It was one year ago this month that I left Tribal Dawn, and began Anthropik Media. It was a similar dream, but more focused on web design and development. However, my employment with Vivísimo demanded much of my time, and the dream languished. We established the Anthropik Network in part to serve as a billboard for our services, but also to advance a much greater cause. I had come to note a consilience of factors, from open source to the blogosphere to organic flash, all moving towards a New Tribal Revolution. The Anthropik Network was meant to be a common meeting place where these groups might converge, discover their common ground, and begin to foment a true social revolution.

That dream died. I set up an ambitious site using Drupal; forums for discussion, blogs and email for every member, articles, books, and project tracking so that when discussions turned to practicality, the Network could continue to foster cooperation and revolution by providing an open source, online infrastructure for collaboration across the globe. It was a difficult system to administer, particularly given the amount of time consumed simply putting food on the table, but the dream was noble and ambitious and well worth that investment.

It was never truly realized, though. The community we fostered was always small, far too small to justify the enormous resources of the Anthropik Network–or my personal sacrifices of time, money and effort to keep it running.

When we abandoned the dream of Anthropik Media, the last reason for maintaining the Anthropik Network as such a sprawling portal faded with it. The Anthropik Network died, and was reborn in a new form, in the form you see now.

At its heart is this blog. While our dreams of a tribal web design business have died, our dreams for our future tribe remain bright. This blog will chronicle the ongoing story of the emergence of the Tribe of Anthropik. We will discuss philosophy, current events, praxis and the day-to-day struggles to move beyond civilization.

In addition, we will use phpBB to set up forums for discussion ranging from open source software to blogging to organic flash to neo-shamanism to eco-anarchy to primitivism to John Zerzan, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen. We’ll also use MediaWiki–the same software running Wikipedia–to set up an Anthropik Cyclopedia, a compendium of knowledge, practical and theoretical, of use to the budding anarcho-primitivist.

We’ve already set up CUSP, the same system used by Brian Clevinger to run 8-Bit Theater, for Mike to continue publishing Mizanthropik.

A lot has changed, but a lot remains the same. The Anthropik Network is dead. Long live the Anthropik Network.