Play, mulligans, and the difference between games and play

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This week I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka (Website | LinkedIn) — a self-described “Earthian living on and learning from the Country of the Bidjigal, Gweagal and Kamay clans of the Dharawal Nation, in Sydney, Australia.”

Mat is a moral imagineer, social entrepreneur, UX designer, educator, artist, and public policy advocate. Cofounder (with Alja Isakovic) of the the inquiry-driven social venture Tethix and mission steward (with Gemma Palmer) of Collective Futurecrafting, Mat has over twenty years’ of product, project, and program management experience, designing and running real-world relational experiments everywhere from startups to federal government initiatives, Fortune 500 tech companies, and grassroots communities. He also makes delightfully weird code-as-art projects like The Ministry of Futility, a bureaucratic adventure game where players navigate a maze of pointless decisions.

In short, he’s precisely the kind of incompressible generalist I look to as a model for how to live wisely in our age of accelerating weirdness.

Mat and I met in 2024 in the group chat that spawned the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server and immediately realized a common thread ran through both our lives: a commitment to fostering our collective imagination aimed at ecologically-grounded, mutualistic, more-than-human futures.

In today’s episode we riff on themes from the Tethix blog and podcast, including:

• How do we embrace the lunacy of tech?• What should we do with the time that new technologies save? (if they even do) and• How do we nuture weird online communal gardens where we can play together?

We also draw from the Tethix codesign principles, product ethos, and elemental ethics documents.

Along the way we explore the fundamental problems of scale and institutional misalignment, the value of ritual, and the return to embodiment.

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✨ Music: “Scalar Reconfigurations”

Chapters

00:00 Intro

06:02 Starting Over With Play

08:05 Mat’s Origin Story

13:56 Online Performance and Anxiety

18:24 How Tethix Began

40:07 Teaching The State about The Duty of Care

46:26 Collective Futurecrafting from Circles to Bioregions

47:05 Start With What Exists

48:34 Pivot Beyond Tech Ethics

50:08 Weird Gardens for Online Community

57:42 Composting The Leviathan

01:01:48 Trauma, Empathy, Care

01:13:11 Agency Rituals and Closing

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