S YS TE MI C S Y MBIOTI C P LANETARY

ECOV ILLAG E NE TWORK

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovillage Network

P O Box 1674
Middletown, CA
95461-1674
USA

silverj6@mchsi.com

Silver J. H. Jones

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 TABLE OF CONTE NTS

The attempted beginning of the information age

3
Zero sum and the fitness landscape
4
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
5
Why ecovi!ages are the preferred experimental labs
7
The local ecovi!age - global interface
8
Creating a zero sum chronotopology ecovi!age
9
In%astructure requirements
9
The zero sum chronotopological social milieu
11
How ZSC helps and accelerates our evolution
13
What ZSC does not address
13

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 CHAP T ER V I
Zero Sum Chronotopology

Silver J. H. Jones
2008

Copyright © 2002 by Silver (J. H.) Jones. All rights, electronic, multimedia, and print, reserved. A publi-
cation of SSPEN - Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovillage Network.

Only a few centuries ago it took weeks for newspapers to arrive in distant parts of the world. These news-
papers provided the only source of news that kept the world interconnected. Only recently have we been
able to imagine a world, in which all forms of information can be made available everywhere and without
any delay in the delivery. We have chosen to refer to a civilization that has achieved this commendable
status as a zero sum chronotopological (ZSCC) civilization. Such a civilization is conceptually within our
reach, but we have not yet committed the intellectual and physical resources necessary to make it a real-
ity. Furthermore, providing information on a global scale, without the tools to properly utilize this vast
repository of information, would be of little use. One of the greatest challenges, in addition to providing
the information, will be learning how to benefit from such a hugh information resource in our limited life-
times.

The attempted beginning of the information age

The growth of the internet in the last decade of the Twentieth Century was the beginning of the zero sum
chronotopology society. The unfortunate collapse of the Nasdaq stock exchange , which followed this in-
credible decade, revealed the true lack of depth in our collective understanding of the process we had be-
gun in the early 1990s. The removal of trillions of dollars from this bold and farsighted objective, has
really set back the pace of progress towards the information age. In the period of the late 1990s technol-
ogy comprised only about 8 percent of the economy. but it was responsible for 38 percent of the growth of
the economy. Technology was projected to be responsible for 50 percent of the growth in the economy
within the next five years. With the implosion of this scenario, the most innovative cutting edge compa-
nies were hard pressed to keep up research and development, and to gain sufficient capital to expand their
operations and innovate. Whether we can afford this miscalculation will be the subject of history books, if
our civilization survives the next few centuries. This, hopefully temporary, back tracking from the new
information based economy to the old brick and mortar economy, was extremely unfortunate. How long

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we choose to linger in this stupor, remains to be seen. If we awaken in time, will we have the courage to
light up the optical fiber revolution again with a deeper sense of vision and purpose? In a world that is
so much in need of communication, education, and real-time access to information, we have slipped into a
state of regression. This mistake must be corrected, if we are to save our planet. The thought that we have
dark fiber sitting in the ground, going unused, and light optical fiber and networking companies hanging
on the edge of bankruptcy does not speak well for our sense of priorities. Innovation on the internet has
come to a near standstill, and the role out of broadband and the final few miles of metro-fiber has slowed
to a snail’s pace. We now excuse our de-synchronization of the economic engines of the world, so focused
for five years on this bold new information age vision, by calling it a ‘bubble.’ Was there corruption, spin,
foolishness, vast dishonesty, exaggeration, and deceptive and illegal accounting? Were the general public,
the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches of government behind the curve? Did the mercenary
financial markets exploit the excesses? The answer to all of these questions is an obvious yes, but this is
also not the real issue. The real issue is whether the fundamentals of this new technological explosion are
sound? We believe that the fundamental objectives of the information age explosion were without ques-
tion extremely sound! Who is going to educate the three or four billion people in the third world without
the distance learning capabilities of a broadband enabled internet, with the coast of a four year college
education approaching $100,000 -$200,000 dollars in the next 20 years? How large is the price going to
be, for our recent recent regression in the rollout of the information age? Do you think there is any corre-
lation between the fact that the new terrorist threats are coming from areas of the world where there is the
least internet access, and the least possibility of self-directed education? How will we reverse the ecologi-
cal decay of our planet without universal education? Did anyone ask these questions, when we began the
wholesale destruction of the very companies that had fueled the possibility of achieving these objectives?
Is it possible that we do not understand the complex dynamical interactions between all of the interfaces
involved in evolutionary ascension, and that we are still operating on the basis of a belief in the old Dar-
winian win/lose paradigm rather than in the new systemic and symbiotic win/win paradigm?

If we do not wake up, and if we keep using the old tired Darwinian win/lose paradigm, we will certainly
lose, because when our whole civilization collapses, the Darwinian paradigm shifts from a win/lose to a
lose/lose paradigm, and now everyone loses.

Zero sum and the fitness landscape

Every life bearing planet in the universe is an experiment designed to evaluate the capacity of evolving
intelligent species to assimilate the information stored and distributed in the universe, to climb the fitness
landscape of evolution, and to accept their role as cocreators of the universe by striving to attain the teleo-
logical objectives of the universe. It is the purpose of civilization to do everything that can be done to
accelerate this negentropic process.
The purpose of zero sum chronotopology (ZSC) is not to homogenize all the citizens on a planet by eras-
ing the distinctiveness of their individual cultures, by providing them with equal access to the same in-
formation. The purpose is to remove as many obstacles as possible to their own self-directed pathway in
evolution, to offer as many alternatives as possible, and to provide the conditions that allow a planetary
society to become robustly diverse and yet maintain synchronization in all efforts to advance evolution.
At the most fundamental level, the universe is more than mass and energy. The universe is information
and computation, and energy and matter are the dynamic means by which these more fundamental proc-
esses are portrayed. Evolutions progression towards bioascension proceeds fastest when there is free and
timely access to information. It is the goal of a zero sum chronotopology civilization to make this a possi-
ble - by providing information on demand, anywhere, anytime, and to provide the tools to assist individu-
als in effectively utilizing such vast stores of information effectively.
In order for our zero sum concept to work correctly, citizens must see them selves not only as information
consumers but also as information providers. If you do not provide information, then someone else does.
If large numbers of citizens do not provide information, then you end up with information controlled by a
small percentage of the population who may use this to their advantage, by attempting to control the rest

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of the population. Diversity comes from a heterarchical bottom-up approach to information, and informa-
tion control comes from a hierarchical top-down approach. We must all be information providers, in addi-
tion to being information consumers. Now this does not imply that we should use up valuable bandwidth
and storage space, flooding the internet with frivolous noise that is of no lasting value to our universal
evolution. Think before you publish, ask yourself if what you are about to publish is of real and enduring
value. The ease and quickness of publishing electronically, as opposed to the disciplined filtering process
that takes place with more traditional forms of publication, should not lead to short sited, shallow, and
sloppy work. If you are publishing factual information, make sure that your facts are correct, and provide
the sources of these facts so they can be verified.
The primitive ancient societies of our planet used the oral tradition of story telling and apprenticeship to
pass down information from generation to generation. Written language brought with it new forms of in-
formation transmission and storage, in the form of books and libraries. With the advent of the electronic
age, new and faster methods of information storage and communication became possible. It is now possi-
ble to write a paper, produce a lecture, conduct an interview, compose a piece of music, or produce a film,
and offer it up to those parts of the world where the internet has penetrated - in a matter of minutes. Geo-
logical location, distance from the provider, or time of day are no longer barriers for clients to receive in-
formation. When the planetary distributed computational grid (PDCG) is completed, one will have access
to the global information archive in the depths of the oceans, on the surface of the oceans, at every land
position, and in space colonies in non-decaying orbits above the earth. The potential of distance learning
to provide for guided learning, self-directed learning, and continuing education can make high level
universal education a reality within a few generations.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

The human brain is a marvelous information processing device, but it has its limitations. Our brains have
finite storage capacity, and the sense organs that supply raw data are localized, and unable to be every-
where at every conceivable moment in time. We overcome these limitations by sharing information gath-
ering and processing burdens with others, and in so doing distribute the workload of negentropic evolu-
tion. This is the best that we can do at present. Perhaps in the distant future, telepathy will allow us to di-
rectly access the whole planetary mind-field. By sharing our collective information with others, we over-
come many of the limitations of individuality. We enrich each other, our communities, and our global
civilization by being exposed to alternative ways of seeing and doing things. Each of us selectively bor-
rows from the collective pool of information, and these new ideas alter our existing world concepts. We in
return inject our modified ideas back into the collective pool of social information. If we view every idea
as a member of a species, and every category of information as a taxonomy, and the entire taxonomy
of species as constantly evolving, we can make a case that information is a form of ‘virtual ecology’,
and that information assimilation, distribution, and processing is an evolutionary computational
process. Properties of emergence, speciation, extinction, and self-organization can be seen in the process
of information growth.
In this new world of information ecology it is not genes that replicate and transmit information. A new
super-organic, social replicator, and transmitter in the form of memes (gestalts) has taken over the evolu-
tionary fitness landscape. Memes are infectious ideas, that spread rapidly through cultures and societies,
transforming the fitness terrain at speeds much faster than genes could ever hope to achieve.
Ecovillages and their networks have the potential to be on the cutting edge of evolution, because their size
and scale allows them to quickly adapt, adjust, and experiment within the fitness landscape of evolution.
Collectively they can potentially serve the larger global civilization as testing zones where new ideas, ap-
proaches, and technologies can be tested in ‘small worlds’ or ‘microsocieties’ in an effort to evaluate their
potential value as candidates for system adoption by the larger planetary society. It is unfortunate that the
larger society currently seems to have a negative attitude toward such experimentation, perhaps seeing
alternative approaches as rejections of the established system. Systems in order to remain viable in evolu-
tion must grow and evolve. It is much better for such experiments to take place within circumscribed
zones of experimentation, rather than within the larger global civilization. Ecovillages and their collective

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networks offer the ideal testing ground for new and revolutionary approaches. New concepts, social, agri-
cultural, economic, technological, and governance approaches can be tried first at the individual ecovil-
lage nodes. Methods that succeed can then be used in more diverse environments, before being absorbed
into the larger collective node structures (ecovillages) of the network. The most successful methods will
percolate up through the network until they approximate some degree of universality across the ecovil-
lage network. In this process methods will be adapted, fine tuned, and improved by testing across a broad
part of the fitness landscape. Only those methods that exhibit highly efficient hill climbing will attain the
peaks in the fitness landscape, and only these methods will make it to the broadest distribution within the
larger network. At this point we can be assured that these methods are well optimized, rugged, robust, and
worthy of being candidates for trail in the larger global fitness landscape. It may be advantageous to think
of all these ecovillages as islands, and colonies of islands, in which circumscribed evolutionary experi-
ments are taking place with some degree of isolation from the larger continents. Mistakes made at this
level are much less likely to percolate through the entire fitness landscape, which would have a much
more costly outcome. Far from being a threat to the larger established system, these smaller ‘micro-
civilizations’ perform an extremely valuable service for the larger global civilization. They should be
held in high esteem, and provided with all possible assistance by the larger state, national, and global or-
ganizations. Deploying poorly thought out infrastructure, technology, network architecture standards, and
social service models in the larger civilization can be very expensive to reverse or correct.
Our limited experience indicates that technological civilizations tend to complexify at an exponential
rate, and we can already see both the potential advantages and disadvantages of this process which is now
taking place in our society. Our ability to absorb, properly utilize, reconcile competing standards, properly
recycle, service our technology, and understand and foresee the effects these technologies will have on
our society - often lags far behind the actual production and release of these technologies. The inability
of our financial institutions, trade associations, economic institutions, educational institutions, legislative
institutions, and judicial institutions to keep abreast of the rapidly changing pace of technological evolu-
tion has become apparent as we rotate out of one century and millennium and into another. Ecovillages
are the ideal testing ground for alternative approaches to learning how to keep our civilization properly
synchronized with the rapid pace of evolution of technology and information technology.
Finding the proper balance between hierarchical top-down (authority, law, design, engineering) guiding
principles, and heterarchical bottom-up emergent, evolutionary, self-organizing principles is the challenge
of the future. The industrial revolution, sometimes now referred to as the ‘old economy,’ was to a large
extent, a hierarchical evolutionary development. We see examples of this type of development in large
multinational corporations, which play such a dominant role in our current civilization. Hierarchical sys-
tem approaches assume linearity, and that decisions should flow from the top-down, while lower levels of
the system are simply there to implement the instructions coming from above. The fast paced agile ‘new
economy’ which we witness from 1995-2008 is more a product of a heterarchical bottom-up trend in evo-
lutionary economics. The unanticipated explosive growth, followed by the equally unexpected implosive
collapse of the technological economy, bears witness to our lack of understanding of the newer nonlinear
economy. Bottom-up approaches are highly nonlinear, and if properly understood and utilized, they bene-
fit from continual levels of synergy with increasing levels of complexification. The problem is, these syn-
ergies are often not predictable from the outset, because they only arise and present themselves in the ac-
tual process of evolution. Smallness, agility, and the ability to be a first mover, is a distinct advantage in
such an environment. Large, highly structured, and rigid organizations are at a distinct disadvantage, and
attempts to compensate for this disadvantage, by taking over younger more nimble and creative smaller
companies, often leads to poor management and the degradation of both companies. The recent collapse
of Worldcom may provide an example of just such a poor attempt at synergy. Worldcom was a very ag-
gressive company, acquiring many smaller innovative companies to fuel its growth. Worldcom’s past
bankruptcy reveals that the attempted synergies were not well conceived. The next century, if we survive,
will certainly be a test of these two alternative approaches. The hierarchical system approach of the indus-
trial revolution is certainly older and better understood, in the context of the previous centuries of techno-
logical and economic evolution. Many, of what were previously thought to be the advantages, of the hier-
archical system, may now need re-evaluation. After two decades of hostile and non-hostile mergers, some
of the largest multinational corporations are considering and actually downsizing. Witness Citigroup di-

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vesting its Travelers section, and Tyco divesting some of its divisions. Some of the most interesting new
drugs and therapies came from small biotech companies, and the most innovative new information tech-
nologies, during the internet boom, came from companies that were no more than a few years old. The
now famous Yahoo internet directory was created in the dorm room of two college students. Netscape
came out of nowhere, and launched the first professional quality Web browser, which helped to launch the
WWW revolution. The largest software company in the world, Microsoft, thought the internet was noth-
ing more than a passing fade. Microsoft soon found themselves way behind the curve, forced to design
their whole operating system around the increasing interest in the internet. Real networks offered a piece
of software to listen to live or archived radio broadcasts and television programs on the internet. It took
years before Microsoft caught on and got up to speed. Smaller companies like Ariba, Commerce One,
BEA, Peoplesoft, and Seibal (not so small) jumped out ahead of larger companies like Oracle with inter-
net savvy intranet/extranet enterprise, supply chain, and customer relations management software to im-
prove the efficiencies of corporations. Cyberstudio (authors of GoLive, acquired by Adobe, and now un-
fortunately extinct) and Macromedia for the first time - made web page design and implementation a
graphical user interface experience, as opposed to a programming experience, and brought millions of
web content providers online. The easier to use Web authoring software contributed enormously to in-
creasing in the quantity and quality of Web content. Macromedia’s Flash and Adobe’s Livemotion pro-
duced a quantum leap in web development software for providing animated and interactive web content -
moving web content into the broadband era. Just where the proper balance between size, uniformity, and
capital resources verses smallness, agility, adaptability, and innovation, remains one of the largest ques-
tions we will face in the coming century. If the small innovative biotech companies are consumed by the
large drug conglomerates, will they be able to maintain their ability to innovate and surprise the world
with their rapid progress in genetic engineering? Innovation on the internet has certainly slowed down.
The recent tech implosion, and the reduced pace of broadband and fiber distribution is truly alarming!
Most of the new Web technologies that have been rolled between 2000 and 2008, were actually invented
by small innovative companies prior to the so called tech bubble bursting.
In a world where at least two thirds of the earth’s population are not receiving adequate education, what
chance is there of educating these children without the types of distance learning that would have been
possible with a broadband internet distributed around the globe? We have already lost 8 years of progress
from 2000-2008 as a result of the tech implosion. Can we really afford to lose any more time? Empty
minds are a great tragedy, an enormous economic burden, and sure path to ecological devastation, and
terrorist training camps!
We need a zero sum chronotopology civilization, and we need it now, or there will be no civilization to
speak of!

Why ecovillages are the preferred experimental labs

One can experiment in the business world by starting a new company; one can experiment in the educa-
tion world by starting a new school; one can experiment in the scientific world by starting up a new lab.
So why do we think we need ecovillages as the preferred laboratories for experimentation? The answer is
really quite strait forward - because they are ‘micro’ whole communities rather than just partial aspects of
communities like businesses, schools, and scientific labs. Such an environment provides a much better
environment in which to test the full implications of new and experimental concepts and technologies.
Businesses, schools, and scientific labs are partial aspects of a community. Total communities are highly
interactive, interdependent, and functioning systemic wholes. To evaluate the full implications of new
approaches, one must experiment in ‘micro’ societies that contain scaled representations of the whole
of the larger community. When you attempt to study a new approach to education, you do not just want
to know only how it effects learning and test scores, you want to know what effects it has on family life,
business, social interaction, ethics, economics, culture, legislation, laws, and governance. How will new
technologies effect family life? Do children learn primarily from their parents today, or from television, or
from the internet - and what about the quality of the content? Some studies indicate that they watch up to
six hours of television a day, and spend less than a half hour with their parents. Have cell phones in-

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creased the percentage of driving accidents? And if this is the case, how much are our automobile insur-
ance rates rising as a result of using this new technology in this manner?
The more technological and nonlinear our society becomes, the more we will have to move our laborato-
ries out of the confined and restricted environments of academic institutions and corporate research labs,
and into the new laboratories of the future - microsocieties. Because microsocieties provide statistically
and qualitatively representative scaled down versions of society, they come the closest to a perfect testing
zone for social experimentation. They operate within a circumscribed zone, and yet they have sufficient
complexity to be representative of the larger global society. Because society is nonlinear, complex, and
interactive - testing at any smaller or more restricted scale would simply not allow us to see the full impli-
cations of our research.
Ecovillages are attempts to set up new and experimental microsocieties where people come together to
design, implement, reside, and live their lives. They represent so much more than a place to work, making
them the ideal laboratory. People who wish to experiment in these communities benefit by being allowed
to test their concepts, and the larger society benefits by being able to adopt new and innovative ap-
proaches to many aspects of living. A natural filtering process is provided that can save the larger society
from making more costly mistakes. Unanticipated side effects are the achilles heel of the technological
age, and it is not easy to stay ahead of technologies exponential growth curve. Implications not envi-
sioned in the original rollout of new approaches can be identified, and dealt with, and when possible, cor-
rected at a much earlier stages of development.

Identifying side effects and unanticipated consequences in the early stages, and dealing with them, is
an important process of complexity and chaos control. Smaller scaled down, but representative commu-
nities, present an environment in which it is much easier to test for such side effects than in larger more
diverse communities. For example, the effects of dietary changes on health are much easier to test for if
you know the exact source of the food supply, the water, and the quality of the air in a given community.
Ecovillages allow the cross comparison of various types of communities across the ecovillage network,
because you can easily isolate the differences, which is an extremely complex task, in a much larger and
more diverse society.

The local ecovillage - global interface

Another way in which ecovillages can be valuable to the larger extended community, is by having each
one set aside a section of their community to be used for time share citizenship, allowing members of the
larger community to visit and experience the new approaches being tested in the more innovate ecovil-
lages. This gives the larger communities a change to better understand the experiments taking place
within the ecovillages. This can be important for funding and community liaison with the larger surround-
ing areas. The idea is to have the interface be something like a cell membrane rather than a hard
boundary, where selective interaction can take place - which is constructive to both sides of the inter-
face, yet allows each side to maintain their respective semipermeable integrity. The ecovillage benefits
by broadening its contact with aspects of society that it might not otherwise encounter, and the larger sur-
rounding community benefits from being introduced to new and innovative approaches to survival, life,
and ascension evolution - a win/win scenario for both parties. The more you think of all the advantages of
such an arrangement, the more you end up asking yourself - why such a system has not been imple-
mented. The only answer we can come up with is that the slower pace of growth in the pre-technological
era of civilization allowed these potential problems to be sorted out more easily within the general soci-
ety, yet the advanced stages of worldwide pollution, ecological destruction, and overpopulation would
seem to indicate that even in the slower growth eras the older techniques were unsuccessful. One thing is
certain, we can no longer afford such folly as we go forward. Ecovillages seem to present an excellent
alternative to the previous methods of testing. Since they share a common theme which is the desire to

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reverse many of the mistakes that have already been made, they are the natural testing ground for ap-
proaches to correcting these problems.
Ecovillages and their networks, in addition to starting with the correct motivation, can hope to see rapid
evaluation of new approaches if they adopt the zero sum chronotopology approach, and link themselves
up to a global network. The continual real-time updating of these experiments, will accelerate change and
facilitate early and mid-stream corrections, often impossible in a larger more diverse society where fund-
ing for research must be acquired, studies must be conducted, data collated and eventually published.
Even then, the pertinent parties who have the power to make changes, may not become aware of this work
for years after it has been published. Witness the governments around the world and their inability to keep
up with the rapid changes and implications of the growth of the internet on their societies. They are be-
hind the curve in attempting to deal with the rapid pace of change.

Creating a zero sum chronotopology ecovillage

Creating a zero sum chronotopology ecovillages and networks involves a number of ingredients. It in-
volves the necessary infrastructure, the proper paradigms, and the willingness of the citizens to have a
sense of personal involvement in the biovirtual convergence this implies.

Infrastructure requirements
Just what would be involved, in terms of infrastructure, in setting up a zero sum chronotopology ecovil-
lage network.
COMPUTATIONAL AND NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE
Each ecovillage should attempt to incorporate the following in the way of computational and network in-
frastructure:

• A highly distributed computational intranet grid allows the ecovillage to make maximum use of their
collective computer facilities.

• Dedicated web and redundant web servers, file servers, e-mail servers, clustered rendering servers,
streaming multimedia servers, environmental servers, and energy monitoring servers.

• Depending on the size and income of the ecovillage, supercomputers should be considered for the most
demanding computational tasks such as scientific simulations, batched 3D rendering, and video special
effects rendering.

• Each community should also have the capacity to tie into the larger ecovillage’s distributed computa-
tional grid - through its extranet connections to the entire ecovillage network.

• Each community needs as broad a bandwidth optical connection to the backbone as possible (T3, T2,
multiple T1’s)

• Ideally one would wish to have all of the computers within the ecovillage connected by metro optical
fiber. If this is not possible, 100 Gigahertz ethernet connections would be the second choice. For port-
able computers the new higher bandwidth standards for wireless transmission would be advantageous.

• Storage facilities would depending on the traffic demands of the system. A well equipped facility should
consist of large RAID redundant clusters, in addition to caching servers for web, multimedia, and
streaming. Older forms of tape backup should be performed in addition to system mirroring.

• Monitored system administration should be 24/7/365.

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• It is very important that the entire computational architecture of the ecovillage be designed and imple-
mented in a manner that it is easily scalable for future expansion and increased complexification.

• Sophisticated real-time computational and network load balancing software should be utilized, in addi-
tion to pre-scheduling and optimization of very demanding computational tasks.

• Proactive fire wall, hacking prevention, and virus software applications should be utilized in addition to
universal user ID and password adherence.

• For more demanding computational tasks, each individual ecovillage can contract, or time share, addi-
tional computational power within the larger distributed computational grid. Very large simulations
might require the coordinated cooperation across a large portion of the grid.

MULTIMEDIA PUBLISHING INFRASTRUCTURE

With the well established ability to produce and distribute music digitally, and the more recent ability to
produce and distribute digital video, there is no excuse for ecovillages not to have their own production
facilities, with the ability to publish in near real-time, in addition to the more traditional forms of publish-
ing, in the form of CD-ROM, DVD, and Blu Ray. Semi-pro digital cameras that can match the quality of
film, can be purchased in the $3,000 to $5,000 range, and they are continually coming down in price. For
$15 to $30 of tape you can produce a full length movie. Digital editing and special effects software starts
in the $500 to $1000 range (Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, and Apple Final Cut Pro). You can de-
but, advertise, distribute, and sell your movies on the internet - bypassing all the television and theater
‘gate keepers,’ and retain the profits for your ecovillage’s growth. This capability is just over the horizon,
and is being held up by the slow down in broadband rollout produced by the NASDAQ implosion. The
capability to accomplish the same objectives with sound is already available, and not quite as dependent
on broadband, although broadband makes is a lot less tedious. Dedicated studios for sound recording,
video filming, video editing, and special effects would be highly desirable if not essential. A dedicated
reall-time multimedia theater capable of producing and displaying incoming and outgoing performances
simultaneously would be a worthwhile goal to strive for. In the not too distant future, virtual reality will
also be a tool of enormous importance, and ecovillages should be in a position to take full advantage of
this new form of media. Streaming live performances to a large audience on the internet, remains very
expensive due to the lack of availability of large bandwidth optical fiber connections. However, it is
within the reach of large successful ecovillages.
A LOCAL AND DISTANCE LEARNING EDUCATIONAL FACILITY
Obviously every ecovillage needs very sophisticated educational facilities, consisting of local schools and
a university, a distance learning facility for broadcasting and archiving classes across the extranet, and a
dedicated hard copy and electronic library which can be supplemented by contracting with larger libraries
external to the ecovillage.
PRINT, ON DEMAND, AND EBOOK PUBLISHING INFRASTRUCTURE
Valuable older books, and books which are out of print can often be acquired at auctions, or via the inter-
net from bookstores that specialize in these out of print and semi-rare books. The copy machine is also a
wonder tool for keeping information alive, and computer scanners are bringing valuable hard copy into
the electronic age. In the near future we may see a new forms of publishing called ‘publish on demand.’
This process will allow electronic copies of books to be printed out at any facility that has the proper
equipment (essentially an intelligent copy machine with an internet connection to a book on demand
server archive. Many book publishers which are not willing to invest in hard copy printing and distribu-
tion for books that they believe do not have a large enough audience, will be willing to publish books on
demand because the initial investment is minimal compared to typical publishing and distribution. Print
on demand is an added source of revenue, with minimal investment and economic risk. Depending of the
cost of the technology, ecovillages could perhaps afford their own machines. Larger ecovillages could

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even consider traditional printing and publishing, although we do need to move to ebook formats if we
want to create a paperless world and save our very valuable trees.
A SCHEDULING CENTER
If the ecovillage has a large quantity of live lectures, conferences, town meetings, planning sessions,
audio performances, and video performances both within the ecovillage, and via videoconferencing with
other external nodes of the ecovillage network - then it should have a scheduling center which provides a
long term calendar of upcoming events, and a near and real-time list (similar to the on screen TV Guide)
which provides a list of hourly events throughout the day. This center could also handle any subscription
fees or ticket sales for events held in the ecovillage or on the internet.

The zero sum chronotopological social milieu

Creating a zero sum chronotopology ecovillage involves more than infrastructure. It involves a deep and
fundamental commitment by the participating citizens to commit themselves to a full biovirtual conver-
gence. The society cannot be divided into ‘technogeeks’ and casual users. Another way to look at the zero
sum analogy, is that for everything you take out of the system, you put something back. A zero sum chro-
notopology system is a reciprocal system. The system functions like a living entity which breathes in and
out. The trouble with the current internet paradigm is that a lot of people are taking from the system, but
only a small percentage of people are contributing anything. The system spends most of its time exhaling,
without the being recharged by inhalation. We must change this paradigm! We must become round trip
internet citizens, instead of end users! An end user system is a hierarchical system, and tends to promote
central authority and information control, because a small percentage of the entire population controls
the information flow. A round trip user system is a heterarchical system where there is no central author-
ity, and it is a much better paradigm for the promotion of emergence, continual self-organization, and
reorganization. In a hierarchical system some group at the top of the pyramid sets the rules and provides
orderliness. In a heterarchical round trip system, a much greater freedom and responsibility is passed on
to the individuals who participate in the system. Authors must decide what can be classified as valuable
information content, and what are the proper ethical and behavioral codes for conduct in the virtual reality
world. Individual citizens have much greater power in bottom-up systems, and therefore a much greater
responsibility to conduct themselves as responsible network citizens. They must carefully consider all the
implications involved in publishing their work prior to releasing it, and be prepared to genuinely evaluate
feedback form the network with regard to the content. Manners and courtesy go a long way towards pro-
moting constructive interaction. People are much more likely to tolerate alternative viewpoints if they are
presented in a non-offensive, constructive, and open-minded fashion. Polarizing criticism is destructive,
but thoughtful criticism can be constructive, and very useful in the process of learning and moving to-
wards a convergent society. An aesthetigenesis paradigm promotes just such a sense of community, where
constructive criticism is seen as a means to a convergent process. On the other hand, destructive criticism
fosters just the opposite effect, by dividing people up into polarized subgroups within the larger system.
When greater freedom is bestowed upon the individual citizen, greater responsibility is required. In a hi-
erarchical system the authorities at the top of the system write the laws and codify ‘proper’ social behav-
ior. When the central authority is weakened or removed, laws and morals must be voluntarily incorpo-
rated by each individual. This type of community is highly depended upon the highest levels of education
and spiritual evolution in its individual citizens, if it is to have effective self governance. In such a com-
munity one must always think systemically and symbiotically, rather than selfishly. One must always ask,
what will be the consequences of my actions upon the larger community? Greater degrees of freedom in
life, and in the cocreation of the universe, require greater degrees of responsibility on the part of the citi-
zens to whom this freedom has been bestowed. For a system like this to be as effective as possible you
must accept not only the freedom, but also the responsibility. Unfortunately, the current state of the inter-
net, is full of examples where the increased degrees of freedom have been accepted without careful atten-
tion given to the responsibility. Careless publishing does little more than add noise to the system. Gossip
oriented publication, disinformation, and the publication of unsubstantiated material reported as factual,

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functions as pollution and disease within the organism of the network. If every citizen within a society
conducts him/herself in a responsible and systemic manner, there is no need for courts or policemen.
You may say that this is nothing more than a utopian dream, unrealizable in the real world. Nonsense.
This is just good systemic social engineering, a science and art we have not yet decided to master. Once
we have mastered it, as all advanced civilizations must, we will ask ourselves why we wasted so much
time getting around to it, when it was not that hard to accomplish. Systemic societies do not require ex-
ternal sources of law and policing, because every citizen in the system works to perfect the science and art
of understanding the full implications of their actions upon the whole system. All forms of seemingly in-
dividual action, are in effect group actions, because of the high degree of interaction, interdependence,
and interoperability in systemic phenomena. Our thoughts and actions ripple throughout the larger system
like soliton waves, creating complicated reverberations and resonances. Complexifying societies can be
crushed, overcome, and defeated from within, if they do not learn this extremely important lesson. In ad-
vanced technological societies, every citizen must, of necessity, become an applied general system ana-
lyst. The older paradigm of monocausal, reductionist, linear, and hierarchical design and administration
must be left behind. Individual and collective actions have multicausal consequences in complex systems,
and we must learn to master this complexity if we are to survive and prosper. We believe that ecovillages
provide an excellent setting in which to begin the process of converting our society from the old linear,
hierarchical, and non-systemic paradigm to the new nonlinear, heterarchical, and systemic paradigm of
the future. The future society must be in constant contact with the ever changing information ecology, and
it must be extremely agile, and able to quickly adapt to an ever changing fitness landscape. It must be able
to effectively manage complexity at the microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic levels simultaneously
in all types of space-time frames. Our future civilization must practice complexity control and chaos
synchronization, by selectively tuning for the convergent zones within the basins of dynamic attractor
networks.

Unfortunately our current state of societal awareness of this inevitable paradigm shift is almost nonexist-
ent. We have entered the technological era, but we have not examined the full systemic implications of
our entrance into this challenging phase of evolution. For the most part, we are currently unable to see the
technological revolution from any perspective other than productivity gains and profits. We are currently
focused on a very narrow band of the spectrum of this inevitable paradigm shift. We are for the most
part, dealing with every new technological invention as a separate linear phenomena, and assuming that
we can forecast its implications strictly from its own inherent characteristics. We are ignoring the larger
full spectrum systemic reality. Ecovillages can provide excellent testing grounds where we can test alter-
native approaches in reversing this trend, and begin to move towards a fully systemic approach, which
will allow us to preserve our existing planetary biological ecosystem, and symbiotically merge it with a
new virtual ecosystem of our own creation.

Experimental microsocieties like ecovillages should be a major priority of every country on the planet,
because we must test the full implications of this evolutionary quantum leap - before we attempt to im-
plement new approaches on a full planetary scale. It is hard to imagine how this is not a win/win sce-
nario for all parties involved. Our societies already pay out huge sums of money in the form of welfare, to
support individuals and families who are not able to function adequately within the existing paradigm.
Why not spend a small percentage of our national treasuries to support experimental microsocieties who’s
intentions are not just to function adequately, but to actually function in a manner that supersedes and is
superior to that of the general society.

We believe that microsocieties must be an essential component of our civilization as it moves forward in
the technological and information age.

The hour is late, and we have much work to do to correct our current course! So Let’s Rock!

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How ZSC helps and accelerates our evolution
In our introduction section we showed how civilizations progress through a series of sequential phases or
stages:
• the competitive phase
• the systemic phase
• the symbiotic phase
• the long-term sustainable phase
• the biorapture phase
• the ascension phase

The zero sum chronotopology paradigm shift can assist us in so many ways to move more rapidly through
these various phases of evolutionary advancement.

The zero sum chronotopology approach attempts to put time on our side, rather than allowing time to
work against us. Time is relative in the universe, and in a large part of the universe - time is involved in
the evolutionary challenge of consciousness ascension. The stages we must move through are already
built into the universal plan when intelligent life arrives in the evolutionary arena, so we have less control
over these stages than we do the time it takes us to move through them. The stages of this consciousness
ascension are dynamic, multicausal, and structured like a dynamical attractor network. Yet they are still
more pre-structured, qualitative, and less relative than the quantitative progression of time. Levels of
learning must be achieved, each involving both a qualitative and a quantitative progression. The ZSC
paradigm is the science and art of attaining the principle of least action, or maximum evolutionary ef-
ficiency, within the basic constraints built into the universe. It is an attempt to attain the maximum su-
perior cocreation in the shortest period of time, and to minimize the amount of suffering and ineffi-
ciency involved in the process of evolution to an absolute minimum. The faster we move through these
evolutionary stages, the greater is our knowledge, joy, comprehension, and appreciation of ourselves and
our place in the universe.

The sooner we adopt this paradigm, the sooner we will be able to say that we are a long-term sustainable
civilization - with a future that reaches out into the stars, the galaxies, and the universe.

What ZSC does not address

How can we separate low quality information form the valuable and high quality information which can
aid us in our universal ascension? We have attempted to address these issues in our sections on conver-
gent systemic teleology, eschatological community, and synergistic aesthetigenesis. The universe and it’s
inherent evolution involves a complex process of interaction between eschatology and entelechy. In the
process of cocreating the universe we must constantly choose from a vast eschatological potential deci-
sion tree, in order to bring about an emergent objectification of the universe. Eschatology deals with po-
tentials. Entelechy deals with the inevitable choices and the narrowing down of the decision tree that we
must make in the process of the emergent objectification of the universe, which is unavoidable in the
process of cocreation. We must constantly choose what we categorize as important and less important, or
as noise and information, and what is of true value to us in our evolution and ascension. On the macro-
scopic level, we are guided and pulled by a universal attractor basin, or an attractor basin network (if you
adopt the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics). The function of the attractor basin or basins
is to provide a macroscopic, general, teleological universal objective. It is at the microscopic and
mesoscopic levels that we as cocreators make the choices that determine our unique pathways through the
much larger phase space and dimensionality of the attractor basin, or basins, within which we exist. We
individually and collectively choose the paths of convergence into the universal attractor basin/basins.
The bestowal of free-will, and our specific utilization of these degrees of freedom in our choices - deter-
mines our pathway through universal evolution and ascension. In the process of maneuvering in this rug-

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ged fitness landscape, we place our unique classical and quantum signatures on the universe as its active
cocreators.
At the completion of the universe, we can truly say that this is our universal creation, by virtue of the dis-
tinct and unique history of cocreatorship in which we have participated.

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