Tribal Dawn shook my faith, but did not destroy it. I still believed in the occupational tribe. So, I was no sooner gone from Tribal Dawn than I began forming another such tribe, this time called “Anthropik Media.” The name, of course, comes from the Greek for “man,” anthropos, the same root as “anthropology.” I was looking for a name that denoted a more human kind of art.

The dream was different. By the end, Tribal Dawn’s “mission creep” had spread from computer games to websites, and everything in between. Anthropik Media was more focused on web design and development, specifically. With a mere 200 people, Blizzard is one of the smallest game companies around. At half that, Razorfish was for some time the largest of web design firms. It’s a simple difference in markets. Game development takes huge teams working round the clock for years; web development takes small teams a few weeks to finish a project. Game development is extremely difficult for a small company; web development is not.

I was inspired by “Organic Flash,” the philosophy of design championed by Kurt Dommermuth. It resonated well with the worldview I had begun to take on. So much web design glorifies an abstract, mathematical precision; the essence of organic design is a reverie in imperfection, a glorification of the messy, the sanguine, the real, the alive. It rejects cold, hard, logical precision, the abstract lines and primary colors of some Mondrian world, and instead creates an art that is alive. This could only be fully realized with an interactive medium, of course. Adaptation is a major element of life, and art that reacts to its viewer is ever more “organic.” Sound, sight, motion and interactivity have allowed the greatest Flash artists alive today to create living atmospheres, organic art that rejects the psychotic aesthetic of the civilized mind, and instead glorifies creation as it truly is. Messy, sticky, imperfect, beautiful, and always very real.

At the same time, we could take a page from Summersault’s book, and use our skills and expertise to help build communities. The internet has proved to be fertile revolutionary ground. The emergence of the Blogosphere has begun to undo Gutenberg’s revolution. Free Software has undermined one of civilization’s most basic tenets–that humans must be coerced into obedience, and cannot be trusted to follow their passions. These both required each other, grew from each other, and both required the internet to take form. It has allowed radical minorities to find one another, and eliminated the confining limitations of geography. These communities had proven, time and again, to be invaluable crucibles for the formation of a new, tribal society. As Anthropik Media, we could form our tribe while helping others create such communities.

The first exemplar of that was our own, the Anthropik Network. I noted that while some details were different, free software hackers, organic flash artists, bloggers and “Ishmaelites” had more in common with one another than not. I hoped that by providing a forum that all shared in equally, they might discover this as well and begin working together. Powerful free software with beautiful interfaces devised by some of the world’s most brilliant artists; blogs promulgating ideas alien to our civilization for 10,000 years. The formation and flowering of a true social revolution.

Naturally, things didn’t go as smoothly as we would have liked….

My Autobiography

1. My Catholic Faith
2. Testing the Gorilla
3. Tribal Dawn
4. The Dream that was Anthropik
5. A Student With No Master