Phyles

Phyles The Internet is the great steroid jar of this century. Take the ethics of the lonesome Ivy League hackers of the 80’s and set them loose on the web: in 15 years you will get Linux, Firefox, free music, the Public Domain movement and the end of the old culture industry. Take the old BBS, fanzines and fan conventions, move them to the Internet, and you will get the greatest conversational community boom since the Babel Tower.

When conversations take place in languages such as French, Spanish, or Arabic, they become transnational with great ease. Only 2 out of every 5 people who write in French on the Internet live in France. More than half the readers of any Madrid website with more than 1000 visitors per day are in Latin America. Arabic in the Western islamic world has gone, in ten years, from being a religious language superimposed onto regional, almost mutually unintelligible varieties (Moroccan, Algerian, etc.), to having a standard that is gradually reunifying the local dialects: Al Jazeera Arabic.

Virtual communities arise in new spaces, the spaces of the various globalisations associated with the great transnational languages. The main players in these communities belong to two generations that have grown up with Himanen’s hacker ethic: the network logic of abundance and the work ethic of free software are the glue that binds the blogosphere. The result: conversational communities, identitarian, transnational non-hierarchical tribes, based on the powerful incentive that is recognition.

Let us place these communities in the midst of the whirlwind that is a world where national states are sinking and the globalisation of the economy is eroding all the good old institutions that used to make people feel secure. Many of these communities will wish to have their own economy, community companies and common funds.

Spanish cyberpunks went from cyberactivism and literature to constituting a group of cooperative enterprises straddling South America and Madrid. Their new banners: economic democracy, resilience, and transnationality. They changed names: now they are known as “Indianos”, the Spanish word for the emigrant who would return to his home village after making his fortune in the Americas. Only that the Indianos’ America has been the Internet, and their business has spread from consultancy to sustainable production or local development.

In these very same years, the Murides, the old pacifist Sufis from Senegal, went from having a nationalist discourse and growing peanuts to constituting a community trade network with two million members that spreads from South Africa to Italy. Its transformation isn’t over yet, but the young Murides have turned the daïras, the old Koranic schools, into urban communes that are also business cells.

At first blush, nothing could be farther apart than cyberpunks and the Murides. But the parallelism is significant: they are not companies linked to a community, but transnational communities that have acquired enterprises in order to gain continuity in time and robustness. They are phyles.

Phyles may function democratically and be cooperative-based, as in the case of the Indianos, or else they may have a small-business structure and even a religiously inspired ideology, as in the case of the Murides. But they share two key elements: they possess a transnational identity, and they subordinate their companies to personal and community needs.

Phyles are “order attractors” in a domain which states cannot reach conceptually and in areas that states increasingly leave in the dark: phyles invest in social cohesion, sometimes even creating infrastructures, providing grants and training, and having their own NGOs. Transnational thinking allows them to access the new globalised business before anyone else. A phyle’s investment portfolio may range from renewable energies to PMCs, from free software initiatives to credit cooperatives. Their bet is based on two ideas. First: transnational is more powerful than international. Second: in a global market the community is more resilient than the “classic” capitalist company.

Winning a bet in the cyberpunk and postmodern world we live in nowadays amounts to nothing but resisting and thriving. In order to do so, one must truly belong in this world, truly love its frontiers. Phyles are the children of its explorers: of free software, virtual communities, cyberactivism, and the globalisation of the small. Maybe because of this, they are indubitably winning their bet.

DIY in 12 steps

Do you have a real community? Communities emerge, they are not artificially made. That means interaction and identity. Taking part in someone’s blog or having common interests doesn’t automatically provide that. So first step is to ask yourself if you really have a community or a contact list. Size doesn’t matter: a community of three persons can grow, a thousand persons spamming each other with Facebook or Twitter status updates are useless even as a starting point.
Build a private conversational space. Deliberation is what really matters in community building, so open a mailing list, a private newsgroup or a closed web forum. Start discussing and learning together.
A blog for each member. Private talking will transform personal blogs: they will be the origin of new proposals for the mailing list and the places where the conclusions will confront the external world. Having personal windows for contrasting with the world what you cook within your network is the best vaccine against narrow thinking or sectarian leaders.
Meet together. Community building is trust building. Meeting all together used to be difficult – especially if there are members on different continents – but meeting with some other members has to be on everyone’s task list. Having a beer or lunch will make it easier to discuss virtually later.
A blog aggregator for all. Build an aggregator for all of the community’s blogs, show the conversations to the world, expose your community to criticism as well as new ideas and influences. Accept that others talk about your network as “you”. Identity emerges not only as an endogenous process but also as a kind of external recognition.
Write periodically a paper with the consensus you reach. Almost once a year, write a paper with your common approach to reality and your visions of the future. The important thing is not the ideas or proposals themselves but the exercise of consensus reaching.
Take your time. Time is on your side. Time is necessary for maturing, will make it easier for the less interested to leave, will develop connections between closer members, and will allow clusters to form inside the community. Time will let you learn the two key lessons of deliberative communities:
- Not everyone goes in the same direction. Plurarchy is the cement of deliberative communities. Not everyone has to agree about everything always. It’s not always necessary to achieve consensus, as it’s even worse to artificially produce scarcity by voting on differences. Learning to live with plurarchy is the key experience necessary to becoming a phyle. It’s not about extreme individualism: on the opposite, it’s about sharing and developing a common identity from the everyday practice of complete personal independence.
- The goal is not to remain together but to learn more. The nation-state has taught us that a group is more important the more members it has. At the end of the day it produces the thinking of a proselytist sect: easy to become a member, emotional chantage if you want to exit. Be just the opposite! To separate, to go out, to stop being part, or to come back to membership doesn’t have to be explained, it has to be as easy as possible. Members’ state of mind is not the community’s business. You are a conversational, deliberative community: there is no cost for the remaining members when someone leaves, so don’t impose costs on the members who want to separate from the group for a while or forever. Becoming a new member on the other hand, has to be approved by the consensus of actual members. Expel proselytism from your mind.
Identity becomes defined by conversation and learning. Independently of group origins you will discover that the important thing about your community is the knowledge and ideas you have discovered together. So even if your community was born as a study group on Swedish stamps of the fifties, you will feel that it’s open to Uzbekians who share the same passion and ideas. Real identity is always transnational. Anyway, with time you will discover language as something important too. Fresh chatting, cooperation and real equality in the community’s life is limited to speakers of the same language or very closely related languages (such as the Nordic ones) who have no problem of understanding your language even they if speak in his/her native one (which has to be understandable by you too)
Encouraging particular initiatives and sharing narratives. Living in plurarchy teaches you to encourage the emerging of clusters without suspicion. These clusters will have their own projects and particular interests. They are not in contradiction with the community, in fact they reinforce it because a stronger kind of trust and connection will be born between cluster members. From the point of view of community building, the important question is to share experiences and conversations between the clusters and the whole group.
The great leap. The great leap’s time will come when, inside the conversational community, one cluster constitutes a commercial firm acting according to the common identity, principles and ideas. The key question now will be understanding this initiative as part of the community, but also as something new destined by itself to build a community of a different kind. The emerging of democratic firms inside the community means that some clusters inside feel mature enough to go further than fraternity and are capable of testing equality. Equality in managing of organizations means that everyone is indifferent on which other member will assume command of any task, as everyone trusts everyone equally.
A different way of thinking and building community. Then arrives the most difficult phase in the whole phyle birth process. The cluster that founded the firm has to become the center of a community empowered with firms inside the wider environment of the original conversational community. In the experience of las Indias the keys to success in this phase were:
- Organizing the firm under an economic democracy basis, becoming a labour cooperative. Cooperative form is coherent with equality among members, and what is even more important, makes leaving easy and relatively cheap for all. Being a labour-coop made it easier for us to organize as plurispecialists (everybody has responsibility in everything, anyone can perform any task) and to declare a “right of secession” which governs the process of leaving the community, ensuring minimum cuts to dissidents’ incomes.
- Closing the formal organization of our mother community, an association called Ciberpunk, when the majority of its members assumed that a new stage was reached when the firm became more and more solid.
- Establishing a Council that has evolved and grown in order to maintain the original deliberative network connected to the firm, but from an external position. Now, this council advises the main community in its strategies, NGO initiatives and external investments.
- Learning that the newcomers have to reappropriate the evolution and discussions of the group. We established an integration process that includes theoretical discussion and practice in the firm with all kinds of tasks. This process carries on for almost three years and its goal is to accept the apprentice as an equal partner in the cooperative society.
Being Phyle. After this long trip we will have the heart of a neo-Venetian, democratic phyle working: a transnational community proud of its own history and empowered with its own economic metabolism. Doesn’t matter if you have only some few members. Doesn’t matter whether you reach sooner or later a certain income level. Your community will have an economy to base its life style on. The life style that makes everything worth it to its members. Anyway, welcome to the world of phyles! Now is the time to look farther, to make plans for the future… It’s just the beginning, so meet some phyles out there, all over the world, and test new ways of banking, collaboration, international sales, etc.

Phyles

DIY in 12 steps

More on phyles in English