Meta-Industrial Village
Description
Concept from William Irwin Thompson et al. :
"Lindisfarne's social agenda was exemplified by the "meta-industrial village", a small community focused on subsistence and crafts while yet connected to a world culture. All members of a community might participate in essential tasks such as the harvest. (Thompson has speculated that in the United States, 40% of the population could work at agriculture, and another 40% in social services.) The villages would have a sense of shared purpose in transforming world culture. They would combine "the four classical economies of human history, hunting and gathering, agriculture, industry, and cybernetics", all "recapitulated within a single deme.
(The "Meadowcreek Project" in Arkansas, begun in 1979 by David and Wilson Orr, was an effort to actualize a meta-industrial village as envisioned by the Lindisfarne Association. This project received funding from the Ozarks Regional Commission, the Arkansas Energy Department, and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation.)[13][14]
The villages would be linked together by an electronic information network (i.e., what today we call the internet). Thompson called for a counter-cultural vanguard "which can formulate an integral vision of culture and maintain the high standards of that culture without compromise to the forces of electronic vulgarization."