Wonderful, it's great to be here before we jump into the future is tribal

I want to share a little bit about my own background and Give you some of my own cultural biases and how I came to some of these assumptions But growing up I was always surrounded by misfits both my parents were Anthropologists and so I spent a lot of time speaking to really different kinds of people

My father worked with indigenous people in Brazil and my mother Traveled around the world and spoke to people who thought they'd been abducted by aliens So, I don't know how many people believe in aliens Yeah, we can talk afterwards

But growing up, you know between the ages of 7 and 14 this completely terrified me I was really scared that I would be abducted and then Getting into my teenage years I started becoming worried that I wasn't being abducted and feeling like a little bit of pull of egoism Like if they're aliens out there

Why am I not a chosen ambassador of the human race? And so Coming from this perspective It really taught me two things the value of speaking to people that make us uncomfortable The value of speaking to people who come from radically different world views that really take us out of our

echo-chambers and then also the limitations of Western consciousness that there's so many experiences that we have that we don't necessarily necessarily have the narratives for and so part of the effort with neo tribes is to think about the stories that we haven't really Written yet and so we'll look at some of these emerging narratives and really play with them together

And then I'll bring a few people on stage who have been actively immersed in in their own neo tribal reality And we'll we'll make this a little bit more participatory but coming from this esoteric upbringing I went Really into this corporate heart of darkness. So I went from this

really wide open landscape of cultural plurality into Companies and into corporations and within those huge bureaucracies. I felt like I stumbled upon really a lost tribe Within these institutions people that were culture hackers people that were

Entrepreneurs people that were really trying to transform their institutions from the inside these were people like Dave Burdish who worked at Ford who was a Card-carrying member of Amnesty International and really tried to get the company to think differently about their

Practices on human rights who tried to push the company and provoke the company to develop business models beyond just automobile manufacturing to think about Mobility solutions and so working with people like Dave we ended up starting this guerrilla movement For these cubicle warriors for these intrapreneurs for these people that were really trying to bring

Completely different business models into corporate contexts and they face so much pushback They faced all these antibodies within this organization And so it was a little bit like alcoholics anonymous bringing together these people where they could have this shared sense of identity

And where they could really share best practices where they could give each other tips for stealthily how to navigate huge organizations where they could Share instances of being able to pitch and make the business case and most importantly where they could find the source of real

Personal resilience where they could find that peer support that entourage that could give them fuel and courage in their work And then I got bored. I really got impatient working with just people that were trying to transform institutions from within This change from within agenda started to melt for me a little bit

And so I started asking who are the other tribes out there? Who can I spend more time working with so I got involved really with a lot of social entrepreneurs I got involved in occupy and then I got involved really looking at the fringes speaking to people in the black Markets and informal economies and trying to understand. What can we learn from fringe innovators?

What can we learn from gangsters and hackers and pirates and people that we don't read about in Harvard Business Review? but who have incredible stories of creativity and ingenuity and so my tribal context started to feel a little bit more promiscuous and I think that's one of the

elements of the neo in neo tribes this fact that we can be part of several overlapping tribes and For me, it was also this feeling that doing the change from within work didn't allow me to really anchor in An activist spirit in an artist spirit

There were so many things that had to be factored out of me to really think about driving change from within Organizations to be a misfit within a huge bureaucracy. You're constantly camouflaging yourself You you can't be the protester who can stand boldly in your agenda

You have to figure out the politics of an organization to drive change And so some of my explorations in different kinds of tribes were also my own identity Explorations about how could I stand more powerfully in very different ways of being in the world? and So what we have this formal definition of neo tribes

Which is very much looking at this idea of how do we get outside of mass society? You know that we've evolved to live in much more than just the consumerist reality that we've inherited. So if you Like that formal definition. I would keep looking at that slide I stayed up last night too, and I developed a little bit of some poetic indulgence

So let me read you some of the different longings That I have around neo tribalism What does neo tribalism mean? It means we can't afford to live in mass society It means reality is up for grabs

It means that from the slow burning Discontent of your atomized existence the green shoots of wildness are springing forth It means an exit from mechanical rhythms and reconnecting with natural cycles It means consuming technology with the same conscientiousness. We apply to our consumption of food

It means a world where the peak experiences of festival culture find refuge in everyday living It means radically new ways of organizing business and internet startups around Principles of self-organization and cooperative ownership

It means the entrepreneurial cowboy becomes a communitarian angel It means the tech bro developing aspects of monastic living It means believing that yes small is beautiful, but still pondering about transnational political collectives

It may also mean that just maybe we have outgrown mass democracy That civic culture relocalizes at a scale fit for human agency I Carry in my heart a thousand visions for new ways of being new ways of operating new forms of agency

My body craves to be unshackled from an industrial reality that requires my performance Here and now let's rewrite the scripts of capitalism Let's design for each tiny cell of discontent Not with grand schemes and isms, but with gentle prodding into heightened community

Let's sail away from mass society I want to jump out of my role as consumer worker colleague friend lover talking head Leave behind the tattered scripts of identity. I want to rebrand the prison of my discomfort not as personal failing but structural undoing I

Want to follow the rabbit holes of intuition and on earth a conduct manual for mythic living. I Want to feel the flow of the nomad the pilgrim the communitarian in my veins without pausing for your Facebook approval in

The lurch of discontent as we hear the whispers and taunts of the new paradigm. Let's examine our fallenness We're all born into cultures. We didn't help to create Cultures that no longer serve Culture has gone numb modern life has ways of fossilizing the art of living

Let's help culture find its pulse. Let's tease out the emergent DNA Starting now, let's bring into being new tribes new currents new cultures new rituals new processes a new embodiment for a new age So, thank you

So those were really some of the emotional Longings that I think a lot of people are bringing into this concept of neo tribalism We did a retreat in December in Brazil and it felt like everyone who was there while so diverse had a common desire to jump out of the system and

Really? What were they trying to jump out of? This crisis of meaning the fact that we've lost a lot of ritualistic elements of life a lot of myth mythic elements of life Our lack of trust in institutions in government if you see what's happening with the political crisis in Brazil or the US right now

We're really questioning this idea of have we reached peak democracy Can't our democracy is even the best way for us to express our citizenship for us to express our forms of agency And Bureaucracies again, we are living in these command-and-control systems. So how do we find alternative ways of

structuring work of bringing freelancers together of developing collaborative forms of entrepreneurship that aren't hijacked by Silicon Valley and Really this piece that there's been such a disconnection between our human existence and natural rhythms

and So those were just some of the things that we feel like we were in crisis with That were bringing us to this moment where we wanted to seek out alternatives where we wanted to look to different tribes for inspiration in terms of how we can live our own lives and how we can begin to hack a modern society and

In addition to these subjective pulls these drivers There's a whole macro economic landscape emerging that parallels that process that these two things are really Interconnected Really looking at this unprecedented inequality that we have

the the whole externalization of environmental costs Also the facts that you know My own well-being in some ways is tied to the price of oil is tied to interest rates that my sense of contentment is completely interlinked with macroeconomic factors and

We see this spilling over within the business environment to where business is becoming Thoughtful about how do we exit from these mass corporate structures? How do we think about new ways of organizing ourselves around principles of decentralized governance?

And so you have this these green shoots of a new reality that are coming up around citizen production Around what it would it look like if we disintermediated Corporations if we return to a kind of cottage industry reality that really happened before capitalism

Started where we have much more peer-to-peer production And so we'll hear a little bit more about this, but this trend is also this whole trend of district distributed Enterprise this whole trend of decentralization is spilling over into our spiritual life as well

that spiritual and religious realities tend to imitate economic structures and so we're now in this moment where how do we apply the Nodes of the internet the thinking of distributed networks to spirituality How do we embrace realities around peer-to-peer spirituality where we're not dependent on the guru or we're not dependent on

Traditional hierarchies within religious organizations. There's a huge movement of growing nuns So especially prominent among Millennials of people that identify as spiritual but not religious And more and more you see these peer-to-peer Forms of self-organizing around some of these realities, but you can see there's some of the provocation with

Neotribes, but what are we actually talking about? Who are some of these communities that are part of this emerging phenomenon? One is really gangs. I've spent the last three years interviewing Gangsters all over all over the world and the gentleman here is King tone who is one of the leaders of the Latin Kings

And he he really was one of the first people that I spoke to who pushed back against the word gang He said don't call us a gang call us an organization like any other that we do recruitment. We do retention That even though the majority of their money is drug money that that actually means that they have skills in terms of

Understanding how to manage brand how to do products quality around things And so he really was at the leadership of this gang at a time when? The gang was recovering from one of its most bloodiest periods

And so the questions he was asking are not dissimilar from so many of the questions that people ask who who are leading other Types of communities. He was really saying how to what is the what is the change management intervention for this gang? How could he? Pivot the gang to become much more of a social movement to become much more of an activist organization

And so he started building Alliances with really critical allies to bring in some of this new DNA into the organization Another collective that I spoke with is this great French feminist group called Le Barbe and so they'll come to events like this

To any sort of big public conferences and wherever there's an under representation of women they basically Wear fake beards and crash the events and congratulate the men on how smart and intelligence They are and and really provoke audiences into into being much more sensitive to gender dynamics

And what I love about this group is they operate without a leader Even in interviewing them. There's no one spokesperson So they really have this kind of rotating chair for alpha leadership And you see a lot of this type of activity really within hacker collectives to within pirate cultures where you you find much more

elements of decentralization being built into these organizational structures I think I have to click it here There we go Another really fun neo tribe that I encourage you if you're on social media right now to check out

Are preppers so you can go to hashtag prepper or you can go to Hashtag prepper chat and find this really amazing community of people that come from the radical right and radical left And they're a little bit crazy They believe that the apocalypse is coming at the end of the world is near and and that catapults them into this

Philosophy of radical self-reliance where they're constantly preparing for the end of the world There's even a woman on Twitter who sells Foraging advice for like how to look pretty after the end of the world So she gives foraging tips for people that want to know how to make makeup out of like natural plants and things like this

And so this tribe is actually really interesting in the sense that it's uniting these tool different two different poles of existence the sort of climate change advocate You know who staunchly? Doomsday in their own in their own right and then the sort of gun-toting Conservative that doesn't believe in big government. And so you have this interesting alliance

We also have eco villages now around the world and more and more I think these were really planted with this 60s legacy of communitarianism and you know now you see eco villages almost in every country and Ones that have actually developed a large amount of sustainability and so a lot of these

Approaches are really built on this idea of the island How do we isolate and prototype new forms of culture that are fit for an emergent society? And so these groups have tended to to find ways of totally restructuring sexual norms of restructuring governing norms and really incubating them at a small scale

Until they feel like they're ripe enough for mass infection and so now you see some of these eco villages that are seeping a little bit more into the Mainstream and looking at this question of how do we scale some of these practices? How do we scale this culture of embodiment? That's been that's been fostered

another Neotribe that you wouldn't really think of as a tribe per se is This lovely clustering of hermits around the world. You see people that are going back to the land and pursuing this solitary form of living and

Yet they have an e-newsletter that they use to update each other on their little solitary pursuits So that's quite fun And it's and there's a long tradition of these kind of these hermit tribes, you know Thoreau Wrote Walden 45 minutes from where I grew up

And so he had these experiments in radical self-reliance in really rejecting mass consumerism and industrial forms of society and he did that for 18 months and then when he went back into society He had to work at his parents pencil factory So I think there's always this question of if you're trying to jump out of the system if you're trying to peel off from the system

How do you develop a better strategy of cultural infection? How do you really make sure that you can sort of package your insights? First for scale and I think people have very different approaches Around this and we'll hear a bit more from Derek and Chelsea in just a moment

The other thing that I've been doing a little bit of research on is this idea of utopias and failed utopias Especially and looking at what are the dimensions that that make experimental community thrive? I was reading this morning for example about this great utopia that was set up by the Shakers in Indiana

And so the Shakers had this flourishing community Really splintered from the Quakers group the Quaker groups and they had a lot of land and now there are only three Shakers left and they all live in Maine and an element of the Shaker Practice is that your celibate and so how they've managed to exist for over 200 years

Was largely through this policy of adoption and also through people that were attracted to the celibate lifestyle Onboarding new members who are adults and and now what they're doing is they're actually putting their land in trust because they don't actually have any new members and Across the US this is happening now where you had forms of

Intentional or monastic community that are now looking to the new generation who might not share the same spiritual worldviews But who could help be stewards of land? That would otherwise just be you know go to the government or be put up for sale And so I'm involved in in some of these conversations looking at how how can a new?

Generation develop intention around land stewardship and and bridge build with some of those generations that had Started these communities and some of the practices and rituals What can what can the new generation actually learn from some of those elders who have done this work?

I'm not going to talk too much about which is but I've spent some time especially in the last week Being very immersed in different emerging Witchcraft cultures, but you guys want to come up and and I won't introduce you as witches but you want to share a little bit about the

experimental communities that you've been involved in and also maybe any any practices any rituals That you guys feel like this audience might want to hear about cool You can sit on The stools. Oh nice Um, yeah, I can pick up through from there Alexa, yeah firstly

Thank you so much for having us in this conversation today and hello to everybody. My name is Chelsea Robinson, and I'm from a little Island called New Zealand or a set of islands Yeah, so I come from a community in this conversation a neo tribe called in spiral Which I'm sure that some of you who I know here I'm also feeling connected to and I've been part of the in spiral community for several years and

Actually, this community does have some sort of witchy personalities in it But it has all sorts of personalities in it that are all cultivating a practice of tribalism in their own way when I think about The kind of rituals that we have we just have so many it's hard to know where to begin

and I'm sure that many of them are the same as the practices of your own organizations and different communities that you've spent time with including Bringing your whole self to the workplace through Storytelling about who you really are and having a really intensive retreat culture to really build human connections at that deeper level

But I think behind all of this for me when I think about like the shape of an spiral and the nature of it It's it's a it's a business collective. It's a community of people creating livelihood together And I think about when I think about neo tribes I think about these four L's which are kind of like Lineage, you know, every tribe has its lineage

Love every tribe tribe has its love practice Livelihood so most of from eco villages to which culture to Gangster kind of communities. There's always this question of like well, where does that where does the money come from? Where does the food come from? What where's the livelihood aspect and then the last one leadership?

So what is the leadership practice? How do you practice decentralized governance or who is the one leader and I think these are really interesting set of lenses to look at things through Yeah, I I would love to share the lineage of in spiral, but I wonder if it's the right I think that I think that's great Just sharing. I think one of the themes that we wanted to explore is around this idea of cultural hybridity

So rather than perceiving tribes as stagnant entities that have no connection to modern realities What are the different bits of past communities that we're sampling from and I think the in spiral story is an incredible illustration of that Yeah, of course. So this is a very little-known story and it's not mine

so also wanting to acknowledge that in these sort of Dynamic communities story is really the vehicle for for you know, how did we get here? It's like what's the creation story? What's the origin myth but behind how we got here? So yeah to also acknowledge it won't be perfect but

in spiral as a group of Devs, basically developers who sat around in a circle and said hey look Our income is high enough that we can just work a bit for client work and spend the rest of our time doing work That matters or try and transition our own practice of our internal economy as a collective into a collective driven by social and environmental

Impact and I think that's that essence and the way that that group set in a circle and the way that they talk to each Other and the way that they gathered Came from a community that I've been part of called a circle called regeneration Which was a you know it's a gathering like I'm sure many of you have been part of the sort of community that meets every summer or every

Winter and goes deep together and shares practice and shares life stories and really sort of asks the hard questions of why are we here? And what are we here to do and supports each other with that and regeneration was a set of circles and a community and a tribe that came from another tribe in New Zealand

specifically called hot politics Which is two generations before me and hot politics created the first Green Party in the world They created all of these incredible initiatives Transformed the landscape of New Zealand's industry and politics Because of the sort of silent undercurrent work that they were doing in their sort of more personal more quiet more mystic space

And then that also has lineage right back to our our indigenous peoples practice and culture So there was a part of the international peace movement was started in a little place called Parihaka in In the North Island of New Zealand and Parihaka was a nonviolent direct action based indigenous movement against colonization and a lot of a lot of Gandhian practice has actually also been inspired by this group and

Their practices are also still the practices that keep in spiral alive and well But so many people so many of the designers developers Facilitators accountants lawyers and this extensive collective that is now in spiral

Wouldn't necessarily understand that that's the lineage But when you do look behind each of these practices, they have these very very multi-generational DNA Sort of cultural DNA strands and I think it's just so profound to sort of question that and acknowledge it and say Where did this code come from? Yeah, how do I find the lead contributor to the other code base and Derek? I'm interested in hearing about you

I mean, I know a lot about you, but maybe the audience is listening hearing about you but also if you could speak a bit to this point of what are some of the challenges of remixing culture, you know within in spiral you have these personalities that are you know, The the business developer person the programmer person the occupy protester person the witch

So like how do those cultural personalities interweave and what are some of the tensions or conflicts there? Yeah, that's like that's a good question. Hi, I'm Derek I think that to sort of Transition from what you were saying over to what you're inviting in the more recent history of this set of circles

is the I think a really unique combination of people from the Freelance sort of the emerging freelance movement, which is the sort of original and spiral crew the open source community And the occupy movement and I think the DNA of in spiral is really infused with these

This sort of deep lineage going all the way back to heart politics and in combination with this Newer piece of DNA, which is the sort of tech DNA And I think a lot of what we get stuck on as a community is about how we how we relate our own values and our sense of

Measuring and distributing value to the way that the external world outside of our little bubble measures value so in spiral internally has a bit of a market or an economy inside of it and the reality is that some people who are programmers bring in

10 X of what some other people who might do equally important work, but by the market it seems That they're doing, you know something that's worth 1 10th. So I think this is one of the core stumbling blocks or Things that we're still working out and that we're talking to actively seeking out other communities who are dealing with these issues as well

and so yeah, I think through that struggle often the Peculiarities of different groups personalities emerges and People's political philosophies come into play and spirituality and set the personal sense of value where they get their value from

Is a really key part. That's it's great. And I I wanted to share to that for us This is such a new conversation that neo tribes is a frame has only really existed for the last Seven nine months for us to make sense of some of this peer-to-peer sharing between different forms of community

So we're still really trying to find our language for it and would really welcome your input There too, and maybe afterwards if people want to talk about which is we can grab beers and do that But let's let's move on because I think one element of neo tribes that really distinguishes it from other types of communities Is the ephemeral nature this idea that you can have multiple tribal allegiances

And so I wanted to share a little bit I think Eleanor was giving a talk earlier and she was one of the people Who really introduced me to this magical world of LARPing which is a particular kind of neo tribe Awesome. And so how many people here have ever LARPed before?

Yay Amazing. Okay for those who don't know LARPing is live-action role-playing and you might have this bias in your head or you've seen a film where you Associate it with nerds running around in the woods with swords That's not the case necessarily

One of the things that I've really been exploring is this idea of using LARP as a way of Prototyping alternative realities. And so how can you set up this design fiction this utopia this dystopia? Over the course of a few hours or a weekend to really test some

Hypotheses that you want to explore if you want to experiment with the future of finance, for example Why not set up a LARP around it and really get into the embodiment of what it looks like to live in a world driven by cryptocurrency or a world driven by You know more distributed financial tools if you want to experience the collapse

collapse of monogamy and new forms of relationships set up a pop-up scenario around it and Really begin to prototype with some of that culture The other thing that I've really found in in LARP that I love is this idea of bleed which is when The the personality characteristics of the character that you're playing begin to seep into your own personality

So I was speaking to someone who taught himself how to be extroverted through LARP He was a complete introvert and really developed, you know, social skills through this temporary practice So I think it's a powerful way for us to be able to access through tribe Different types of identity and to figure out how we can hack and challenge ourselves to step into new types of roles

An experience that felt a little bit like an extended LARP For me and Derek was also there This is where we met and I know there are several folks from from POC here at Republika was this experience of POC

Where we were for five weeks I was only there for a week, but you guys were there for a good five weeks in this immersion That was an attempt at rebuilding new forms of society But do you want to share a little bit about what the the provocation of POC was about? And how you ended up there and some of the beauties that you found there some of those gems

But also some of the shadows some of the tensions in creating this pop-up culture Yeah, sure. I think similar to what you were saying This is in some ways. This isn't really my story to tell so I can only give a bit of a story from a participant In particular, but I think the message of POC was around trying to deliver a message to the cop 21

Climate conference to say We're we're not okay with you. Just talking about action and not doing anything We're prototyping on the ground really trying to figure out what does a society that is sustainable look like and there's sort of a

underpinning of that Experiment I think that was about open source culture in particular and how how does that relate to the way that we build societies Manage societies and come together as communities and makers and so for those of you who don't know about POC 21 it was this five-week long innovation camp held in a castle outside of this castle

outside of Paris and we came together and Really prototyped what a new society would look like by building building toilets and Creating systems to make sure that everybody got fed wasn't a posh castle No, it wasn't a posh castle when we say castle

Sometimes people think that we were just hanging out But turns out the infrastructure of castles is not actually built to hold up to 300 people at one time It was yeah, that was a issue that came up many times. And so I think some of the beautiful things about that experience were that Yeah, just the aspect of transformative learning of being in that context

so I showed up about a week early to help set up the infrastructure for the camp and It felt like we were in a disaster area. Like we were figuring out. Okay, there's one toilet We've got like 30 people we need to build a toilet today So that tomorrow that that is not an issue and also someone's building the showers

but right now the showers aren't working and there's tents but some of us are sleeping on the floor and it felt like Yeah, we were Like a larp, I guess we were really prototyping a bit of a dystopian situation And it was the beautiful thing was to see over a period of weeks using open source tools and using the Obviously not everything that we used was open source

But really trying to be as generative with the tools of open source and open hardware as we could to create a community with infrastructure and so by the end of it, I think that there's this Kind of magical experience of everybody

Going through this learning journey and finding out that okay some of these things are we kind of have a handle on like we know we can figure out how to build these things and these things meet our need in These ways and some of these things we don't have a handle on and so yeah I think there was a lot of there's a lot of difficulty in organizing

There's a lot of difficulty in like being able to see each other under stressful situations And I think those are all really human aspects of the prototyping experience And yeah, I feel like I learned a lot from it I know that many of the sponsors who came who sent people went off to quit their jobs So I know that other people had transformative

There were two things that really stood out for me Being at the castle one was just how everyone's happiness seemed to shoot up when there was good Wi-Fi Which has implications for how we design tribes that are very different from historic tribes But then also leaving POC I mean Manu is here in the front row too of the audience

Everyone seemed to have this deep longing for building a new kind of society and then really struggled to figure out how to bring that back into their everyday life So Chelsea, I'm wondering if there's anything that you would want to share where you felt like there's been a sort of a longing or a hunger that you found in community or some a particular a

Particular gem that you feel like What could be transferable to to sort of mass everyday society? Yeah, I mean I've run a lot of different communities

I've been I've been the person who other people call it 2 a.m And they're like, I've come up with an idea and you're like, oh, please go back to bed. Let's talk about it tomorrow So yeah, there's a lot of different every community is so different It's Interesting, you know there I think what comes to mind is about like what currency is going to sustain that energy and that longing

Because you you are always in this process of creating the world. There is no receiving the world really you're constantly a participant and creating it and so Whether whether it's like a movement for climate action in policy or whether it's a you know

Inspiral style business collective or whether it's a group of people from across an entire sector coming together to pincer Movement and change their sector. Everyone is showing up with that feeling of like I can feel it in my heart How do we do it? And so I think one of the hardest things and I've you know as someone in only the early part of my adult life

I definitely have been told many times It's not about you know, staying up all night every night in your 20s trying to change the world. It's like Actually, this is a multi-generational process and so I think it's interesting on a small scale you look at a political campaigning organization and and a political campaigning movement something like occupy or something

like black lives matter and you can see it's tribal design and It's leaderlessness potentially And you can see that money's not a big part of that. Maybe it's maybe the donation based Fundraising system is just never going to allow for those people to actually create full livelihood from

participating and creating the world in that space and so the currency becomes love or it becomes reputation or it becomes Credibility or it becomes FaceTime or something like something Motivates you to keep showing up to the meeting because it's rewarding for you Whereas an inspiring I think there's this there's a slightly there's slightly more healthiness

I think to people being able to earn money together that that is a gym that I would definitely That firm from now on I will be designing around as you know It's like actually if we can make money together and then share that shared capacity It not only sustains us but it sustains our mission because then we can take people out of this

Feeling trapped in this organization where they want to create an internal movement in whatever Corporate as you were talking about that feeling and we can say Come into our alternative little economy We're gonna bridge across from the island to the mainland using an economic engine just to give you more time

And to give you more sustenance and to allow you to have a holiday sometimes, too So I think there's a really interesting piece about about livelihood and about money in there Yeah, the other thing about POC not that I was there but it just it's just such a strong reminder that another gym is about Time like how long you know one another I think any community over five weeks would encounter the same challenges of

We have to set up a governance system and know whatever and what is this power structure that's emerging and whatever and I think that Everything it's about time and when I was talking before about the lineages You know circle behind circle behind circle of people sitting together working through their shit is really like

That is you know Nothing can replace that level of depth that you've created and co-created over over generations of like the wisdom of that informal Knowledge that is coming through that so yeah, there's something there about time, too

Yeah, thank you. I want to bring our attention to one other element of neo tribes that we really see in festival culture There is a young guy who who I met who was part of this peer-to-peer Spirituality or philosophy group that we put together called wisdom hackers and he spent

Three months traveling around and going to festivals and really asking the philosophical question Why can't we bring festival spirit into everyday life? and I think from a from a neo tribal perspective there are a lot of ways in which festival culture and Community design insights that have come out of festival culture have been really important for even seating groups like

Inspiral and and how we think about even mobilizing politically but we were also at a festival an amazing festival in Costa Rica called envision recently and We had a bit of a provocation to some of the organizers and I'm wondering if you guys can share a little bit

about some of your some of your Discomforts with festival culture and then some of the things that you feel like it's actually incubating new new forms of DNA or new kinds of micro economies that could be really interesting as a way of transforming mass society

immediately, I just have Sort of a two sides of the same coin, you know it's it's the the same thing that is the gift is the curse in terms of Festivals being a place where people can escape and so they can escape in a way that is going to definitely be

Devoid of their normal life sense of identity and purpose and daily rhythm So the escapism of it can can be a real it can be a shadow as well as a blessing But I think in its escape it also allows for you know a place Separate and free from the bounds of your normal thinking so there's this there's this wondrousness of the escape and and this difficulty with it

Yeah, I I would agree and I guess the the classic example of the festival that walks this line is Burning Man and I think that yeah you it's in some ways that's sort of an extreme example, but

You've got this peer-to-peer experience to some degree or at least maybe you don't have it exactly in the same way now as you used to but you've got this experience of Going out in a costume and sitting down on a gigantic pirate ship built in the middle of the desert and having a conversation with Larry Page

and I think that That experience over time has created a really significant cultural shift at least in California and I think it does ripple out So I do think that the seeds of Experience that happened in those festivals can create real impact I think that I don't know

I was really inspired by the Envision founder who we were we had this panel at Envision talking about post capitalism And we didn't we didn't name the panel And I was really inspired by his his own critique of his own projects where he was saying Yeah, we we bought this piece of land in Costa Rica and we like invited all our friends and we built this little eco village

And then we realized shit. We're all just rich white guys And we just bought a piece of Costa Rica from the government and made it ours And so now he's like iterated that project and really the next version of what they're doing is more about being a bridge to finance For the local community to co-own that piece of property

And so I I hope that what the festivals are incubating is something that conscious Obviously, these things are complex so you can never really know Yeah, I mean it was disheartening at Envision to to see people locals were sneaking into the festivals climbing fences and going underground and and so I think part of our challenge there was how do you think about

festivals as as sites of inclusion and how do you how do you radicalize festivals so that they're not just about Hedonistic escapism which can be really important for one's own personal development But how do you how do you bridge that with? With systems, so how do we how do we imagine ourselves within a festival context also?

also being able to think about you know systemic impacts of that festival and and I think this challenge of radicalizing self-help really comes out in this tribalism conversation because you have so many people who are really

Appropriating a lot of indigenous culture and are going on these ayahuasca retreats and are seeking out personal healing But they're seeking out personal healing in a way that's atomized from systemic engagement So they see that healing as divorced from this post-capitalist moment that we're existing in

I think we only have a few minutes left before questions. So I'll I'll move us on Although the slide wants to stay on festivals But really some of the questions that we've started sharing are really how do we steal? How do we pirate from different kinds of tribes? How do we respect the lineages and remix some of those and

one tribe Alright, well, I'll just talk about it and maybe it'll it'll click over so one tribe that I've been really interested in is the Amish and Have spent a lot of time with Amish communities who I think are really incredible for a variety of reasons

I think one they have this alternative script of Entrepreneurship that is much more vested within The community and so within this ethos of collaboration and you also have within Amish communities this reluctance to Technology, so it's not that they're technology Technologically abstinent, but they believe in slow adoption. So you really have beta testers within the community that are

First importing new technologies and then seeing well What will be the impact of this technology on our community's well-being and so to bring some of that Amish provocation into mass society I developed this performance character called the Amish futurist and the last time I was at Republica some years ago. She was present so

Rebecca was here and was Leading everyone in a confession of their technology sins and the vanities that were encouraged by Facebook But I'm interested too in in your guys's perspectives because it's been really funny

to use Rebecca as a vehicle for actually creating this crack in this culture of entrepreneurship and of the startup scene for people to be able to share their Technophobia is for people to be able to share. Well, what are the actual bigger intentions behind this particular technology? So as you guys think about not necessarily becoming more sort of Luddite in your approach to technology

But as you think about, you know What are some of the social dimensions that accompany technologies that we have to think about and how are you bringing more of? More of an existential awareness to technology there have been some great talks here on platform Cooperatives for example that are beginning to think about new forms of ownership that don't go down this traditional growth pathway

So I think that there's there's tons of different examples of people experimenting in this realm So I for context I went to school at UC Berkeley which is in around Silicon Valley

and studied both computer science and entrepreneurship and my experience of that was really that The story of what technology is and its role that it plays in the economy is really Dominating in a in a certain direction. So it's like as a

Entrepreneurship 101 at the end of this class you're gonna pitch to venture capitalists so that it's I guess part of my inquiry around intentional technology is really about We as humans tend to seem to tend to play with defaults or play with the stories really easily

It's like cool. Well, I'm I'm supposed to pitch to this venture capitalist So obviously this makes sense and he's gonna take 5% equity and in two years, they'll kick me out of the company I think that these I mean that's extreme but like it's not unheard of and I think that

the intentional technology story is One of both being intentional about what the technology is. I think that's something that is really really present here and you know Can you share specifically to just co-budget and Lumi own the tools that you guys so in and spiral we've got this like pattern of trying to take Social processes and transform them into digital processes for collaboration

so the the first one that we kind of that kind of is the most popular one is Lumi Oh, which is an online tool for collaborative decision-making which came out of a crew from the occupy movement and spiral very much didn't make Lumi Oh, but gave Lumi Oh a desk and an internet connection and

Allowed them to sort of figure it out or help them figure it out And another so Lumi Oh is sort of the digital version of a social process That comes from a lineage of consensus building practice If you get a chance to check out the tool, it's very very simple. It's like a discussion thread with Thumbs and I sort of there's it's this extremely deep practice of consensus building that it comes from

and I guess the second tool that you mentioned is co-budget which is our sort of internal economy tool within in spiral which allows us to run a bit of a Participatory budgeting process which comes from I think originally it comes from

housing cooperatives who would put on these sort of project fairs Where you would you would sort of show up to dinner one night and everybody would get a couple Monopoly dollars and people would put up sort of science fair style posters and say like I want to do this with the houses extra money and if you everyone put these fake dollars into each other's buckets and then you get a

You get an allocation of funds based on how much You were given from the community And so we've we've been experimenting with these practices as ways of building technology that support social process and social development and Also experimenting within these technologies with different financing structures that allow a bit of flexibility from the the dominant

narrative of the economic economic narrative of technology and venture capital I can go specifically into that with people afterwards to talk about the financial instruments Well, what's really interesting at a higher level also is that? Inspiral has in some ways pioneered this foray into really building open-source social enterprises for

Neotribal technology and I think that it's it's bizarre how hard it is to find that so I think that it's really interesting that most technology and especially the way that it's financed in the way that Dominant paradigms of ownership are working in the technology space

Really incentivize us to build pieces of technology that are where the user Design is centered on an individual's experience rather than a group experience So I think it's really interesting as well to just kind of notice at that higher level that examples like Lumiou and co-budget are kind of like this new species of

Technologies designed for groups to thrive not for people and not for individuals only to sort of gain this vanity experience or whatever your example was like so of the sort of the sins of Facebook Beautiful, so I think we have time just a few minutes left If there are any questions, maybe one question or two questions and otherwise, we're just gonna be around too

So as we begin to sort of refine this story and figure out You know what works we're really eager to hear from you guys What are the types of challenges that you're encountering as you build communities? And maybe lastly what can we use from cults because they've done a lot of this particularly effectively

And so one of the frameworks that we hacked was this business model canvas for cult creation And so really looking at for any kind of community design process How do you think about your origin story and your creation myth? How do you think about the incentives that structure that community and really just applying a lot of the things that cults do well

To think about some of the emergent collaborative economies and new forms of community that we want to structure Great. Thank you guys We have one question. Yeah My name is Laurie I I live in I've been living in collectives now for about on and off

Eight years and I'm I live in a big collective myself in London, which is Among other things has become a poly collective and a real center for the queer community in North London

but um One of the things that we found Is that and certainly one of the things I've found when I've tried to write about it and think about it Is that the politics really emerge from the space rather than vice versa? I'm sure this is something that you experienced with occupy. I certainly did and the space emerged out of necessity

We live in a big warehouse One of the reasons we live in a big warehouse is because we can't afford the rent in London Otherwise the rent in London is crazy. We can only afford to live there because there's sometimes 12 of us and Out of that it became easier to shop for food collectively and make meals together collectively

And then everything emerged from there So I'm wondering what your thoughts were on rather than starting with the idea or the longing Starting with the space itself and the problems of that when there is so much pressure on space and on housing. Thanks

Fantastic. Thank you Do you guys have any reflections on just the power of space in really seating some of these new communities? I have a really quick antidote, which is I was just in Devon last week On a course that really looked at Bioregionalism as design and so was focused in less on this idea of story of place and really being

Attentive to how the spaces and the geographies that were in come to inspire the cultures that are there And so the things that you see Operating very much within a social or a cultural fabric you see those mimics within the environment of the space and you know specifically in this region of Devon it was

Notorious for a lot of witch hunts. So the day before we got there There were a number of indigenous woman who had come from around the world to really heal the land and heal some of that trauma And so it was a powerful experience On every level of thinking how place

Informs the cultures were trying to build there was a guy from Silicon Valley who'd recently moved there and was trying to create an incubator and he was really having to redesign that around that place and specifically, you know think about how the geography had created a culture that actually wasn't about the sort of Lone Ranger innovator

Yeah, I think place is everything and I also love the way that you brought up in your question the issue of Like communities out of necessity rather than communities out of luxury I think that's like a really important concept that you've brought through which is kind of we have like dodged around

And I think Derek and I were just living in San Francisco a few months ago Just for a short time to try and understand that world And as you say we were living in a in an artist sort of Queer activist house filled with many many bedrooms in the middle of San Francisco

And it's the only way that you can live in the middle of San Francisco at a certain point and it's so inspiring to be here in Berlin and in Germany and to know that the work of the the housing syndicate also as like this incredible example of housing commons practice and yeah, it's it's

Species it's only now in this really strange digital age where we're feeling more disconnect with where do I live? What is my home questions like that have been much much less frequent I think in previous generations and so it becomes more important now also for us to

question, what we need our roots to be made of, what is rooting, where are you rooting, and what is the culture of that place, and how is it coming through you. In New Zealand, we have a practice of, you don't introduce yourself by who you are and what you've done, you introduce yourself of your family lineage and where you're from, land-wise, you explain which hill you grew up next to, which river,

which boat you arrived into New Zealand from, because in Maori culture, everybody arrived on a waka in a canoe from the Pacific Islands hundreds of years ago, and so everyone can trace back to one of these boats, and I think again this is a practice of regrounding, recognizing that you are the manifestation of all

of these layers of lineage, all of these layers of different connection to land, and we're inextricably connected with that, so yeah, I just totally honor what you've brought forward, yeah. Great, thank you, thank you guys. Thank you, Alexa Clay, wonderful, thank you very much.