Feÿcosystem

by Marc Santolini

This year has been utterly particular, and Fey provided the perfect extraordinary escape. Beyond the idiosyncrasies of the current situation, Fey even seemed to be the escape to anything close to what would constitute "normality" and traditional routines. So what is Fey the name of?

Following the words of Newton, if we see further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. So is Fey, built on long standing ideals and practices of communal living , be it traditional (Kibbutz) or modern (North American Communes). From traditions, it derives the fluidity, "naturality" of a system anchored in a local cultural usage through the passage of generations. From modernity it borrows the theoretical deconstructive grounding that lays solid foundations to withstand the ever changing global cultural landscape. Then, it is maybe no surprise that Fey welcomes a young, "modern" generation fully embedded into its generational fights for social (r)evolution into the almost oxymoronic landscape of a "traditional" castle grounded into its country long history.

Across my few passages, I have witnessed numerous attempts to characterize the place, a difficult exercise that one always faces when in the early stages of an innovative venture. Because framing would be already losing a certain agility and freedom. Because a frame is a border. Naming categorizes. Encloses. Staying afar from a predetermined fate, Fey cultivates permaculture. It is a place where entropy and negentropy coexist, an institution without institutionalization - an "extitutional" proxy. Fey thinks ecosystemically -- and an ecosystem doesn't have a centralized governance model, it doesn't derive from an intelligent design, it escapes any teleology and predefined model. An ecosystem is what it becomes. In its process, negentropy (the order -- the vegetation and animals) is built from entropy (the disorder -- the soil that once was order), in an ever-ending cycle of cross-feeding between these co-existent Yins and Yangs of collective organization.

In the Feycosystem, process is key: any individual is prompted to act, express themselves, do, teach. The resulting boiling "doacraty" continuously generates opportunities to learn, co-create, and most importantly bond together. Fey is an incubator of human interactions, an ecological accelerator spreading knowledge oversupplies across its temporary members. It is the equalizer of an ever-modulating collective symphony.

Though characterized by the agility and plasticity that short-termism allow, ecosystems are nonetheless highly dependent of the conditions through which they accumulate knowledge in the long-term if they desire to persist. Be it through organic genetics or cultural memetics, ecosystems slowly encode their structural topography through generations. Interaction rules get set, and slowly adapt as the inevitable novelty kicks in. Poised at the edge of stability and volatility, such adaptative complex systems are abundantly represented across collective processes, from ecological networks to brain wirings, multicellular organisms, or companies in a free market. These systems are driven by two highly different time scales: the short one of the ephemeral individual and the long one of the collective phenomenon it partakes in (the tree in a millennial forest, a skin cell in a decennial human multicellular organism, a tech company in a centennial free market). To be adaptative, such complex systems rely on a slowly evolving informational repository: the tree DNA encoding how its future generations will look like and be predisposed to interact in their ecosystem, the lifelong kept neurons and their wiring diagram that ensure an organism long-term memory and identity, or the money valuation system allowing for market stability and inter-operability.

In the Feycosystem, the weekly transient individuals are concomitant with a long-term ecosystemic encoding operating through three main processes. First, the founders and core residents at the Castle capture the local collective memory of thoughts and practices, the knowledge of prior success and failures, and the long-term vision and value set infused through small scale, repeated encounters. Second, the use of a continuous messaging board (the Whatsapp group) creates a digital repository for the community continuity to operate, stitching together the weekly "generations" of feytopians. Finally, the short-term residents are not randomly selected, but are sampled in vicinity to the initial founders social network, in a process driven by homophily (we are connected to whom we are more similar to). This process generates a similarity in the background prior knowledge (be it evanescent and unspoken) of the do's and don'ts of community living, plugging the community into the centennial timescale of communal idea(l)s.

All these contribute to the current performance of the ecosystem, but also reveal its potential fragility. First, by relying too much on its "core" components (its founders and core residents), the Feycosystem is not easily resilient to their removal (be it accidental or voluntary). Improved resilience could be attained by formalizing the process of obtaining (and being relieved from) "core" responsibilities. Second, by relying on instant messaging, the collective repository gets overloaded by daily information exchanges that become irrelevant in the long term. An occasional documentation process (such as what this book attempts?) would allow to synthesize the relevant information for mid- to long-term usage. Finally, the similarity and redundancy induced by social network homophily can create an echo chamber effect, limiting in the long-term the renewal of the community necessary to its ultimate adaptability and perpetuation. To this, thematic calls and outreach work, be it through podcasts or {b/v}logging, might provide useful in ensuring proper renewal and diversity.

Beyond the Feycosystem, multiple attempts, nationally and internationally, propose and promote such communal living, and provide as many examples of potential successes and pitfalls to learn from. Learning from all of them will be key. Beyond learning, connecting them through a global network will be an even more challenging task. In such a meta-ecosystem, local ecosystems become individual nodes in the broader ecosystem. This is the realm of geopolitics and its "embassy networks". Such an "eco-mmunal" framework is the biggest and probably most fascinating challenge the Fey community is poised to tackle.