Mara Dettmann is an advertising and marketing strategist with a focus on cultural marketing, technology and the ways people use emerging tools to connect with one another.

Her work sits in the space between digital innovation and human behaviour, looking beyond the technology itself to understand how it shapes culture, identity, work and the stories people tell about themselves.

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This conversation explores the evolving relationship between technology, culture and human connection. Mara reflects on the future of work, the rise of AI, the changing shape of creative careers, and the kinds of human skills that may become more valuable as automation becomes more capable.

The discussion moves from gig work and the “weird job economy” to the value of friction, imperfection, and difficulty in our lives. Alongside this, there’s a broader reflection on storytelling, optimisation culture, control, and the ways people try to find stability and individuality in a world that often feels increasingly chaotic.

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What makes this conversation compelling is that it avoids treating technology as either utopian or catastrophic. Instead, it focuses on the behaviours forming around it - the ways people seek control, optimise themselves, simplify complexity and increasingly try to remove friction from everyday life.

But throughout the discussion there’s a recurring question underneath all of that: what do we lose when everything becomes too efficient?

Whether discussing AI, fitness culture, automation or storytelling, we kept returning to the idea that discomfort, unpredictability and even inconvenience are often the things that make experiences memorable, human and meaningful.

Rather than resisting technology outright, Mara approaches it as something that reveals human nature more clearly - our anxieties, ambitions, contradictions and desire for connection.

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