I’d like to introduce you to a technology system built on the Barwon River near the Queensland/ New South Wales border. It’s in the middle of the town of Brewarrina. Today, it’s an archaeological site. Nearly 400 metres long, it comprises a series of stones, rock walls and channels. It’s the largest and oldest set of fish traps in Australia.
What this system did was create the capacity to trap fish going upstream or downstream, and to hold them in pens in cool running water – when the river was running both low and high. The reason for this trap here, on this river, was that it was a meeting place. It was a site where multiple Indigenous nations and families gathered, and where ceremonies, ritual and knowledge were built and exchanged. For that to happen, you needed to have food at scale, but it also meant people could gather again next year and for years to come.
The most remarkable thing about this system? Its age. For thousands and thousands of years, people used, adapted and modified this system, and even today, its custodians, the Ngemba people, still fish from the rock walls. Imagine building a technical system that would last for millennia – most of us are lucky if we build a system that lasts for 10. The Brewarrina fish traps (enshrined on the Australian National Heritage list in 2005) also reveal a deep understanding of technologies – in this case lithics – and an understanding of the ecosystem, hydrology, fish biology and an environment that was changing over this period of time.
Those three pieces – technical, cultural and ecological – are incredibly significant. As we think about building technical systems, we need to build them with multiple pieces in mind – not just the technology, but the ecological piece, and the human piece. It’s a useful way of framing how current technical systems should and could unfold.
In 2016, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published a chart that crystallised a conversation that had been around for a while about the notion of a Fourth Industrial Revolution. The WEF gave that conversation form, structure and a back story. It made it part of a series of earlier waves of history and waves of economic and technical transformation. In doing that the WEF stabilised the context of that history and its consequences, and also made a fetish of the technical systems. And in some ways they made quite mysterious the consequences of those revolutionary transformations to human society, to culture. What’s also mysterious about
