one
voice across conflicting interests of importers, local manufacturers and professionals
• fell into cellular automata and other uses of graphical displays, and, after some
things that made sense went nowhere,
• threw away all prior assumptions and found the first burst of international academic
interest in complex systems.

31. After 20% of 1986-89 around the world learning that we weren't quite the
first to imagine what would become the interweb, and that, no matter how
culturally close we seemed, such a project could not be driven from even
the world's most liveable city; dreams of excessive wealth gave way to
commercialising our learnings on the modest scale we could live with.

33. March for Science
with well known faces
in the front row

34. And some miscellany,
each part of big story:
Megafauna Festival dig
Responding to tragedy
Lets Make a Park
Volcano Dreaming in
DWELP HQ window

35. Other presentations within this project explore those and subsequent
learnings, with many specifics gathered in Slaughtering Sacred Cows to be
presented to another group in October while Informed Dissent focuses on a
particular history and the giant leaps now demanded.
This joins the Supervenience network from its introductory Too Funny for
Words to its concluding take on Accepting Cosmological Responsibility.
SUPERVENIENCEhow emergent minds and money seize power over matter
Is to Ought beyond Exploring Possibilities

38. The very survival of a lot more than human civilisation, not just
turning the ship around, depends on women, indigenous people, the
marginalised, engaged elders, precocious youth and other earthly
animals not just joining the table but assuming collective leadership.
Adversary systems have facilitated wider participation than the
autocratic traditions that dominate recorded history, but it hasn't
taken long for nefarious interests to learn to game representative
democracy and the chaos-disposing Rule of Law, strangling
challenges in layers of secrecy, administration and political economy.

40. Letting one pic
from a rally in
Brooklyn stand
for West Gate
Tunnel frustration
and connection
with lower Stony
before the fire
Recent launch of
Recovery Plan,
Anti–Toxic Waste
Alliance rally
Meanwhile,
Upper Stony
Transformation
project stalls

42. Across the intervening decades we have worked with all
levels of government and politics as they accelerated their
self strangulation, while isolated pioneers took seriously the
application of complexity theory to knowledge management.
But half a century on from a cluster of warnings that helped
turn the hopes of the '60s into the liberations of the '70s, we
can no longer avert our gaze from the existential debt due to
unaccounted externalities and enshrined greed.
Since then we have sanctified industrial complexes
operating opaquely behind a shield of commercial
confidentiality and censorious distraction, but from deep
within which open transparent collaborative technologies
emerged to provide a sliver of hope.

44. Need to work
with Maribyrnong
City Council on
Stony, against on
Footscray Park
All pales in light
of Extinction
Rebellion and
inescapable
evidence that
prospects are
even worse

47. Encouraging
diverse groups
tacking NE Link,
from transport &
waterways angles
And another EES
investigation with
same key players
ignoring changing
world/community

49. The emergence of social media empowers a wave of well informed
challenge to recalcitrant authority and stop-at-nothing
accumulators buying influence, with the divide between those who
care and those who professionally ignore more stark by the day.
But even the best-intentioned are too easily lured by fake news
into concocted outrage which focuses on surface-level distractions
while protecting the deeper causes from effective scrutiny. A daily
diet of personal tragedy reports keeps billions imagining each
could be their own personal tragedy.
If anything that makes life worth living is to survive, we must not
allow the collapse of current systems to be replaced by more of the
same, not even just one more time.

52. Questions? Suggestions!