Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Upping the ante
As it turned out, Centrebet’s move online – coupled with the many other betting innovations it pioneered – led exactly to where Daffy hoped it would: a prodigious pot of gold. He says the company went from taking ‘fifty or sixty bets in one day’ to taking ‘five or 600,000 bets on a Saturday night from all over the world’. By the turn of the millennium, its annual turnover was in excess of $100 million and it had become – in the words of Piers Morgan, its then general manager – ‘one of the leading sports betting organisations in Australia, if not the world’.
The geography of respect
Starting in 2019, Parks Victoria closed or restricted access for climbers to much of Gariwerd-Grampians while it assessed cultural heritage and worked with Traditional Owners and conservation experts to develop the Greater Gariwerd Landscape Management Plan (GGLMP). These closures drew strong reactions from many climbers. They saw Parks Victoria’s actions as impinging on their rights, and its apparent focus on climbing as a risk to cultural heritage and environmental integrity as overblown.
In the fullness of time
Our devices and data are more than extensions of our physical bodies. The so-called ‘human-centric’ approach to designing wearable and carriable devices means that they disrupt traditional divisions between work and leisure, production and consumption. It’s difficult not to feel the incursion of work-logics into leisure times and spaces as normal. Stretched for time, couples, families and friendship groups are starting to organise themselves using tools like Slack, Jira, Trello and Asana – that is, in the same way as workplaces.
‘A world we must defend’
Schools across Australia banned Pokémon in an attempt to regain control, but this only caused the franchise mania to intensify. Now Pokémon wasn’t just fun – it was also illegal, which meant it was dangerous, which meant trading cards on campus made you a risk-taker, which meant you were seen as fearless, which meant that you were dangerous.
Women’s work
In the 1990s, increasing fiscal and social rationalisation shifted responsibility for leisure from the state to the individual and from the public to the private sphere. Leisure studies, with its emphasis on providing research and data to inform leisure quality, accessibility and access, was rationalised to enhance the ‘bottom line’ of universities that were now attuned to the pragmatic desires of industry sectors.
Oh, the shame of it
Modern leisure emerged in the West in the early 1700s when French and English cities developed new forms of society built around urban amenities – parks, cafés, fairs and shopping districts – servicing an expanding class of people with discretionary time and income. Public museums as storehouses of national culture appeared a little later in the nineteenth century where they contributed to the development of so-called ‘rational recreation’, a species of serious leisure intended to ‘civilise the masses’.
Once upon a self
For Plato, most notably, drama and poetry were to be regarded with intense moral and political suspicion: they made malevolent characters intelligible to their audiences; they use up our real moral sentiments by arousing them for fictional characters; and by depicting certain traits and tropes they risked seducing audiences into acting them out themselves.
On undoing
I am forty before I visit Europe, still ignorant that a century before me my great-grandfather had walked those same cobblestones. That he had fought in a war that did not reward him with any meaningful welcome on his return home. Now that I know, I yearn to go back and breathe that air, knowing that William was there.
Into the swamp
Some versions of environmentalism understandably encourage an almost Swiftian misanthropy, with the ecological collapse framed as the inevitable response of nature to a pestiferous humanity, the only species that, by its very existence, destroys all that it touches. But maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t have to be that way.
A Martuwarra Serpent stirs in its sleep…
Aboriginal people are usually confident in the enduring nature of knowledge (not just belief) because that other mob down the road has the same story, or a similar one. It is a multispecies and layered story, and that is precisely what makes it creative, unlike so much of continuing Western materialist ideas and practices.
Everybody loves beginnings
Beginnings are a breaking of silence that give some indication as to why the silence ought to have been broken, and the prospects of such a breaking. Why should I have broken my silence and begun this discourse? And why should the difficulties of breaking this silence, difficulties that for some reason I must enact in order to ameliorate, appear so manifestly predictable to me?
The emperor’s new opponent
Ask many of my colleagues to define AI and they will tell you…that it’s about getting computers to do tasks that humans require intelligence to perform. Or, to put it another way, it’s about faking human performance on intelligent tasks.
