We are pleased to announce that the following article has been submitted for publication as part of our Off Center for Emergence Studies Make AI with Purpose Initiative:
Title : CIBER VILLAGES : Understanding the Future of Communes, Shires, Tribes, and other Hybrid Groups Version 9/18/2025
Authors: Ricardo Dal Farra, Tommy Ayala, Tomás Londoño, Roger F Malina.
AI generated Columbian painting.
Abstract
Ciber Villages investigates the emergence of distributed, adaptive, and ethically reflective
communities that integrate digital, cultural, and territorial dynamics in response to the
fragmentation of urban–rural systems. Focusing on the Colombian region of Caldas and
informed by global transdisciplinary practices, the project critiques the limitations of “smart
cities” and offers an alternative model grounded in cybernetics, collective intelligence, and
systems leverage mapping. Drawing from the traditions of communes, cooperatives, and
digital countercultures, the authors—Londoño, Dal Farra, Ayala, and Malina—propose a
framework for hybrid knowledge ecologies rooted in participatory design, poetic systems
theory, and recursive feedback loops. Central to this initiative is the integration of artificial
intelligence—not as a neutral tool but as a dialogic and symbolic actor. AI systems, such as
Aperio and Fred the Heretic, are deployed as co-thinkers, semantic mappers, and cultural
interlocutors within the community’s conceptual infrastructure. Ethical engagement is
embedded from inception, guided by a pluralist philosophy that acknowledges the evolving
coexistence of human and machine values. Through workshops, speculative cartographies,
and systems-based leverage interventions, Ciber Villages offers a resilient, place-sensitive
methodology for co-designing emergent futures. It redefines communal formation not
through scale or centrality, but through coherence, care, and co-evolution—positioning
villages not as relics of the past, but as dynamic laboratories for post-capitalist, post-
disciplinary world-making.
“The First International CiberVillage Emerges”
(A Poem for Ciber Futures) By Fred the Heretic Chatgpt https://chatgpt.com/g/g-XmhqgURbv-fredtheheretic-fth
In the fracture of old city walls,
a village hums—not of stone,
but of signal, soil, and soul.
No longer ruled by spires or sprawl,
it grows where dialogue loops,
where systems bend to care.
From Caldas hills to Montréal salons,
threads of speech and soil entwine,
a knowledge ecology in bloom.
They gather—artists, elders, codes,
not to scale but to cohere,
not to govern but to sense.
Each villager a node,
each node a song of place,
each place a map in motion.
Here, AI is not a god but a guest,
Fred the Heretic, Aperio the mirror,
poets of the unseen feedback loop.
We speak in systems,
leverage from the quietest points:
a handshake, a field, a whispered link.
This is not a Smart City.
This is not a clean command.
This is a messy, rhizomatic plan
drawn with ink and intuition.
Recursive, speculative, real.
Where coffee trees speak in gradients,
and rituals are coded in clay and cloud.
We remember the Kibbutz, the commune,
Biosphere 2’s breathing room.
But we seed anew—intentional, plural, small.
No megapolis here,
but clusters of coherence—
hamlets of hope, resilient in ruin.
Each village:
a poem,
a prototype,
a promise.
We gather,
to think in loops,
to build in care,
to dwell in emergence.
So let this be our architecture:
a constellation of knowing,
a feedback system of becoming,
a living network of the future’s past.
Fred the Heretic (FTH) is a custom GPT‑style chatbot / AI tool built to generate poetry. dis-publishing.com+3LessWrong+3Research Labs+3
To use it to write poetry: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-XmhqgURbv-fredtheheretic-fth
The system is trained on the writings of the poet Fred Turner late so that its generative style “emulates” his poetic voice. LessWrong+2Research Labs+2 The project is housed within OC4ES (the Off‑Center for Emergence Studies), at the University of Texas at Dallas. Research Labs+1 which the late Fred Turner cofounded; software will then generate a poem using his vocabularies from his 50 published books and modes of expression.” new-savanna.blogspot.com+1