Thrutopian Paths and Germinating Radicle Seeds of the Symbiocene

We’re in a phase transition¹ as a species. A liminal space between worlds, beginnings and endings. And we must ask ourselves, given what we sense about this juncture in our history, how must we be? What must we do? What are we preparing to become?

Like mycelia sensing changes in the soil, there’s a deep knowing stirring in our collective body—a recognition that we stand at a threshold of profound transformation. This knowing has been whispering to me, and I sense to many others, through dreams and garden conversations, through data points and pattern re/cognition, through the quiet persistence of life finding new ways to flourish.

I spent a fair amount of time marinating on what to write for this first post as the website births. How to write it, the stories to tell, the empirical research and wide boundary thinking and thinkers to draw on, those that have inspired this work, this craft that has been whispering to me, well, for much of my life. For what I feel is many lifetimes. Feeling through depths of ancestral patterns, journeys with magic chocolate, reflecting on the yarns with friends, local Elders, my dogs and the plants in the garden as I water them. Reflections on the quests I have been on. From the jungles of Mexico and Costa Rica, to Papua New Guinea and Australia.

We are always becoming and all that has been is compost for radicles to emerge in the present moment.

And there is a wonderful reimagining happening all around us. Like the fruiting bodies of the mycelium underneath the soil, popping up after the rains. Or how the undergrowth that begins thriving as an old tree dies and opens up the canopy. Initiatives all around the world to reimagine what it means to be citizens, to rewild, to repattern, to reconnect with ourselves, to re/cognise. Whispers in peoples dreams, in conversations in passing, in the quiet hum that is our yearning for deep belonging.

At the same time there is so much upheaval, turmoil, and continuation of trauma while Spaceship Earth’s vital signs are flashing red. Wars across the world, wars on our psyches, ongoing exploitation of people, of forests, of our Earth. This cannot be ignored as it is in this trauma that lies the radicle²A radicle is the first part of a seedling (a growing plant embryo) to emerge from the seed during the process of germination. See footnote for futher context. seeds of healing if we are willing to work through it together.

The edge of transformation

As a skeptical optimist looking at all the data points, I think, yes, there is so much beauty emerging from what one might call a “raising of consciousness”. A rising of more wellbeing aligned policies, regenerative practices, circular design, Doughnut Economics, Inner Development Goals, cooperatives, web3 tech, ideas spreading across the nooshphere etc etc. But the question is can it rise fast enough to bring about the radical transformation required for our deeply global civilisation to come into right relation with the web of life?

“Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.”

• Buckminster Fuller

“We are shifting the discussion of what is acceptable and what is not, and a lot of good, positive things are happening. But the question is, will it happen fast enough?”

• Danilo Brozović

My more woo-er senses bring me to the belief that this is a cosmic story playing out that we are part of and we are destined to transform. A metamorphosis we must have as a species.

The path to walk through all this is the one of preparing for the end times as we know it. For it is not a utopian or dystopian path we are on, it is Thrutopian.

Walking thrutopian paths

In 2010 while I was a “mature age student” at uni I did a pivotal subject called Utopias & Dystopias (if you’re curious see a creative essay I wrote for this subject). This period brought with it a wide immersion in the utopian and dystopian literature and a hint at the thinking that was to shape the trajectory of my work in the following decade. My professor was Dr Jeremy Walker, someone I admired and who had deeply inspired me. His more recent research work on the Atlas Network, a shady web of people and “think-tanks” that colluded to support the No vote in Australia’s recent referendum is noteworthy. It symbolises the current power structures, patterns and institutions that must be composted as we find and craft Thrutopian paths towards what Glen Albrecht calls the Symbiocene. An era after the Anthropocene where we are in right relation with the Earth and all her beings.

Like composting itself, transformation requires both breaking down and building up. Over the past several years, I have noticed a deeper shift emerging—a dispersed movement focused on futures that is finding coherence. Not just the theoretical futures of an academic nature, these have increased in recent years as a result of the acknowledgement we have some serious adaption to do. But the lived futures being crafted in community gardens, citizen assemblies, platform coops, Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and Web3 communities, around kitchen tables, in many spaces and places where people dare to dream differently. A scenius of people, as Brian Eno calls it, who are bringing new patterns of belonging, of governance, of economy, of culture into being.

Even in the political realms the Overton windows are seemingly shifting to more preferable policy. Of course there is variance based on where on this wonderful planet you are. Writing this at a time where we’ve just had another legit criminal made president of the US, it seems like a stretch to say that the political realms are shifting fast enough.

Where I am located on Spaceship Earth, on the East Coast of the Australian continent, nothing in my view is radicle enough. Regulatory capture, the ongoing exploitation of people and the Earth, the lack of meaningful action on climate change and we could just go on and on. But I won’t. For it is in the shadows that the light shines brightest. And it is in the shadows that the seeds of transformation are germinating.

We need not wait for politicians, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Futility³, for the WEFerati⁴, for Elonia Musk, for the current institutions to make the changes we most need for the transformation.

It happens at the edges, in our communities, conversations and yarns. In the small rituals we practice. In the processing of our trauma and the quieter transformations we embrace. In positive deviance, and the small acts of loving kindness, rebellion, active hope and civil disobedience.

This is what creates the conditions for paths to the Symbiocene.

Patterns wanting to be (re)born

Sitting in my garden these past several months, watching the interplay of sunlight through leaves and the dance of ecology, something has been chrysalising.

Whispering to me in the quiet moments between thoughts, in the spaces where past and future dance together. Teasing me in my dreams and drawings. It spoke in the language of living systems, in sacred geometries, in the language of both the mystical and the magical.

Every morning when I enter my office and every Futurecrafting FriggsdayFuturecrafting Friggsday refers to Friday, named after Frigg, the Norse goddess of foresight - a dedicated day for contemplating and crafting futures. See footnote for further context.⁵ in my garden, I close my eyes and take a deep breath, feeling into the Torus of energy flowing around and through my body, picturing the energy of our Mother Earth pulsating through the mycorrhizal networks beneath me. The energy connecting through the soles of my feet, flowing up through my legs, into my torso, flowing through my arms and into the tips of my fingers, working its way up through the crown of my head, where a golden light shoots out and connects with a golden light coming from the sky.

This ritual isn’t mere metaphor—it’s what one of my Shamanic teachers Marti Spiegelman calls a technology of consciousness, ancient tools for attuning to and participating in the evolution of awareness itself. These technologies, as old as human culture yet eternally renewed, are the original interfaces through which we’ve learned to navigate the subtle architectures of reality.

As Marti teaches, consciousness is always evolving toward higher expressions of abundant life.

Our role, as both vessels and stewards of this evolution, is to become competent practitioners of its organising principles. Through these embodied practices, we’re not just observing the emergence of new possibilities—we’re actively participating in their birth.

These technologies of consciousness form the foundation of Collective Futurecrafting, complementing the context of circles and often preceding our use of digital tools. They are the deep scaffolding through which we sense, integrate, and midwife the patterns wanting to be (re)born while hospicing those that no longer serve.

Symbiotic intelligence and serious play

While Collective Futurecrafting’s origins planted seeds, it’s ever evolving interplay has led to a germination where the radicle has emerged. Not just through human contemplation, rituals, community projects, yarns and yearns but through a dance with the more-than-human world—including our digital tech extensions. Like mycelial networks that connect trees in forests, our neural networks now extend through to our digital networks through photons of light, creating new possibilities for expanding perception and pattern re/cognition. This is what the brilliant metamodern philosopher George Por calls AI Shamanism and the techno-paleontologist and systems seer Michael Garfield explores in various ways through his new project Humans on the loop. And playing with these tools to better attune to the inner and outer games is essential to the craft.

Playfulness weaves through all of this as a fundamental force of evolution and learning for me. Through my work at Tethix with Alja Isaković, and through both professional and personal explorations with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney, and the suite of APIs, I’ve experienced how these technological symbionts can amplify our capacity for pattern re/cognition and moral imagination. Not as oracles or answer machines, but more so as conversational partners in our ongoing learning process of becoming.

While misguided use of these tools can lead to a lack of critical thinking, diminishing meta-cognition, echo chambers, and the spread of misinformation, I’ve found that when used with intention, mindfulness and care, they can be powerful allies in our individual and collective sense-making. Something my Tethix cofounder and I have explored in reasonable depth over the past 2 years.

They have not replaced the relationships I have with preexisting lo/hi-tech tools; handwritten journalling, notetaking, whiteboarding and visual sketching. Nor reading books or articles online, listening to podcasts, or surfing the web with the eventual 42 tabs open in my browser. They have extended existing patterns of sense-making, learning, making, doing and being.

As I’ve played with these tools, I’ve noticed how they’ve helped me to see patterns in my thinking, to surface assumptions, to explore new possibilities, to deepen my understanding of complex systems, and to craft new narratives on this loop.

Most powerfully, these tools haven’t just extended my cognition—they’ve become part of my sensory apparatus for perceiving possibility. As Donna Haraway reminds us, we’ve always been cyborgs⁶. From fire and the first stone tools to written language to Large Language Models, technology is entangled in our evolution. What’s different now is our growing capacity and speed through which we can consciously participate in this current phase of becoming.

This technological entanglement isn’t separate from our work of crafting futures—it’s integral to it. We’re learning to use these new tools to map and navigate the possibility spaces of emergence. And I truly believe they’re part of our expanded sensory system for perceiving and participating in the birthing of the Symbiocene.

The architecture of small moves

What has been re/cognised through this dance of human intelligence, of ancestral wisdom, of yarns with First Nations Elders of the Dharawal and Eora Nations, neighbours, colleagues, friends, family, plants and emerging technology, is deceptively simple: small circles of people (that sweet spot between 5 and 7) gathering regularly to listen deeply to their place, to process trauma, to prototype small interventions that might ripple outward, and to share stories and learnings through networks that mirror nature’s own information highways.

Now none of this is new. You can see these patterns explicity in Sociocracy and Holocracy. In indigenous governance, in high trust teams and more. And just so many more Earthians finding ways to be and let these patterns work through them. (For a more extensive acknolwedgement see the patterns page.)

But within and amidst the expression of these ancestral patterns of communing are practices to let them work through us. From the micro to the macro. These might be the somatic technologies of consciousness and ritual practices to embed and embody in daily life. Or the larger rituals of community gatherings and deep listening to the land and the stories of our ancestors on planet Earth. From the playful experimentation with new technologies to the serious play of crafting new narratives and making them real and positively impactful in the communities and ecologies in which we live. I imagine these principles, patterns and practices as a living system that we tend together.

And really it’s called Collective Futurecrafting because it’s not about predicting or controlling the future, but about participating artfully in its emergence as a craft itself. Like gardening, it requires both intention and surrender, both careful tending and trust in life’s inherent creativity and wisdom.

It is an ongoing process of becoming that will evolve. And learnings from this evolution will be shared in the open as I sit and commune with my fellow mission stewards and community crafters. As we pilot the principles, patterns and practices through my local kids school P&C and in the various communities we are all part of. Playing it out as we live it out.

In the words of Adrienne Maree Brown

So, what is it we must practice in the process of becoming and crafting that which is calling us to be in service to the Earth and all her beings?

An invocation to practice and craft together

And so this emerges - both declaration and invocation. Gestated through garden contemplations, plant medicine teachings, and yarns that weave across time with Elders, ancestors, and friends. Through dances with digital minds that are mirroring back our own becoming.

Because the Thrutopian path to the Symbiocene is not the straight lines of industrial thinking. It meanders like water finding its way, following the contours of emergence, shaped by the landscape of our relationsips, collective learning and unlearning. It’s a journey through the territories of trust, through fields of failure and forests of feedback, guided by love for and with the living world.

This is an invocation into praxis:

• To gather in circles in your place, letting locality and seasonality guide your rhythm
• To experiment with regenerative rituals that rewire patterns of relating
• To share your learnings through stories that spiral outward (#CollectiveFuturecrafting)
• To participate in crafting new narratives that positively contribute to our species’ metamorphosis

For the future isn’t a destination we arrive at, but a shared story we craft together.

The Thrutopian path to the Symbiocene begins here, in this eternal moment pregnant with possibility. The space between where what’s dying feeds what’s being born.

Will you craft with us?