A Long-Expected Party
Bilbo Baggins vanished on his eleventy-first birthday. That was a good thing, I thought, as I peered into the Bodleian exhibition cabinet to see the hand-scratched, one-page summary of the great story that Tolkien wanted to tell. Bilbo’s vanishing marked the transposition from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings; a shift from a beloved children’s book to a world trilogy that we needed.
Tolkien took a lot of pages to tell us one of the simplest, and most powerful lessons you can learn. Let go. We needed all those pages, and we still do, because the message is so hard.
If you are ever fortunate to find an idea, then you must know that it will never be yours forever, or even for long. If you find more than one, then more so. Ideas only become good ones when people wrestle with them—even baulk at them—and then clothe themselves in them. It is in that wrestle, tussle, tumble, that ideas become good ones. The very best ones are those that everyone else thinks that they discovered.
Lots of people will say that the ANU flexible double degrees, the Admissions, Scholarships and Accommodation (ASA) project and Kambri are mine. They are not. They have always been legacies for the collective audacity, care, and investment of everyone who helped to make them what they are. Academics. Administrators. Staff from all levels and backgrounds from across the University.
When you let go, you make it possible for new ideas to happen, and for you to be different and to grow. You also make it possible for others to find and to shepherd new ideas, and to grow. You don’t vanish, you become different. Humans are much better than hobbits in that aspect.
Tolkien’s summary resonated with me not simply because of the story he wanted to tell. He had a big story that spilled into multiple volumes. He needed to tell it. All from a sketchy map and a one-page summary.
It rang a chord because the book that I thought I was writing to completion this year went from being a standalone statement to being part of a much bigger story about the relationship between my twin loves of history and philosophy. My interdisciplinary space is no safe harbour. People shoot one another in the name of history. Whole families have been wiped out because of history. Moreover, our digital world and selves are what they are perhaps because of histories that go without saying. Every algorithm builds a world from a past, and we need to be conscious of that to build a better and a fairer world.
So I am stepping down after seven years of service as DVCA at ANU at the end of 2018 to let new ideas happen and to grow. Those of you who follow me on twitter already know that book two of four—on how ethics can be found in the size and the scale of histories—is underway. I’ll blog my swansong to Kambri once more this year.
My blog will be back in a new form next year. I’ll be blogging my first thoughts on book three—historicizing artificial intelligence—from the ground up. I hope that you will all continue to baulk, tussle and tug at my ideas, and to help me to say what needs to be said about a potentially new world.















