Hosted by Tessa Leon. With special guests Pink Shorts Press and Sahil Choujar.
Surely there’s more to our humanity than the ability to select boxes with traffic lights.
While it’s getting very tempting to fall down the rabbit hole where robots do our admin, help make hard decisions, and validate all our suggestions, deep down we know what we really need are veggie gardens.
Today, we’re more digitally connected than ever, but our society is also experiencing a pandemic of loneliness. Hyper-local real-life communities will be a touchstone of the resilient future we need. But how does this look in practice?
An analogue rebellion is rising. People are finding solace in film cameras, flip phones, cassettes are for sale on Smith St in Collingwood (so you know it must be cool). This nostalgia for a pre-digital era might reflect a rejection of artificially generated creativity. Artificial ideas. Artificial neatness. And how come the robots get to make art before they spend their 20’s waiting tables and sleeping on couches?
At the same time, online spaces are crucial to help us organise and facilitate connections that flow into IRL relationships. We need to use these digital tools wisely, so how can we stay human in today’s online world?
Let’s talk about it.
Join Margot Lloyd and Emily Hart of Pink Shorts Press, alongside Sahil Choujar, Director of Tech For Good. Hosted by Tessa Leon, come discuss how we can foster connection, trust, and creativity together without typing that prompt in a chat bar.
Margot Lloyd
Margot has wrangled commas and characters as an editor for over ten years. She’s collaborated with award-winning authors across fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s books at Griffith Review, University of Queensland Press, Text Publishing and Wakefield Press. She loves talking about publishing and editing wherever she is in the world, including on Creative Australia delegations to India and New York.
Emily Hart
Emily has published and edited bestsellers by chefs, politicians and illustrators. She was named the book industry’s Rising Star in 2022, and has worked at Hardie Grant Books, Wakefield Press, Dillons Bookshop and XXVI. As well as bookselling, ghostwriting and art teaching, she also has experience (and a degree) in marketing and brand voice.
Sahil Choujar
Tech For Good
Sahil started coding at ten, after Jurassic Park convinced him dinosaurs were real and computers were magic; he's still working on telling the difference. Actor, dramaturg and software engineer, he's spent twenty years building tech for the physical world, including smart water dispensers that have kept two million plastic bottles out of landfills. Now he's nurturing a sustainable, privacy-focused, micro-footprint AI practice, majority-owned by the earth itself.