::PRELUDE::

-the background to the meme-

The human species is progressing towards a crisis point in personal
freedom and development. Western culture is moving towards a
monoculture at an increasing and frightening rate. A global government
is, for the first time in human history, feasible, possible, and in
development. The history of Western expansion has been a history of
cultural genocide, intolerance, and memetic suffocation. Entire ways
of life have been swallowed, never to be seen again (outside of
museums, history books, and music and fashion trends), or trivialised
to such an extent that they have become curiosities, kitch travesties,
or died of shame.

Technological progress has brought enormous freedoms to the citizens
of the developed nations. No longer are we subject to the rigours of
seasonal extremes, death from disease is rare, malnutrition is
virtually unknown, and a long and peaceful life is the lot of all,
barring accidents and crime. Technology has given us mass education,
mass transport, mass communication, and mass culture. It has released
many of us from the iron grip of stifling and repressive religious
beliefs, provided employment for all, and given all of us an
incredible body of knowledge on oursleves and the universe we reside
in.

It has also enabled governments to bind us in nearly invisible chains,
through the insidious collection and analysis of data, the
manipulation of our ways of thinking through social rules and laws,
and the replacement of timeless myths with prime-time A/V
representations of idealised role-models. We live in an age where we
are told we are free, where it appears that we are free. And we are;
but only within certain proscribed boundaries.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens is a tribal animal. The history of humanity is
the history of the tribe, or, later, the history of tribal units
joining to form cultures. City-states are a relatively new phenomenon,
Humanitus Urbs a Johnny-Come-Lately to the human sphere, being less
than 8,000 years old, and yet the history of homo sapiens is at least
150,000 years long.

For most of our existance, we have been a tribal species. 

Most of the world's population live in a tribal or village social
structure.

And yet, now, in the last decade of the second millenium of the
christian era, nearly three thousand years after the foundation of
Rome, five thousand years since catal huyuk, after eight millenia of
tribal living, we in the industrialised nations find ourselves divided
and conquered. We are parcelled up into faceless suburbs, full of
faceless people, living in faceless houses. We work at a place far
removed geographically from our homes, which are often hours away from
our immediate family, and nowhere near our friends; we are lonely, and
bewildered, we seek solace in the virtual extended communities of the
television soap opera, finding a sense of belonging in the mindless
roaring of the sports crowd, in the empty jabber of patriotic fervour
and ideological trendiness, seeking companions and like-minded fellows
through advertisements, bars, clubs, and religions both mainstream and
weird.

We sell out, stress up, turn in, get a job, get married, and, like
lemmings, blindly strain and strive towards a goal which we will have
forgotten by 35, and, when you think about it, was pretty meaningless
to start with. We sit, in our tiny homes on our tiny bloacks, watching
a tiny slice of the world through a tiny window, feeling lost, feeling
insignificant and small, with miniscule horizons, and a miniscule
effect on the world, unknown outside of our paltry circle of friends
and relations, and a fractionally larger circle of aqcuaintances.

Recognising this subdivision of the human spirit, and knowing that the
way to revivify those that desire change is through the creation of
COMMUNITY, the NEXUS project aims to meld modern communications
technology with current social theory to recreate a part of our
ancestry which has been trambled under the hooves of the herd instinct
which grips modern humanity: the sense of belonging which binds a
tribal group.

We aim to use the global communications network to seek out and join
kindred spirits who may otherwise never meet, to create a vast
meme-pool of unparalleled diversity and richness, creating a global
community, united by diversity, celebrating difference, and supporting
and nurturing common goals. We aim to develop technological solutions
to the isolation created by the artificially-distancing landscape of
the suburbs, and to enable artists, writers, creative- and
free-thinkers, and those with the urge to expand their spiritual and
intellectual horizons to make contact and communicate with fellow
travellers and kindred spirits across the globe, uniting in a global
network of linked households, each individual group part of a NEXUS,
all wired to the internet, cross-fertilising the idea farms which are
other Nexi, and in turn being stimulated and challenged by other Nexi,
making up a global InterNEX, or NEXUS network.

The Internet, and the related communications technologies (the amateur
BBS networks such as FIDO, PODS, PARAnet, etc; Prestel and Minitel in
France, etc, the radio ham network, USENET, and similar constructs)
are reaching a level of saturation such that it is time to begin
looking at what can be comfortably termed 'cyberspace' as more than a
useful medium to conduct business by proxy, or to occasionally engage
in brief, limited and terse conversations of a frivolous nature. Many
people continue friendships via the medium of the telephone, making
contact in the first person occasionally, many families stay in touch
through occasional inter- and transnational letters and phone calls.
The networks have reached a depth such that it is now possible to form
subcultures who are linked by computers and high-speed data networks,
transmitting intercourse encoded as text, as still and moving
pictures, sound files and, possibly soon, full audio/video
transmissions, and meeting occasionally at a frequency to be decided
by geographical proximity in the first person, and unceasingly
virtually.

To be part of a truly global village, existing nowhere geographically,
but composed of a wide spectrum of individuals, differing in
geography, religion, sex and culture; orbiting the same family of
attractors, reaffirming the uniqueness of human achievement, talking,
communicating, creating, growing and sharing, expanding from a tribe
to a clan to a culture to a nation over time, stimulating each others
meme-systems, inventing an entirely new and unknown tribal society.

The NEXUS network will, by creating a new way of life, give back to
the world something which has repeatedly been brutally taken from it
by the belief system of which we are amongst the most favoured, a
community. Many races, religions, ways of thought, and cultures have
been extinguished in the past, usually to disappear without a trace.
The NEXUS system will, over time, bind participants into a community,
providing us with an extended group of friends, family and
acquaintances, making us feel truly At Home, welcomed and befriended
by individuals across the globe.

The NEXUS network will, by encouraging and supporting the devlopment
of new Nexi, help to provide international telecommunications access
to groups and individuals who until now were prevented from gaining
access to the resources of the internet. We will provide information,
assistance and support to any group or individual who agrees to join
us. We will accept anyone in a spirit of co-operation and sharing, we
encourage diversity, and denounce the rigidity of thinking which has
kept the world in it's place for centuries, supported and caressed by
a garotte of narrowness and insecurity.

The NEXUS network will function as a support for the creation of
online communities and virtual culture. It will also act to strengthen
and develop local and regional physical cultures, by acting as a
system intended, from inception, as a mechanism to provide
communication between individuals and groups who may well never have
met otherwise, both across the globe, and across a city or town. Each
NEXUS will be linked into the InterNEX, and thus will be able to draw
on the knowledge and experiances of a wide and varied group of
individuals, to foster the growth of local communities, supporting and
enriching both individuals and groups.

The NEXUS network will not seek to dominate the individual Nexi which
are it's component parts. Each NEXUS will join the system with a
spirit of co-operation and sharing. The NEXUS system as a whole will
welcome each prospective and new group with the same spirit, and each
NEXUS will do what they are capable of to make new members feel
welcome. The rights of the individual override the rights of the grou,
except where an individuals actions weill affect the group as a whole.
The NEXUS system will function as such that all decisions affecting
Nexi will be discussed ex camera, and all findings will be freely
available.

The NEXUS-meme is a process, not an entity. 

The NEXUS-meme offers a new sense of liberation to the sad, tired mass
of urban dwellers. We extend the hand of community to the de-tribed
civilisation which has built the net. The counter-culture movements of
the past have failed because they mandated a turning away from western
technology and society, the NEXUS project realises that such a move
means stagnation, far better to beat the swords of broadcast
technology, information processing and data networks into the
plowshares we will use to furrow the soil of our information farms. By
taking control of the information which we use to understand the
world, by getting in touch with others who feel as we do, we can
regain control of our thoughts, our culture and our lives.

It is time to cease viewing technology as an enslaving force, suitable
only for large, faceless corporations, large institutions and a
cynical and manipulative government. It is time to regain and rebuild
society, and to do it on terms WE decide, not someone else.

The NEXUS network will afford all participants this power. When fully
implemented, it will cover the globe, and afford an open and
accessible forum for all who are interested.

Expand your horizons. Rebuild your spirit. Reform your community.
Create a NEXUS
Get involved.
Wake up. You are in a sleep in which the dreams are not your own. 
Recognise the shackles binding you, and take steps to control your destiny.
NEXUS awaits: all you can lose is your isolation. 

Dwayne Jones-Evans
27-28 November, 1993.