As Cory pointed out:

Secondly, your tribe is strong in that the three remaining members are solid in their agreement, which is awesome, but I have to point out that you are all family. Like real family. Mike and Jason are brothers, and so of course are going to think alike, and Guili and Jason are getting married, so its a foregone conclusion that you’re solid (congrats again, btw). You don’t have any members anymore that aren’t related. It doesn’t really matter, it just makes it look like that what you have is a family, not a tribe. Just thought I’d point it out from a readers point of view. Do you need anyone else in the tribe to call it a tribe? No, you don’t, but I think there’s more to your solidarity than purely a common philosphical thread, whether you see it or not.

We do see it, but anthropologically, a tribe is a family; the core of the Tribe of Anthropik that remains is the strongest part. We were the members who spent the most time together, and as Cory points out, there is more binding us together than mere philosophy.

And I think that suggests precisely where tribe-building has to start: with your own family. Because like you said, if we wait to learn how to form tribes until a collapse, we’re in trouble.

(Surprisingly enough, should Steve ever rejoin us, we’d still be a family—we discovered that Steve’s actually a distant cousin of mine and Mike’s!)

And second, in traditional tribes, leaving the tribe means exposure to terrible hardship and alienation. There’s little or no support for someone outside of the tribe; you don’t just go join another. But in this culture, there’s almost no penalty for leaving whatever you happen to be a member of. I live 2000 miles from my siblings; when Seattle got too big for me, I moved. When my employer sold out, I quit and got another job. No big deal.

I’ve taught live-in courses at a half-dozen intentional communities, and am familiar with many more, so I know their dynamics well. Few of them are still around, and the rest have high turnovers. That’s because, if things get tough, people just leave. It’s much easier than staying to solve the problems and there’s little penalty for quitting. Sadly, the only thing that really keeps intentional communities together when things get tough is if the members have a monetary stake that is difficult to withdraw. (Or, as the financial sponsor of the Big Island’s Pangaia community said to me, you’ve got to have some skin in the game or there’s no reason to work at it.) If you leave one of this culture’s tribes or communities, there are thousands of options, unlike traditional tribes where outcasts often die. Maybe in a couple of decades the situation will be more like old-style tribes, but for now, as Anthropik folks well know, the threshold for quitting a tribe is often nothing more than an argument or bad feelings, or just boredom. Having the idea that tribes are cool, or that maybe someday you’ll need to know this stuff, is poor incentive for maintaining the discipline required to stay in a voluntary tribe. So: How can contemporary tribes develop structural ties that are more solid and enticing than all the options outside the tribe? If we wait to learn how to form tribes until a collapse, we’re in trouble.

I think this statement could be better phrased. Permaculture is a design philosophy. The designs can be made to aid planning, but the philosophy is for bottom up plans. As a result, top down hierarchies would be nonsensical in a Permaculture design.

It’s just a tool and not the only tool. I’m hoping to have more tools to gracefully transition eight million new yorkers to the future. There are no guarantees that a have the tools needed for it to be graceful. Nevertheless, I appreciate the utility that Permaculture offers … for some things.

But, the placing of the economic sphere as a subset of the social sphere, that is something very significant—and as this discussion illustrates, much more problematic than just being nice to your cashiers and waitresses.

Like Giuli says…

Giuli hasn’t been in this thread. She posts under her own name; _Gi is somebody else.

I think many people who currently live in cities are operating in their own ‘rhizome’ networks already

Of course! How could it be otherwise? See “The Face of Anarchy.” Being so essential to human life, no society can do without tribalism completely. Tribalism doesn’t need hierarchy, but hierarchy always needs a bit of tribalism.

I think it would be a great loss to think that we have to abandon our cities and the networks created there. Rather, we need a rewilding of the city environment in my opinion. This is actually happening in Detroit. Entire neighborhoods have succumbed to crime and decay and been razed to empty pasture.

Yes, but the cities are going to be killing fields. They can’t support that many people. They’ll be rewilded, too, but not without a lot of time and a lot of pain. If your community is still without roots, I’d very strongly advise you to take the communities you form in the cities, and start putting down roots in a somewhat more remote location. The Tribe of Anthropik lives in Pittsburgh, but our home is a good clip north.

I’m not from the East coast so I don’t know what it’s like to not be able to find a peice of wild somewhere close. But if we can manage to support wild space, permaculture, and concentrated living arangements, why not?

It’s the premise I think that’s flawed. Even the most ambitious permaculture plans can’t support much more than a small town.

People and machines are different… to the extent (in my opinion) that artificially intelligent things won’t be machines. And treating people (or artificially intelligent things) like machines is wrong.

AI is smoke and mirrors. It’s as much “intelligence” as a puppet is a “person.”

(1) People and machines are different… to the extent (in my opinion) that artificially intelligent things won’t be machines. And treating people (or artificially intelligent things) like machines is wrong.

(2) I tried being a robot at work for a while. Now my aim in work is to be as little of a robot as possible. There is always a tension. There are ways of managing it. They are sometimes difficult.

(3) Thinking about our machines as other than ourselves is also wrong.

What I’m saying was, perhaps your marriage WAS purely utilitarian, your social looking glass may have just warped your perception into thinking it was an authentic relationship.i

(p.s. I read your comment just as you intended it, without offense. Thanks!)