From: heath michael rezabek Date: Fri, 13 May 1994 13:26:47 -0500 (CDT) Subject: NEXUS.FAQ.1 [COMMUNItek] To: nexus-gaia@netcom.com < N E X U S - G a i a @ > -- NEXUS.FAQ.1 [COMMUNITY & BACKGROUND INFO] -- > what does it take to make virtual culture into a lifestyle? i mean to > completely integrate my net.concerns with my RL concerns? what does it take > to gather together the people from the Net i've most grown to love and with > whom i can work together the most efficiently -- what does it take to get us > under one roof, to get us a node, and to link that node to yet another NEXUS > under another roof with a slightly different approach in some other city? > [free agent .rez, Mon Nov 15 12:55:21 1993] -- There are TWO [2] sub-FAQs which make up this primer, CommuniTek-oriented ... this is FAQ [1] : COMMUNITY INFO. See the end of this FAQ for further details on the NEXUS project and the other FAQ in the current bundle. -- [ 1 ] N E X U S C O M M U N I t e k : C O M M U N I T Y & B A C K G R O U N D I N F O Q 1.1: What is a NEXUS? A: The dictionary defines a "nexus" as a "a connection, tie, or link between individuals of a group, members of a series, etc." When applied to virtual cultures and the networked humans which comprise them, a NEXUS is basically a domicile/workspace/cultural-center formed in real-life by people who have met and established relationships over the Net. They purchase and secure group Internet access, and thus control their own node, living in close proximity, since creativity blossoms in people when surrounded with creativity. This is akin to the synergy found on the Internet itself, as local parts of the Internet also need a close group of people in order to live and breathe and grow. There are 2 main ideas behind what a NEXUS can be. The first is a NEXUS as work-place and local service-provider for a given community. In this capacity the NEXUS can sustain itself and its continued prosperity through services offered to its community. NEXI can run small, fast, agile services for folks. This is what [some] people need and will pay for: decent service, cheap. You /can/ make a living doing this, being a mom-and-pop i.Net provider or a co-op virtual-community-infrastructure provider. These services could be Internetworking services [email accounts, SLIP/PPP services, MUDs, conferencing servers, etc], or services that synergize with the Internet... digital prepress services for print documents, digital imagesetting, CAD/CAM [for circuit boards, molds, etc], audio and video production, CD mastering, and overall information gardening. Another possibility is the formation of a day care center for kids. [if you have a house with a yard for kids to play; there are lots of folks who would give a lot for their kids to grow up surrounded by cyberculture... most flexible-minded folks and even some yuppies :) believe that fluency in infotek is the passport to citizenship in the new society...] This, of course, leads into possiblities of inservices for local schools, and businesses as well, on how to become Internet-fluent. The second is, of course, the community/co-op itself. A NEXUS' workers have to be doing something when not maintaining its system, and that something is the fostering of virtual communities as they exist on the Net, and of their own flesh-community as it exists at the NEXUS. This includes the production of art and cultural artifacts which are compelling and useful to those within that virtual culture, as opposed to the mass-produced cultural placebo offered through mass-media. At the bottom of the NEXUS is community: lent speed and flexibility through the Net, lent form and reality through the flesh. One word for this is NetWeaving; whatever the name, to many it is a direction and goal which seems /just/ too insubstantial. One of the aims of the NEXUS-NetWeave is to vivify and give form to this vision, to Weave the Net together through people, and to graft that living Net into life. Q 1.2: Where'd the idea come from? A: Seemingly, everywhere at once. Some had heard the word "nexus" on the EXTROPIANS e.list during the L.A. riots, where the poster used it to refer to their house as a place -- a NEXUS -- where others of a kindred approach could fleshmeet and spend time before moving on. Eventually others batted the idea about in its current context, as a workplace/domicile/cultural-center/incubator for the emerging virtual cultures of the Net. It found its way into a body of collaborative prose, based on a fusion of fact and vision, called FIXION. It was only a matter of time until we began to form a common base of operations and set to work... Q 1.3: Why a cooperative? A: Cheap, easy, and fast Internet service is something a lot of people look forward to. Why isn't it available now? One answer is that big companies haven't found a way to make a lot of money at it. That doesn't mean it can't be done another way, though. If you want a product or service that isn't available where you are, one way to get it is to form a cooperative to provide it! A cooperative is a group of people each contributing a little bit of their time, money, and organizational skills to the group for their mutual benefit. Cooperatives have a long and successful history in the United States; there are electric, telephone, and water cooperatives in many communities around the country. Why not an Internet cooperative? Yet another reason for a NEXUS in particular is that, as issues of privacy and security of information become greater and greater issues and as the senses of individuality and community which we now have undergo metamorphosis, stable and reliable sources of community and co-independance will become not only desirable but /vital/. Q 1.4: If Internet access is the main reason for a NEXUS, why not wait for a commercial for-profit business to provide it for us? A: If you don't need Internet /now/, waiting is a possibility. There is no telling how long you are going to wait, however, and what kind of service you are going to get if you do wait. On the other hand, the point of a NEXUS is to get affordable Internet; so if you are tired of waiting, if you want some say in what you are getting, when you get it, and how much it costs, the forming a NEXUS may be for you. The savings over a commerical provider will more than pay you back for services you could afford individually, and by joining tgether you can get access to services that you would otherwise be completely unable to purchase -- direct ethernet to the Internet for example, with the ablility to plug and unplug machines into it at will. Of course, the cultural, community aspect of a NEXUS is something a for-profit service will never be able to provide. Whether your NEXUS is an old shared house or just an apartment building that has been wired for Ethernet, having a bunch of dedicated, creative net.heads in close physical proximity has a lot going for it. Paying for technical support from some Internet company can't possibly compare to getting help from a friend who can explain things to you in plain language or show it to you standing around your computer in your kitchen. And being in a nexus of worldwide communication as well as being at a hub of communication for your local neighborhood unites both ranges of human vision: the local: Home. And the global: Gaia. NEXI are meant to be an inherently flexible model, both socially and technically. They rely on adaptability to the new cultural ecologies, ecologies that emphasize community, trust, communication, openness, and creativity... instead of bureacracy, secrecy, and coercion. Like mammals in a land populated by the last lumbering dinosaurs, NEXIans and their NEXIal nests thrive and multiply in this new world, unnoticed by the large organizations that dance awkwardly above them. NEXI can afford to try things that for-profit companies and large companies would never be able to -- like using new technology, new software, or new ideas in distribution. Indeed, NEXI, building on the idea of culture as a self-organizing, dissipative structure, are positioned to take advantage of the new ecologies of information -- the impossibility of "ownership" of a piece of information, the economies of distributing information instead of goods [and having NEXI make a living off of /producing/ the goods], the economies of distributed communities of collaboration [hardware, software, and literature development over the Internet]. Q 1.5: Are there any precedents? A: There are already cooperative, person-oriented Internet providers in some places -- The Little Garden in San Francisco, California, RAINet in Portland, Oregon, Hookup-net in Ontario, Canada and others. These networks provide affordable service to many people, and some have been doing so for several years! In each of these places, mostly separate from this movement, there are isolated nexi already. Toad Hall, part of San Francisco's RainyGarden Affiliate, The Little Garden, is an apartment building that has all of its units wired for ethernet. The tenants share costs with TLG, who has several communications servers and other equipment in the building. There are other smaller nexi in The Little Garden throughout the Bay area. Another RainyGarden affiliate, scruz.net in Santa Cruz, CA is growing many little nexi in shared households in parallel with a county-wide UUCP network called Cruzio. In Portland, NEXI are growing in yet another RainyGarden affiliate, RAINet; and in Seattle, a not-yet-operating RainyGarden affiliate called spi.net, for Seattle Peoples's Internet Cooperative, is organizing a network of individuals, businesses, and NEXI. Although the west coast is a hotbed of cooperative network growth and NEXI development, small network providers are popping up in Texas and NEXI are forming in Austin; in New York state; and in Australia. It /can/ be done. It /is/ being done. Q 1.6: But most of those are service-providers, at root. Why take the extra step to forming a NEXUS? A: A NEXUS is an environment that encourages flexibility and growth; as a person, as a community, as a culture. NEXUS implies NETWORK, just as person implies society. NEXI work by themselves and together as intermediate steps between the individual all alone, and the vast sea of popular culture. The NEXUS and the NEXUS-community are the trellises that we weave our person-hoods and culture-hoods upon, to give them strength and structure and beauty, to help them grow in the harsh world we live in now. To help grow our selves, to help our new culture grow and thrive. Thus, the NEXUS community is not an organization in and of itself, nor is it necessarily a commercial enterprise foremost, as revenue goes back into development. It is a networked community. The NEXUS community; [see Q 2.4 in the communiTEK FAQ] Isolated NEXI form and dissolve all the time all around us -- communes, shared households, co-housing groups, housing co-ops. Many of them embody the values we look for -- interdependence, creativity, flexibility, communication, even net.culture. But surrounded by a vast and unfriendly sea of popular culture which encourages isolation, independence rather than INTER-dependance, and near-pathological materialism, these Temporary Autonomous Zones tend to disappear, leaving the individuals to fend for themselves. Enter the Internet. Here is a vast and flexible meeting-place, an agora teeming with people of all shapes and ideals; a place where Temporary Autonomous Zones coalesce and deliquesce without ever leaving the land of email. The Internet is populated with many who look to integrate their net.lifestyles with their real-life, and the NEXUS-community is the place for people to come together to do this. NEXI can serve as the frontier outposts -- a Point of Presence [PoP] -- of emergent global cultures; they are the evolving tropics of the Internet. NEXI are integral with Internet. They are places where Internet is raw, unfiltered, cheap, and teeming with life. Where people can plug and unplug their communications tools from the network at will; where new services and new virtual environments come into being easily, quickly, and disappear just as quickly. NEXI don't just depend on existing networks; NEXIans weave their own networks. NEXIans build their networks cooperatively. A NEXUS is group of people, each contributing a little bit of their creativity, energy, time, organizational skills, and other resources to the group for their mutual benefit. This may only relate to providing the Internet connection, but hopefully also extends toward other forms of interdependence and synergy. Just as some households share food costs and other chores, NEXI share Internet costs and chores. Businesses are not the only model for providing Internet; the whole Internet used to be run cooperatively between individuals, and still is a cooperative made up of large corporations. It is relatively easy to divide up the tasks, technology, and capital needed to keep a network going, and in fact works well on a household level and among handfuls of households -- human scale. This is the advantage of the new technologies: that they adapt with ease to human scale even as we adapt to them, and to the global horizons they continually provide. Another vital thing that NEXI share among each other and among their members is a stable and reliable sense of community. NEXIans band together to preserve their net.culture in real-life, for security and common culture, a culture that respects individuality and co-independence of people, instead of a culture where each person strives for independence from other /people/ while nevertheless /cultivating dependence/ on corporate systems of culture. NEXI seek to build their own messaging systems, for data and for culture. If you can't see "why" by now, though, it may not be for you. Q 1.7: What's involved? A: A public-access data-network doesn't require much in the way of traditional construction -- no stringing wires along poles or digging cable. All the wires are already there. A NEXUS can rent leased lines from the telephone company, fiber optic cables from other telecom companies, or simply use normal residential voice phone lines that never hang up. A public-access data-network doesn't require much equipment either -- just some boxes called 'routers' that cost about the same as mid-range PCs, and maybe some modems. A public-access data-network /does/ require organization, and maintenance, and planning-- it is mainly PEOPLE, not hardware! If the goal is a NEXUS -- an integrated workplace/home/cultural-center -- then the need for community here and now becomes the /most/ important thing. Q 1.8: Those are fine ideas, but how about actually setting one up; that's a lot of technology to put in place. How can one place do it? A: Well, we hope to be able to provide an ever-growing amount of technical and construction support. As more are established, logs and archives of what works and what doesn't and what hasn't been tried yet will be formed. As for the actual work, we plan to "train" a group of people at the first NEXUS to go up, so that this crew can travel in the flesh to the next PoP to come up and help raise the NEXUS, just as the Amish do barn-raisings. Details of how these crews will operate are still being discussed. Q 1.9: What makes a Nexus a NEXUS? A: Any household which has secured group Internet access could be considered a Nexus. The only difference between such an independantly-run Nexus and a NEXUS would be that the NEXUS prefix/title is used in local e.lists which are meta-subbed to larger We hope that people will take the information and ideas needed to form a Nexus to heart, whether with or without gravitating into the NEXUS e.list infrastructure which exists and is forming. We can offer the support of the community which already exists to try and bootstrap each NEXUS into existence, but hope that the ideas themselves take root and prosper with or without us. [see Q 2.4 in the communiTEK FAQ] "BEFORE SIGNING ANY DOTTED LINES DEPT." -- CAVEATS: What a NEXUS is NOT: : It's not free service -- it's people helping each other, pooling resources to provide network connections for mutual benefit. This does require some time, effort, and yes, money. [Though not a crippling amount, thanks to the cooperative organization of the network members.] : It's not precisely a for-profit business -- the idea isn't to get rich doing this, it is to provide essential services for appropriate cost to enable a community -- the NEXUS -- to stay alive and comfortable. The money earned by a NEXUS would best be spent thru re-investment in that NEXUS and expansion of its services, capabilities, cultural outreach, and fun. : It's not an attempt to "drop out" of our existing society. It seems apparent that any successful adaptation will require us to adapt to the systems in which we are already immersed. Then, through each other, we can expand and enrich our stake in our culture and our world from within the NEXUS-community. : It's not a 'content provider' -- or a censor. We have to keep in mind that, on the business end, all we want to do is move data, and what people do with the data is their own business. What we do with the organizational information we gain as a cultural NEXUS can be seen in the same light as the money gained: a resource to re-invest in continued growth and prosperity of the NEXUS itself [and thence of the whole NEXUS community]. : It's not an effort to put other Internet providers out of business -- they provide specialized services to their own communities, just as a NEXUS does to its own local city's community. For example, food co-ops certainly do not put wholesale distributors or supermarkets out of business. If the dinosaurs are going to be convinced to leave us alone, we must be willing to do the same. Our method is not success through onslaught, but rather slow and steady growth and adaptations to our changing cultural and world circumstances. THE NEXT STEP: ...is entirely up to you and those you work with and love on the Net. You can take the idea and implement it any way you can. You can start threads about this idea -- it's strengths and weaknesses, its visions and blind-spots -- in the virtual communities you now belong to. For information on this infrastructure, see NEXUS.FAQ.2 [TECHNICAL & STRUCTURAL ISSUES]. Those interested in working further on this project from within an existent community setting can do so by sending a message to with "subscribe NEXUS-GAIA" in the body.