David Ronfeldt: While most readings in this series are about the malignant forms of tribalism polarizing America, this one is about an attempt to foster a positive transnational form called “neo-tribes”. The reading is by a collective named NeoTribes, writing “NeoTribal Emergence” (2016).

NeoTribes draws its inspiration from philosopher Daniel Quinn’s writings recommending “new tribalism” as a way for people to move beyond the ruinous effects of modern civilization and chart a course to a better life. NeoTribes is also associated with the pro-commons P2P (peer-to-peer) movement. The neo-tribal orientation is thus on the Left — but an innovative kind of Left that combines classic tribal and new information-age network types of ideas. And while classic tribes were built around ethnic identities and sought to maximize pride, these neo-tribes are being built around work and lifestyle identities and seek to maximize purpose.

NeoTribes agree that tribes were our earliest form of organization, and that “human beings have evolved to live in tribal society as opposed to mass society.” They also believe that, because modern civilization has resulted in such untenable waste and destruction, “we’re in the throes of a re-tribalizing moment.” So their motto is “The future is tribal”. As they see it, “”In many ways the “neo-tribal” moment is being ushered in by a deep longing to escape cultures that belong to a bygone era.” In a sense, this means starting societies over by reverting back to the tribal form — but NeoTribes is future-oriented, and it means to accomplish more than that.

At present, NeoTribes consists of five cutting-edge transnational collectives: OuiShare, Wisdom Hackers, Agora, Sistema B, and Perestroika. But they are just getting going, and will campaign to expand this year.

Here’re a few passages about the above:

“We are a transnational collective of community builders, facilitators, strategists, entrepreneurs, provocateurs, researchers, experience designers and social architects from diverse tribes, serving an emerging paradigm. We delve into different forms of community, networks and subcultures to reveal best practices, tools and experiential knowledge; to “re-mix”, share and apply within modern ways of living and organizing. At our core is an effort to create visibility, shared learning and relationship between emerging pockets of insurgency.”

“We as NeoTribes, an emerging collective of neo-tribal communities, have come together to ask some timely questions and create a frame through which we all may continue to develop common language, wisdom and practical know-how. We are experimental communities searching for viable alternative forms of living in an era of deep transition. We are digital natives yearning for an analogue reality that is marked by the physicality of existence. We strive to align our pace of life with natural rhythms that make space for love, trust, belonging and solidarity – values too often absent from mass society. Since September 2015, we’ve been gathering in digital meeting rooms as well as face-to-face for learning journeys in Brazil, Berlin and Costa Rica, forging bonds of trust between our communities, and making space for reflecting on who we are, where we are heading and why we feel the way we do about the present moment.” “Over the course of the next 6-months we will embark on a learning journey, crafting and curating a cookbook of practical “how to” wisdom from over 50+ neo-tribes around key themes related to community design, group practices and rituals, methods of self-organization and facilitation, and tools for governance, financing, and mutualism.”

One quality I like about NeoTribes is their insistence on combining individualism and collectivism (or mutualism). This is consistent not only with P2P theory’s concept of “collective individualism”, but also with TIMN theory’s view that all four of TIMN’s cardinal forms of organization (tribes, institutions, markets, networks) and thus societies as a whole involve both individualism and collectivism — often different kinds and in different ways at different times, but always a combination nonetheless.

Here are a few quotes showing this:

“[We] aren’t naïvely cocooning ourselves in “Cumbaya collectivism.” We recognize the human need for a community where one can pursue belonging in the context of a collective, while also remaining autonomous, self-expressive and unique. We affirm that each individual should be witnessed and understood, without being pressured to disappear into group identity or camouflage her authenticity. We believe in the power of individual autonomy, and also in the power of mutualism. Many of our tribes are finding new ways to mutualize resources and build commons in the forms of shared operational infrastructure, housing, work spaces, food, and so on – without demanding that anyone martyr themselves for a higher cause.”

“In constructing our communities, many of us think about how to create a place of shared identity, while also maintaining inclusivity. Traditional tribes are often very closed. You inherit an identity based on kinship and the place you were born. But neo-tribes most often represent your “chosen tribe.” You opt in, and can have multiple tribal allegiances or cycle through different tribes in a lifetime.”

This insistence by NeoTribes on being for both individualized and mutualist approaches contrasts with the canard I’ve heard from tribalized conservatives that they are for individualism while liberals /progressives are for collectivism. This canard has awful problems: First, all the liberals I know are for individualism too. Second, conservatives may oppose the collectivism they see in big government and the welfare state, but they like other kinds of collectivism — e.g., family, community, patriotism, etc., not to mention that their tribalism is itself a kind of collectivism. Third, as I noted above, all progress-oriented societies require mixtures of individualism and collectivism, otherwise they cease progressing. This is another area of doctrinal thinking where the tribalization of conservatism has led to a defective defense of a false dichotomy (not to mention that it provides further evidence that conservatives think mainly in terms of boundaries, liberals mainly in terms of horizons).

But to get back to the NeoTribes’ initiative, here’s what else I appreciate: They are for openness, in transnational networked ways, not isolation and exclusivity. They recognize a need for “alternative forms of governance”, suited to a next phase of social evolution, “without delusions of separateness to entirely “escape the system”.” Indeed, they recognize “the interdependence of personal well-being and structural forces”.

Furthermore, they prefer to focus on local matters, yet feel part of a global consciousness. In their words, “We long to root down in local contexts, and often find more pride in the cities that we contribute to than the stale rhetoric of participation offered at a national level. At the same time, our digital infrastructure and social media has imparted to us a global consciousness.”

I see some overlap in all this with TIMN theory about past, present, and future social evolution — but I shall note three points only lightly: First, by combining tribal and network impulses, NeoTribes reflects the TIMN dynamic that each new form starts its rise with a tribal impulse, before it matures and professionalizes around its own distinctive principles. Second, NeoTribes reflects a TIMN dynamic that says efforts will be made to adapt prior forms to new needs — and the neo-tribes movement surely is such an adaptation, suited to the Information age. Third, TIMN is partly and ultimately about the rise of the +N network form and the creation of a new sector based around it. This may be a commons sector, but I think it’s still too early to tell. NeoTribes has aspects that fit this, but I don’t see that it corresponds fully to +N.

Thus, I find the neo-tribes concept quite positive and appealing. Yet, as a TIMN quadriformist, I should temper and qualify my interest. Even so, it’s good to read about a tribalism that isn’t bitter and vengeful, bad for society.

I shall hope that Michel Bauwens and other P2P and NeoTribes proponents eventually take a look at this post.

The post Readings about the tribalization of America: Neo-Tribes. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

History provides ample proof. For as long as there has been art, artists have worked together to support each others’ projects and sustain their livelihoods. Early examples include the medieval guilds of Europe, where artisans such as stonemasons and glaziers worked together to meet their common needs. Artist collectives have also been around for centuries. Contemporary versions range in size from just a few members to scores who produce art individually or collaboratively and exhibit their works in shows together.

The tradition of artists banding together is alive and well today. Below are three examples of artist forming worker cooperatives to support themselves and their work at a time of increasing economic precarity.

1. Stocksy United

Photo: Screenshot of Stocksy United’s home page, a collage of sample curated images.

Perhaps the most well-known example is Stocksy United. As an online stock photo image company, they’re also one of the largest artist cooperatives around with over 900 photographer-owners. Nathan Schneider, scholar in residence of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and a leading expert on platform cooperatives, notes that Stocksy has created a “formidable cooperative platform by sharing ownership with photographers — enabling the business to put artistic integrity ahead of the usual imperative of short-term growth.”

Stocksy’s forbearer was the for-profit stock photo company, iStock — which even back then was an enterprise that prided itself in being “by creatives, for creatives.” In 2006, the company was sold to Getty Images for $50 million. Under the new ownership, fees to photographers were cut and the culture of artistic camaraderie vanished.

A few years later, the founders of iStock decided to use the money from the sale of iStock to form Stocksy, a stock photo site formed as a worker cooperative owned and governed by its contributing photographers. This would ensure photographers were paid fairly and had a say in the business over the long term.

Their origin story is unique, since it’s rare for a digital media platform to share ownership and governance with its contributors. The funds from the sale of iStock certainly made it easier to launch Stocksy, but the key was the pre-existence of the iStock photographer community that was eager to build and own an enterprise together.

Other artists may not have the same access to capital or community as Stocksy. Two more co-ops, CoLab and Meerkat Media Collective, demonstrate other ways in which creative professionals can come together to form their own thriving, collectively-owned businesses.

2. CoLab

Photo: Members of the the CoLab cooperative in their office.

CoLab is a worker-owned digital agency that designs and develops websites and apps for mission driven organizations and entrepreneurs. It was founded in Ithaca, NY in 2010 by Rylan Peery and Ralph Cutler. Peery had studied co-ops as a Stanford undergraduate, during which he spent over a year and a half visiting cooperative businesses across Latin America. In the late 1990’s, he worked in venture capital and raised money as a tech start-up entrepreneur. Of these two experiences, Peery says that he became “keenly aware of the limitations and challenges of the conventional technology start-up paradigm,” and that he “carried seeds of a possible solution inspired by the sustainable economic development work” from his exposure to cooperative systems during college.

Cutler, who was an old friend of Peery’s, was also working in the design industry. Though the agency he co-led with another partner was doing well, he says that “it lacked depth, vision and a higher mission.” Even though it felt collective in nature, Cutler felt restless. “I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time but I was unfulfilled.”

In 2009, Peery and Cutler began collaborating on some design projects. It became clear that they shared the same vision for the kind of creative agency they wanted to build. So in 2010, with the help of co-op development resources and a supportive community, they converted Peery’s traditional business into a cooperative.

Since then, CoLab has grown to more than 25 workers and worker-owners. They’ve met potential members through meet-ups, conferences, co-working spaces, and the like. Once they found a promising candidate, they’d collaborate on a project to know them and see if it was a match. “From there everything can flow quite organically into co-op membership, but the fundamentals of being open to exploring new connections and relations is the foundation,” Peery explained.

As a cooperative, they make all of their decisions democratically through a three-fold process: working group meetings on specific project issues, board meetings for decisions that require the involvement of all their members, and the Loomio app to make day-to-day decisions. Overall, they strive for a “lean democracy” where all members can participate in governance or are represented by designees. They also offer leadership training for all members to better support a democratic workplace. The team at CoLab plans on a further expansion of their cooperative enterprise by creating a performance arts and studio co-op in Ithaca that merges visual and interactive arts.

3. Meerkat Media

Image: Still from Meerkat Media Collective’s short documentary about the People’s Climate March called Into the Streets.

Across the state from Ithaca is the Meerkat Media Collective in Brooklyn New York. Meerkat started as an informal collective in 2005 between 12 college friends who all had backgrounds in film and activism. The collective started as a means to share resources and support each other through their individual freelance video projects. While each filmmaker succeeded in their respective careers, they wanted to find a way to funnel the money they received from their hired contracts into their own individual passion-projects. They had been working as a collective, but they didn’t have a shared bank account or operating budget.

That’s why Meerkat Media Collective eventually became a more formal collective of artists-in-residence and a worker cooperative film production company. Their projects include documentaries and web videos for publishers, universities, and non-profits. As they strive to produce high-quality films for impact, they also provide their members with a sustainable income and humane work environment.

The co-op arm of Meerkat was launched by half of the original collective’s members in 2010. The six founders incorporated as an LLC where each of them became equal partner-owners of the enterprise. Co-founder Zara Serabian-ArthurIt told me that it was easy for them to transition into a co-op because the founding members had already been making films together in a collaborative way.

Their collaborative way of doing things has evolved to the point that they rotate roles for any given film between director, editor, and shooter. Unless a client specifically requests a certain style, which may be one of the members’ unique strengths, they do this rotation to make sure all of their skills continue to develop and that no one gets pigeonholed into one role or style of filmmaking.

Their residency program is made up of independent artists that actively work on film projects, individually or collaboratively, with the collective’s support, resources, and equipment. Residents also support each other’s projects, receive a monetary stipend, and attend an annual creative retreat. The residency program and co-op have a strong reciprocal relationship. The program is funded by the co-op and residents have access to shared office space and equipment. In turn, the residency offers the co-op access to a new talent.

The Meerkat co-op makes most of their collective decisions through meetings, which happen at least three times a week. They hold a full-day strategic planning meeting once a month, and for small every day issues, they also use the decision-making software Loomio.

Serabian-Arthur thinks that co-ops are a great fit for artists and creative professionals. “As artists trying to imagine a different kind of world, it makes sense that we’d apply that thinking and commitment to our work and process,” she explained. “I also think that artists are especially prone to be open to experimentation, to taking risks and trying something new. Many artists I meet are excited about the idea, but I haven’t met many people adopting a similar model — I think in part because we’re not exposed to many examples of creative cooperatives that we can learn from.”

Restoring the Cooperative Tradition

Schneider notes that the historical tradition of artists using collective organizing goes back centuries. “Probably for as long as there have been artists, there has been a recognition that the design of ownership structures go hand-in-hand with what it takes to be truly creative. In the medieval period, artisans formed guilds to ensure that they could protect their economic security and their creative integrity.” Schneider says that in the time since, artists have formed salons, collectives, gift economies and cooperatives. “Even in the most capitalist of societies, artists have nourished these models for the same reasons.”

Despite this legacy of art collectives, navigating the process of setting up a cooperative enterprise is a new and complicated process. The founders of CoLab and Meerkat Media both mentioned how helpful it was to have some guidance from the outside. Peery and Cutler worked with LIFT to get coaching on the vision of their organization, and said it was one of the reasons they were able to make the leap from traditional business to cooperative.

Support has also come from local government. In 2014, New York’s City Council voted to support the development of worker-owned businesses and directed $1.2 million dollars towards expanding existing worker co-ops and developing new ones. The Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative funded training plus technical, legal and financial assistance to current and potential co-op members. According to the Democracy at Work Institute, it was the largest U.S. city investment in worker cooperatives to date. In 2015 the Council invested an additional $2.1 million into the initiative and in one and a half years, tripled the number of worker co-ops from 20 to 67. Due to such resounding success, the City Council renewed and expanded funding for the initiative again this year.

Serabian-Arthur of Meerkat Media noted that their co-op directly benefitted from this Initiative, noting that the training and resources that the city has funded, along with the supportive cooperative ecosystem that has emerged alongside the New York City trade association for worker co-op businesses, have been extremely helpful to keep them going.

What’s clear is that it doesn’t take much to plant the seed of democratic workplace ownership among artists, and that having the right support can go a long way. Peery believes that since artists and creatives value collaboration and experimentation more so than other professions, creative professionals might be particularly amenable to the co-op model. “Creatives likely also recognize more so than other professionals the value of collaboration in fostering innovation and excellence. My hope is that creatives can model the value of radical collaboration through cooperative work for other professions.”

Schneider echoes this sentiment, pointing out that artists’ willingness to explore the frontiers of new sustainable, democratic economic models is an advantage for all of us. “As has happened again and again, we are all benefiting from the economic designs that artists have created for themselves by necessity, and by the willingness to treat economics, too, as a medium for creativity.”

Top photo: Members of CoLab

The post Art Co-ops and the Power of Mobilizing Collaboration for Creativity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

American society is increasingly made up of people who’ve been conditioned through 2-3 + generations of fear, media framing, and corporate/bureaucratic caste system manipulation. Practically every avenue and direction either beats people down, or herds them into cubicles, or fenced-in fake and winding road communities. Worse yet, many more are lost and forgotten poverty stricken cities and rural communities.

Culture, substance, and spirituality are largely lost, or just a caricature for some people with leisure time to adorn like fashion accessories at best (with a few exceptions). American society is becoming far adrift without an anchor in this modern ocean. And every month we collectively become more and more lost. The more that we double down on our existing system, the more destructive and expensive for everyone involved it becomes. It starts to cost the lives, freedom, and sanity of everyone it is connected to, as it chugs it’s way toward eventual full scale collapse.

On the ethical/social level, the recent US Presidential elections have begun to break the “spell” of American national politics. We are approaching the end game of traditional media driven American politics when everyone *knows* that (for instance) Clinton and Trump are both implicated in lying, but the majority of people expect, or go along with expecting each other to just take a side, instead of just stating the facts as they are.

Some historians state this is similar to what happened toward the end of the Soviet Union. Many people purportedly knew the system was based on falsehoods, but everyone carried the lie forward and enabled it for some years, until it finally broke.

wrote in “The Cheating Culture” about the dramatic rise of fraud and cheating as a new foundational way to operate in America http://www.cheatingculture.com/about/ . Callahan argues (correctly in my opinion) that this “Cheating Culture” is driven by income inequality. In turn, income inequality is driven by deliberate caste/class systems that coerce people into tiered positions in US society, where resources typically flow from many to a wealthy few. Simultaneously, the wealthiest interests economically capture the regulatory mechanisms created by public oversight systems. The net effect is a deepening of the foundation for corporate control of government.

The 240-year American experiment cannot carry forward much longer under the current paradigm. The core function of American government is Empire. Any historic variation from Empire has been an exception to the goal of conquering people, and land and remaking it into American culture, and implementing a caste/class system within. A lack of ethics, and lack of human, cultural tradition, and spiritual grounding has won out in American culture. And this victory is now costing communities their safety, prosperity, well being, and even sanity and lives in some cases.

The picture painted by Occupy Wall street of the “99% and 1%” is just the tip of the iceberg as this system starts to decline. The appetite for corporations to extract wealth from communities continues unabated. Fundamental infrastructure is now being destroyed in the name of wealth extraction (such as the water systems of Flint, a result of the bait and switch emergency manager scheme to take private control of public resources), and the threat of oil infrastructure destroying the Standing Rock Sioux Missouri River water supply. Bodies of water, such as Lake Erie are now subject to algae blooms that make the water toxic. Each year sets record temperatures as more carbon is released into the atmosphere, while simultaneously more forests and wild ecologies are stripped for the purpose of making money from arguably unneeded development and resource extraction in the name of economic “growth” (read: to make wealthy people wealthier at all our expense). These are the actualized costs of our bankrupt American culture. As these costs mount, American people are afforded less and less agency over time on local and national levels to change the system and advocate for themselves. Instead, precedent is set to favor already financially wealthy and politically powerful people (mostly corporations).

The likely end game under sustained current conditions is not going to be good for many people. Quality of life is likely to decline significantly for many. As Dave Pollard wrote last year our choices in Energy, Ecology, and Economy are driving us toward this end game. So, whether your livelihood is tied to Energy, Ecology, or Economy (directly, or indirectly), your end game is likely collapse under the current conditions. We are now understanding as a species that we are in the midst of a human-initiated Mass Extinction, radical changes to our climate, and destructive reformation of natural ecologies into weaker, less robust systems that fail to self-regulate temperature, water flows, and collection of sunlight and conversion into nutrients. We therefore have to now resort to excavating long-sequestered carbon resources and burning those, because we have lost our knowledge of symbiotically using the existing ecologies in intelligent ways.

Many Americans can intuit this. And this intuitive perception is creating the conditions for change. But America really has no alternatives at this point. The hungry maw of the American Machine gobbles up everything that emerges, co-opts it, and turns it into another extraction mechanism for wealth hoarding for a few.

The time of the Seventh Fire

Throughout the history of America, there has been an alternative all along. An alternative that has been maligned, demonized, marginalized, victimized. But within it are the traditions, knowledge, wisdom, culture, spirituality and connection with natural systems that contain the ingredients America needs to evolve and change and adapt away from it’s pathway toward collapse. This alternative is the 566 recognized Native American tribes of the US. The time is now to start a process based in respect and reconciliation to exercise this alternative. The purpose of this writing is to attempt to create a pragmatic plan, and justification for investing in this alternative to the existing American system.

“In the time of the Seventh Fire an Osh-ki-bi-ma-di-zeeg (New People) will emerge. They will retrace their steps to find what was left by the trail. Their steps will take them to the Elders who they will ask to guide them on their journey. But many of the Elders will have fallen asleep. They will awaken to this new time with nothing to offer. Some of the Elders will be silent because no one will ask anything of them. The New People will have to be careful in how they approach the Elders. The task of the New People will not be easy.

If the New People will remain strong in their quest the Water Drum of the Midewiwin Lodge will again sound its voice. There will be a rebirth of the Anishinabe Nation and a rekindling of old flames. The Sacred Fire will again be lit.

It is this time that the light skinned race will be given a choice between two roads. One road will be green and lush, and very inviting. The other road will be black and charred, and walking it will cut their feet. In the prophecy, the people decide to take neither road, but instead to turn back, to remember and reclaim the wisdom of those who came before them. If they choose the right road, then the Seventh Fire will light the Eighth and final Fire, an eternal fire of peace, love brotherhood and sisterhood. If the light skinned race makes the wrong choice of the roads, then the destruction which they brought with them in coming to this country will come back at them and cause much suffering and death to all the Earth’s people.” The Walleye War: The Struggle for Ojibwe Spearfishing and Treaty Rights By Larry Nesper

We are now at the precipice of the time to choose this road. The cold hard reality is that we will never have a choice under the current Economy/Ecology/Energy/Governance system, as the choices under the current system have already been made for us. So, to actually arrive at a place where there is now a true choice between these two roads discussed in the quote above from Larry Nesper’s book, we need a way to reform our Economy/Ecology/Energy/Governance system. Only a smaller fraction of people in America are currently ready to really do what it takes to reform those systems. However, as the late psychologist Clare W. Graves noted, there are some conditions for change that humans need fulfilled before they are ready in a bio/psycho/social way to really change. Those conditions are:

1. Potential
2. Solution to existential problems
3. Feeling of dissonance
4. Gaining Insight
5. Removal of barriers
6. Opportunity to consolidate

The alternative I suggest meets these conditions, and I will illustrate how in the following writing. First I will discuss the type of change proposed. Then I will discuss how the proposed change meets Graves’s Six conditions.

The type of change proposed in this writing is for Americans to start to voluntarily elect to apply for membership to Federally recognized tribes who are willing to participate in this effort. Elsewhere on this website, it has been suggested that people should or will start forming “Neotribes“. For America, this is a mistake. As mentioned previously, American culture is too young to function in a tribal way. For America, it would be much better for people to instead become new members of the already existing tribes. The new members of tribes would join newly formed bands, or some other component, where they work to learn the language, traditions, and history of the tribe they have joined. The new members would also work to help these tribes re-acquire unceded lands territory in a US government and internationally recognized way (likely through tribal and international courts as well as US government courts).

The goal, to start with, is to recreate this map as soon as we can:

As the process of restoring unceded territories unfolds, participants would work together to both return large amounts of the territory to pre-colonial state, and to re-orient large portions of bio-regional food systems toward traditional food uses of these territories. Restoring Elk, Moose, Bison, Wolves, Beaver, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and plants into a retrieved robust/diverse natural ecology again. Traditional foodways can be expanded to provide a perpetually sustainable and year-round food system that is not beholden to doomed Energy/Economy/Ecology systems. The traditional Native American way of molding and shaping the land in concert with it’s ecology can produce millions of pounds of food if enough land is dedicated, and people are active in procuring the bounty. I will expand on this point with evidence and examples in a future post.

In addition to the above, North Native American language and traditions possess concepts that do not exist in Western culture/traditions, or have been lost or massively suppressed. The cultures, while not dominant, are superior in philosophy, ethics, spirituality and humanity. In all of these areas, the American extension of Western culture has failed profoundly, and is headed toward disintegration, permanent division, increase of fear and xenophobia. Before it is too late, it is time to recognize this failure, and germinate the dormant seed of an ancient and better culture, and give it a chance to lead, instead of to be the most oppressed and marginalized.

Six conditions for Change

Below is a discussion of how this alternative meets Graves’s Six Conditions for Change mentioned above.

Potential

The existing American people have the skills to make this change, but cannot lead it. So, if they start to treat existing Native Americans as equal partner and leader in this change, instead of as marginalized wards of state, by actually switching citizenship to these nations, and recognizing them with either dual citizenship, or wholesale change, the other piece of the potential puzzle is met by the existing native peoples.

Solution to existential problems

Americans largely lack solutions to the current existential problems mentioned above. This writing is an attempt to start to pragmatically suggest solutions.

Feeling of dissonance

If the current election, and recent events over the last 7 years in America are any indication, dissonance is widespread in America now. The goal is to see a change take place before the dissonance grows to unbearable levels.

Gaining Insight

From the widespread protests of 1999 in Seattle, to the recent campaign of Bernie Sanders, to the efforts to spread permaculture, re-localize local food and economy systems, and create more diverse communities based in peace and tolerance, where this emerges people see progress. But, much of this progress is still rooted in systems of Energy, Ecology, and Economy that leave the progress open to future exploitation and extraction. So, a change to Native American tribal governed America would also need to be done in a way that offered insights to participants that their elected change is working. Many Americans are in dire need of a reconnection with the “spiritual”, and not in a way that appropriates and co-opts, but instead in a way that reconnects in genuine ways. This alternative will provide that insight.

Removal of barriers

In the case of this proposed change, “removal of barriers” constitutes the work to help tribes achieve full sovereignty, and to actually join those tribes in favor of the existing US regime. It is also desirable for all indigenous people in the existing US territories to continue to develop relationships and create lasting connection and even federation, to achieve strength in numbers.

Opportunity to consolidate

The opportunity to consolidate this change is inherent in it’s success. Retrieving and developing a better philosophy, spirituality, and culture will pay off in immediate, and long term ways for all participants. It will also create a model that can be used around the world as an effective and available way to resolve the damage from Industrial paradigm activity to the earth’s species and climate.

One thing is for sure: if we are to survive as a species, it is now time to start thinking about where our best solutions can be found, even if they contradict our previous cultural assumptions about what is desirable, and what is not. We need to start looking past our collective assumptions about what is “superior” to what, and start think about, and be ready to accept what can truly help us, vs doing nothing and rejecting all alternatives while our system plods onward toward destruction.

In the next post in this series I will detail more of the practical ways this alternative can be realized in America in the months and years to come.

The post Osh-ki-bi-ma-di-zeeg: A New Political Revolution in America appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Well, something piratical is happening. It is time to rescue the stories, re-hydrate the language, scatter dialectical inflection amongst the blunt lines of anthropological scribbles, muck up the typewriter with the indigo surge of whale ink.” -Martin Shaw

What is a NeoTribe?

The sociological concept of neo-tribalism suggests that human beings have evolved to live in tribal society as opposed to mass society.

Far from the pages of academic literature, we’ve noticed that more and more people are self-organizing around new forms of collective identity. From hackerspaces to co-living communities, to eco-villages to festival culture to movements for collaborative economy and cooperative ownership, we believe we’re in the throes of a re-tribalizing moment. Many of the longings of the 60s are being re-mixed for a digital age by a new generation thoughtful about building alternative forms of governance, but without delusions of separateness to entirely “escape the system”.

We as NeoTribes, an emerging collective of neo-tribal communities, have come together to ask some timely questions and create a frame through which we all may continue to develop common language, wisdom and practical know-how. We are experimental communities searching for viable alternative forms of living in an era of deep transition. We are digital natives yearning for an analogue reality that is marked by the physicality of existence. We strive to align our pace of life with natural rhythms that make space for love, trust, belonging and solidarity – values too often absent from mass society. Since September 2015, we’ve been gathering in digital meeting rooms as well as face-to-face for learning journeys in Brazil, Berlin and Costa Rica, forging bonds of trust between our communities, and making space for reflecting on who we are, where we are heading and why we feel the way we do about the present moment.  

Below is a taste of the living questions, intuitive patterns and generative tensions that have emerged during this journey so far.

LIVING QUESTION # 1:  Why are neo-tribes emerging at this time?

Speaking from a place of change in global macroeconomics, we have identified number of drivers for this reexamination of how we organize ourselves, including:

• Unprecedented inequality in distribution of capital and resources

• Industrial standardization of our surroundings

• Breakdown of social support systems

• Massive externalization of environmental costs

• Exponential diffusion of technological innovation

• Growing entrepreneurial and freelancer culture

• Digital revolution that brings:
  • Unprecedented awareness of the challenges of our times
  • Connection with like-minded people from all over the world

Each of these macro trends has an emotional underbelly. In many ways the “neo-tribal” moment is being ushered in by a deep longing to escape cultures that belong to a bygone era.

Many of us are dealing with symptoms related to:

• A crisis of meaning and the failures of secularism – sense of drifting without orientation

• Burnout and time poverty, increasing alienation and “zombification” of life

• Disconnection from nature and human rhythms

• Crisis of trust in institutions and disenchantment with government and democratic process

• Incapacity for agency within bureaucracies

While we often try to heal these emotional symptoms with therapies targeted at the atomized self, as neo-tribes we’re recognizing the interdependence of personal well-being and structural forces. Self-help needs to be radicalized to encompass not just my own “seeking” and healing, but an awareness that my own pain is also connected to forces outside of my control – macroeconomic and cultural trends. Individual, community and global well-being are interrelated.

The poetic challenge becomes a task of reperceiving the prison of individual discomfort, not as personal failing, but as structural unravelling. Practically that means that we are excited about the promise of new forms of collective identity and organization to deliver us from some of the harms inflicted by “mass society.” But we maintain humility in watching for the shadows and micro-tyrannies that may come to animate some of our emerging tribes.

GENERATIVE TENSION 1: Neo vs. Ancient

“The tribal life is precious because it is tested out. For 3,000,000 years it worked for people. It worked for people the way nests work for birds, the way webs work for spiders, the way burrows work for moles. That doesn’t make it lovable, it makes it viable.”- Daniel Quinn

What is so “neo” about these tribes that are cropping up? For millennia humans have been testing various forms of social architecture – ways of living together. Scientifically speaking that means we have a whole array of experimental petri-dishes to sample from. The radical history of communitarian movements in England in the 1640s, the idealism of 19th century American utopias, hippie communitarianism of the 1960’s, the solidarity economies inspired by Latin American liberation theology in the 1980s, the parallel wisdom of indigenous peoples fighting for justice and way of life around the world, we are not without a dense history of experiments – a lineage of co-conspirators that mark the ages.      

We feel enormously grateful to be able to learn from the tribes that have come before us.  But we’re also living and working in a context remarkably different from any of the pressures confronted in the past. As society, we face a period marked by environmental collapse, mass migration, accelerated conflict, and a technological transformation that is putting us on a path towards distributed forms of energy, education, and finance. Trends toward decentralization and the desire for local living patterns are conditioned by the Internet, which reroutes power to the local and to the “long tail” of possibilities for niche communities.

We are in a moment of cultural evolution that is decidedly different from anything we’ve seen to date. Perhaps its signature challenge is how to be informed by ancient wisdom and indigenous practices without superficially appropriating or extracting culture from the people and places where it emerged.

GENERATIVE TENSION 2: Autonomy vs. Belonging

In many ways we are living out the hangover of an economic system that has prescribed a way of life incentivizing self-interest and hollowing out our sense of self-love. This script is beginning to expire. And so we find ourselves in a refreshing moment where we can honor a wellspring of pre-modern insight and seek after the wisdom that parallel cultures and folk psychology offer to unearth more connected and embodied ways of living. The idea is not to move beyond individual identity and autonomy, but to create space for the complex range of motivations and expressions that have been labeled unimportant or non-existent by neoliberal economics.

With this said, we aren’t naïvely cocooning ourselves in “Cumbaya collectivism.” We recognize the human need for a community where one can pursue belonging in the context of a collective, while also remaining autonomous, self-expressive and unique. We affirm that each individual should be witnessed and understood, without being pressured to disappear into group identity or camouflage her authenticity. We believe in the power of individual autonomy, and also in the power of mutualism. Many of our tribes are finding new ways to mutualize resources and build commons in the forms of shared operational infrastructure, housing, work spaces, food, and so on – without demanding that anyone martyr themselves for a higher cause.

For example, Enspiral, a neo-tribe in Wellington, New Zealand, has pioneered the mutualization of resources for freelancers and social entrepreneurs. The collective has created a tool called Co.Budget where the group can do participatory budgeting: portions of earned income are diverted to a common pool that can be spent on mutually agreed projects. The collective has also built a shared infrastructure for accounting and operations that allows “solo-entrepreneurs” to benefit from membership in a purpose-driven community, while reducing the overhead of running one’s own business.

GENERATIVE TENSION 3: Openness vs. Coherence

In constructing our communities, many of us think about how to create a place of shared identity, while also maintaining inclusivity. Traditional tribes are often very closed. You inherit an identity based on kinship and the place you were born. But neo-tribes most often represent your “chosen tribe.” You opt in, and can have multiple tribal allegiances or cycle through different tribes in a lifetime.  

The challenge for neo-tribes is that radical openness can water down shared values and erase intimacy. Larger groups can also reduce the ability to make collective decisions efficiently and stir up mistrust and conflict. One of the most important elements of growing a neo-tribe is thus focused on the who and the how, and not just the why.

For instance, Impact Hub, a global network of 80+ mission-aligned coworking spaces, has been through various cycles of near-breakdown in its quest to become a functioning collective of distributed communities, navigating the tensions between serving a movement, building a business and sustaining a network. Similarly, Burning Man, an annual gathering of 70,000+ co-creators experimenting with new forms of community, has seen its principles of radical inclusion, decommodification and radical self-reliance tested by an influx of mainstream culture and so-called “plug’n’play” camps in recent years.

We therefore ask how we can build communities that are simultaneously open and adept at preserving their core values. This feels increasingly important in a time when nationalism is on the rise and countries are closing their borders in the face of waves of mass migration.

GENERATIVE TENSION 4: Local vs. Global

Many of us feel that we’ve entered into an age of “peak democracy”, where our democratic processes, systems and national identities no longer reflect what we care about or how we wish to exercise our civic agency. We long to root down in local contexts, and often find more pride in the cities that we contribute to than the stale rhetoric of participation offered at a national level. At the same time, our digital infrastructure and social media has imparted to us a global consciousness. Through these channels we feel connected to catastrophes far from home including the global migration crises and the rise of “neo-fascist” politicians.

We draw inspiration from diverse political, social and cultural movements and the new strategies for organizing that are emerging from groups like Podemos in Spain and Fora do Eixo, a network of cultural collectives in Brazil. And so we are examining the role and value of transnational collectives and commons policy, and the potential of learning and strategies shared between diverse tribes of people and place.  

GENERATIVE TENSION 5: Nature vs. Urban

“Lost in a sea of perpetual technological transition, modern man and woman find themselves increasingly alienated from the ecological choreography of the planet.” – Jeremy Rifkin

For many of us, the possibilities of “digital detox” and “off-grid” living have entered into common parlance. We’re drawn to nature, rural landscapes and decommodified simplicity as an antidote to modern urban life. But more deeply, neo-tribers are also exploring what a return to rural, regional and localized living would look like. Pandora Hub, a neo-tribe that originated in Spain embraces the simple goal of “living the good life in rural areas.” The group has initiated experiments ranging from co-living in an abandoned village to learning permaculture practices from rural Nepali communities. In a similar vein, the Global Ecovillage Network equips thousands of communities around the world with tools and skills, providing tangible examples of sustainability in action.

The tension that many of us currently feel is how to create lifestyles on principles of openness, geographic wanderlust, and cross-pollination, while also making long-term commitments to people and place. We want to be both a part of the progress and openness that is incubated in cities, while also maintaining links to the land through stewardship in ways that align our lives with the pace of natural cycles.

LIVING QUESTION 2: What do we want to do together?

We invite this movement, this groundswell emerging under the banner of NeoTribes, not as an absolute truth but rather as an invitation to listen. Instead of crying out and screaming “the world is on fire,” we seek to receive and live stories of demonstrated better ways.  Bringing idealistic principles from past movements into practice, we now have the technological tools to share, organize and regenerate— inspired by global success stories rooted deep within local place. The magic of this moment lies not in more development, another novelty project, or an isolated brand, but in a remembering of value, ethos, identity, belonging, purpose and power that come from a shared story.

Over the course of the next 6-months we will embark on a learning journey, crafting and curating a cookbook of practical “how to” wisdom from over 50+ neo-tribes around key themes related to community design, group practices and rituals, methods of self-organization and facilitation, and tools for governance, financing, and mutualism.

More information about gatherings and coursework can be found here: www.neotribes.co

Say hello at: [email protected]

OR join the group conversation on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1706731536226852/

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