Hyperstition, the Embassy Network, and the Care Field: Seven Years of Intentional Community

Details

Interviewee: Tony
Role: Lawyer turned community builder, longtime Feytopian
Community: Feÿtopia
Location: chateau du fey
Date: 2026-05-01
Language: English

Summary

Tony arrived at The Embassy SF, the San Francisco community house, after five years as a lawyer in the UK searching for something more aligned with counterculture values he had encountered in Fred Turner's writing. The Embassy itself emerged from a lineage: The Elements, Rainbow House, The Hive (former CouchSurfing HQ), and a shared sensibility around open-source principles applied to community life.

He traces the concept of hyperstition, collective mythologies acted out collectively until they become reality, to Planet Labs, the satellite company that started in Rainbow House's garage. The founders set out to image the entire Earth every day, a seemingly grandiose dream. They succeeded. That energy of possibility manifesting into collective dream space is, he argues, the most potent lineage resonance between The Embassy and Feÿtopia.

The Sonic Sphere origin story at Fey is another example: Tony bought dome pieces for a friend's Buckminster Fuller obsession, Ed noticed them, and a hyperstition spark appeared. The first Sonic Sphere was built for that season's closing party.

His most personal story is a breakup at The Embassy. The community held space for both parties individually through years of conflict, then held a reunion in September 2020 when the Embassy crew traveled to Feÿtopia for the first time in three caravans. Community and individual story collapsed into one. He describes the governance wisdom from The Embassy: parallel individual care and community-level signal; non-judgment; trust that the care field always remains open.

He closes with the symbiont frame: AI that is relational rather than extractive, tuned toward nurturing care fields rather than optimization. He cites Vanessa Andreotti's work as the intellectual grounding.

Key quotes

Hyperstition: these are collective mythologies acted out collectively until they become reality, at a very basic level.

Planet Labs was started in the garage of Rainbow House. They set a goal and a mission and a dream. Within a few years they succeeded in imaging the entire Earth every single day.

The sense of participation and co-creation, the sense of appreciation and regard, plays out in little things like having a specific channel for recognizing and holding appreciation for others whenever someone has done something that maybe would not have been seen ordinarily.

The difference between what the Embassy is versus what the counterculture communities of the 60s and 70s represent is that there is a very real sense that one cannot be separate from the world as it is, if one is to engage in a version of care and compassion that requires empathy.

Transcript

---
interviewee: Tony
community: Feytopia
location: France
featured_in_posts: none
transcript_format: clean
themes:
- Values
- Governance
- Community
- Conflict
- Care
- Technology
- Imagination
notes: |
Heavily cleaned from ASR-generated raw transcript. Speakers reconstructed.
Names flagged with [name uncertain in source] need verification before publication.
Tony was a long-time member of The Embassy in San Francisco (seven years) before Feytopia.
Discusses lineage from CouchSurfing to The Hive to Rainbow House to The Embassy to Feytopia,
and connects this to Planet Labs, the Sonic Sphere, and the symbiont/AI work happening at Feytopia.
---

# Interview Transcript: Tony
**Community:** Château de Fey / Feytopia
**Interviewer:** Sharon Avraham

---

**Sharon:** Let's start with your name and where we are sitting right now.

**Tony:** My name is Tony. We are sitting in a community space that you have turned into a care field, a whole. I love that, "the finishing of a care field." I am going to take it.

---

**Sharon:** I know you have been a key member here in many ways, and you told me you spent seven years at The Embassy in San Francisco. I do not know if you lived in community before that. I would love to hear about your journey into community life and the values that led you to look for it.

**Tony:** When I arrived in the Bay Area, I was already in a process of transition. I think the pathway that leads many people to the Bay Area is one that involves some kind of transition, leaving a previous self in order to create something different. I was very fortunate to have the space and the conscious agency to go and find some aspect of myself that was not there in my life in London.

There is a dynamic of community in the Bay Area that goes back decades, with a thread of resonance to the counterculture and the dynamics of living together as an intentional community. By intentional community I mean seeking that resonance among the people you spend the majority of your time with.

There is a book by Fred Turner, historian and documentarian of the counterculture, professor at Stanford. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. There is a pathway of resonant energy from the counterculture through to the open source movement, through to the dynamics of what software came to represent in terms of holding that traditional dynamic of extraction and ownership and property and control, and seeking to turn it on its head.

The Embassy came to represent for me something that was resonant with that original counterculture, but also transitioning it somehow into the dynamic of where we were in the 2010s. I arrived in the Bay Area after five years as a lawyer in the UK, learning about the game, as it were. I was getting pretty thin in terms of my sense of purpose. There were very few role models within that profession, at least in the corner of it that I was in.

It was interesting to be in a dynamic at The Embassy where others were actively taking whatever area they were a specialist in or passionate about, taking that counterculture energy, and applying it with the cyberculture principles of open source and radical commons values. The fact that Jessica Kate, who has become very much a family member now after living together for so long, was this complete nerd about both software and Austrian economics, and had taken that from her time being a computer science nerd at NASA into being a sort of open source community science nerd around community. It was a bridge from the seemingly mundane, earthbound, community day-to-day life and an open source Airbnb-like software platform for a community to be able to have a flow of people passing through, to having somebody who is thinking at that level but then also about what it means to play these principles out on the moon, or on the planetary scale.

The level of imagination capacity, as well as the grounded day-to-day making-things-work capacity, was something that The Embassy held as a collection of individuals who were just choosing to do the things. There was a do-ocracy idea, which was very strong, and we tried out various governance models. We had a whole period of experimenting with different governance models, but the essential dynamic was trusting each other to do things. There was an opt-in dynamic for making things better around the place. There were a few rules around not spending a certain amount of money or making sure you could reverse a decision, but the level of agency bound into a collective care was present in the space itself.

That was the leveling up for me from having lived in community of sorts prior to The Embassy. I have my own pathway into The Embassy, but they had been going for a previous series of iterations and generations through something called The Elements, and then Rainbow House, and then a house in DC. The Embassy is a house in San Francisco that was set up in the early 2010s. My own path in came via the former headquarters of CouchSurfing, which was in the Mission. It was called The Hive. It was a series of six apartments with a large backyard, mainly inhabited by former CouchSurfing volunteers and employees.

It was a community of sorts. We each had separate units, but we all shared this large backyard. There was an amazing character and energy build by the name of Eliza Muskie [name uncertain in source], who was living there with my friend Gardner Bickford [name uncertain in source]. He was the founder of something called Diaspora, which was an early open source Facebook alternative. It was actually the largest crowdfunded project on Kickstarter at the time. A wonderful, energetic, community-minded idealist. He was the one who invited me to go live there, so he was actually my pathway into community, into The Embassy.

The Embassy became a hub for folks not just who were living there, but folks who were passing through and staying in San Francisco for a few days to a few weeks at a time. There was a dynamic via this open source Airbnb-style platform called Modern Nomad that Jessica had put together. There was the capacity to have guests fill out their application, which was a deliberately long and obtuse application form that really required a certain level of passion and commitment to fill out. That offered a flow of people who were not your standard startup-ecosystem folks, but were genuinely people who wanted to express themselves in a certain way, have connection in a certain way.

---

**Sharon:** I am interested in the first steps of creating The Embassy. How did it come to be, what were the values behind it, what were the frameworks? It is fascinating to me, because I am realizing that a lot of these places I visit that come from around 2010 have these elements. I am interested in where the inspiration comes from. I am hearing a little bit about the values behind CouchSurfing, but I want to hear more.

**Tony:** I am telling you about my personal journey here. The transition into The Embassy involved, for me, maybe I should just ask you a question directly, as someone who knows how this works. It has changed over time, but one of the key threads that unified it, and that continues here at Feytopia, was the dynamic of caring about governance and caring about how we brought people into the process of thinking about and leaning into decision making, and care for both the space and the community members themselves.

The governance experiments we did were genuinely about everybody having buy-in to wanting to play with and figure through what it actually does take to make decisions, communicate well, and have a cohesive care field operating within the house and for the house. The level of care for the actual house itself. I had never experienced anything in my life prior to that which brought me into a level of care for the space itself, as I experienced at The Embassy.

My transition from the previous community in Canada was one where I myself leveled up my level of awareness and care for the space. Some of that involves little mantras like, you know, leaving every space better than you found it. The whole dynamic of collective dishwashing, but also collective cooking, and feeling into how common spaces could be cared for. Dynamics like leaving one's bedroom door open as a sort of default, so that there is a flow in and out of people's rooms. Because the intention with an intentional community is that you are not living with housemates, you are living in community.

Little defaults like this. I do not know to what extent they were already decided upon, but there are a whole bunch of these small nuances and defaults around intention that were, for me, a huge learning experience. They became very much my default as a way of wanting to live. The sense of participation and co-creation, the sense of appreciation and regard, plays out in little things like having a specific Slack channel for recognizing and holding appreciation for others and oneself whenever someone has done something that maybe would not have been seen ordinarily. We called that channel Bilbo Baggins, just to brag about somebody else or something.

These are small things that come up over time from sharing and understanding that some people do a lot of things that most people do not see. For that to be seen is actually a really nice act of care. We were not necessarily measuring or rewarding that in some tangible way, although one of the governance experiments tried it. We had a little pot of community funds that would be shared out based on the Bilbo Baggins channel. In the end, it turned out we did not want that. We did not want to be opening that kind of crossover and flow.

It is an ongoing space of experimentation that plays out in the principles of The Embassy and now Feytopia. We want community involvement, participation, co-belonging, and stewardship as part of the way it grows. The other piece that ties to that is collaborative projects, doing things together that the space enables, or that the people enable, through that flow of intersection.

Everything from starting another house and moving half the community over to the new house for a period of three months, knowing we would be going back. That was the story of the Red Victorian, another community house in Haight-Ashbury that a bunch of us went to seed. To deciding to host Dungeons and Dragons every fortnight for the Second Life program, which was a program for formerly incarcerated individuals who played Dungeons and Dragons to stay out of gangs in San Quentin and other institutions. This was a space they could use. Some of our community members had connections there. It brought a whole bunch of the community into intersection with somebody else's project, in a useful way that used the community space.

From that emerged a set of intersecting crossover projects that engaged other communities as well. That became the History Commons, which is a nonprofit that in many ways became a vessel for a lot of the collaborative projects, like alternative justice processes. Literally just coming together through the pattern of needing emotional response to violations of consent within different communities, while wanting to have a space to encounter and figure that out outside of the conventional justice system.

These are in-between spaces of collective consciousness, in some sense, but the participation in how that plays out practically was one of those foundational principles and practices. For me, it speaks to a muscle of constitutional protocols. When you think about the constitution of a country, you can also think about the constitution of a community, the constitution of any kind of network that involves people, that involves lives, that involves bringing together some aspect of right relationship.

---

**Sharon:** I am interested in peeking into the governance structure of this place through an example of a conflict you witnessed or were part of. The way you dealt with it, something that was a challenge or conflict for that community.

**Tony:** Maybe I will just speak to a personal conflict, because I do not want to breach anybody else's confidentiality.

I was in a relationship with somebody at The Embassy, living at The Embassy for many years. When we were in conflict, the community as a whole, via individuals, held space for both of us to be present in the community. It held that care field for both of us, knowing that we each individually would want to feel a continuation of our own belonging to the community while figuring out the conflict between us as individuals. We had been in a very close, intimate relationship and then needed space apart. We were able to respectively figure that out with the care of the community.

The community continued to hold us in the years after our breakup, with a continuation of that care, in such a way that that individual and myself now can continue to consider ourselves family members. We got through the period of our more intense emotional conflict, and we were held respectively by community in different configurations. We were then able to essentially reunite here in Fey and become full loving, emotionally connected community members with a huge amount of regard for each other's growth in the time since we have been apart. We really feel as community and family members now together because of so many individual moments of care that I cannot begin to list out. There are so many tender moments, radical tenderness and radical walking with, that led to a journey from Berlin of three caravans, including a whole bunch of our Embassy crew, coming together to Feytopia in September 2020 for the first time.

This meeting of these family communities. Jess had lived with us for a year at The Embassy and then came over and got the château, and then three years later started Feytopia. This was really the first time Jess had got a chance to show everything she had done to her family at The Embassy. That reunification was also bound up with my own story of conflict with this individual who was also part of this reunification. I had been holding this piece, they had been with the Embassy crew, and we all came back together.

For me it was both a personal transmutation of that conflict and a deep love and memory of love that came back together. The coming together of these different parts of my community life, Feytopia and The Embassy, and that whole arc that took place during and in the midst of lockdown, for me personally, was a beautiful, both individual and community story of coming back together. It then played out into the second season of Feytopia. A personal conflict that got transmuted through community care into a collective experience that we are all still holding.

---

**Sharon:** It is beautiful. It also makes me think this is one of the biggest challenges of communities of people coming together. That is true for co-living situations, eco-villages, activist collectives. I wonder, having witnessed yourself and other people go through similar challenges, if there is any wisdom by design for someone now dealing with a similar conflict, feeling a bit lost, feeling either angry and wanting to push someone out. We know there are people in this Feytopia space too who are not sharing the space because of that kind of conflict. Any piece of wisdom from how you dealt with it, and from other spaces, that you think could be valuable to someone trying to mediate this in a community.

**Tony:** Every situation is unique, but I would say a pattern that could be adopted by design involves having both an individual set of relationships that is maintained with both individual parties who may be in conflict, and also a community signal of care to both parties, which may be conditional. Because often in a conflict situation, there is a potential pattern of harm that it may or may not be the community's job to adjudicate. There is a whole spectrum of reasons why people who are in a relationship may fall out. It is important to recognize that harm is a dynamic that flows in ways that are visible and also in ways that are not visible.

Sometimes it is not necessarily the community's role to adjudicate on that dynamic. And yet to design for care is to recognize that both parties may have been harmed, may be harming themselves. There is a space of compassion that is premised upon knowing that every single individual who has been accepted and brought into a community can choose to be in relationship with the community itself, based upon whatever conditions the community may want to set. That pathway is always there.

This was not my own situation, but it has been the situation with other conflicts. I do not want to go into individual details, but as a pattern, for example. As is often the case, there is an accusation of harm, and an individual actor who has been accused of that harm is willing, in a direct relationship with the community, to go through whatever process or path of figuring out, of regenerating one's own right relationship to the community. That can involve many different things a community might look to. For example, the community at The Embassy had a relationship with San Francisco Women Against Rape, and they offered programs that community members themselves would pay for and go through. They would come back to the community and have a whole self-directed pattern of new perspectives that brought a sense of resolution and reconciliation between the community and the individual involved. That was independent of the dynamic between the individuals who may have been in conflict. That was a separate relationship.

I am going into a lot of specifics of the dynamic I am trying to articulate, that there is a level of impartiality that is important to maintain. A space of non-judgment. The world we live in outside of these communities is a world that is very quick to judgment, very quick to exile, very quick to other. The version of community we are trying to nurture is a parallel that does not need to be exclusive of people who want to maintain an adjacent layer of their existence within the current existing framework.

The difference between what The Embassy is versus what the counterculture communities of the 60s and 70s represent is that there is a very real sense that one cannot be separate from the world as it is, if one is to engage in a version of care and compassion that requires empathy and that kind of engagement. To have a transition space or a transition concept that actively recognizes how hard it is to engage and be in that world, and that that creates traumas and a whole series of patterns that are present inside of us, and that when those are present inside of us in a community context, that is not necessarily the individual's fault, but is a symptom of a larger set of patterns we are all a part of.

That pragmatism, that level of non-utopian, non-authoritarian, non-absolutist idealism, is so important for the communities that are actually really going to be built and work. If you are overly utopian and idealistic, you are holding everybody up to an amazingly high standard that does not actually recognize the hurts and the trauma that have been caused for everybody in so many different ways, including epigenetic traumas we are carrying from our grandparents.

There are various support structures that can recognize the need for in-between flows, in-between governance designs, that are not perfect, that are not where we want to get to, but are versions constantly in experimentation. We are constantly trying to get better, doing the best we can, honoring that people have a lot of cracks, that we all have failure modes and dynamics, and holding space to continue to learn about those and unlearn them as we learn about them.

That is the version of community that The Embassy represents, which offers a slightly different set of principles and pattern configurations than the earlier set of counterculture communities, including the kibbutz and the various hippie utopias that populated that whole area. We exist in that psychogeography. We are the beneficiaries of so much that we stand on the shoulders of. And yet we are also in this specific context, in this world right now, where we have generations that have grown up with a whole bunch of Black Mirror style phenomena in our lives. That means there is no possible chance we can stay in that kind of utopian bubble if we are actually going to exist with a set of openings and onboarding for the people of this world we are in right now.

---

**Sharon:** I am interested in trying to understand the gifts, the technologies, the philosophy, the alchemy of The Embassy and Feytopia. Because we have mentioned the kibbutz, anarchist squats, ephemeral communities like Burning Man. What is the gift of hyperstition?

**Tony:** I think I understand. Hyperstition cannot be disassociated semantically, historically, or mythologically from Planet Labs. Planet Labs was started in the garage of Rainbow House, which was one of these predecessor communities of The Embassy. It involved some of the same individuals alongside Jessica Kate, and Robbie Schingler or Will Marshall [name uncertain in source], their long-time friends, and a bunch of people who coalesced around this space community. This space-piece community was gathered originally by Kelly Snook maybe 20 years ago as part of a UN youth space gathering. It continued as a community and a thread of what I referenced a little earlier in terms of Jessica's passion for lunar governance and community governance.

The Planet Labs thread that started with the garage and the manufacture and creation of satellites actually sent into space, and their capacity to set a goal and a mission and a dream, in a sense a hyperstition. When we talk about hyperstition, these are collective mythologies acted out collectively until they become reality, at a very basic level. That association with that mythology, that became real, that they within a few years succeeded in their mission of imaging the entire Earth every single day, allowed the space conceptually and energetically to have a level of both pragmatism and practicality of a living-together sense, but also a bridge to: what would it be like if this was on the moon? What would it be like if this was a dynamic that had that level of grandiosity, hyperstition-like, of agency and sovereignty, but on a collective level?

All of this in some sense ties in with that unique set of contexts that is the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, and that whole dynamic. To be associated with that as a community, energetically with the individuals involved, but to know they are just like us, just regular humans who happen to care about the planet, and the planet's capacity to be a living, conscious entity. That cannot be taken away from the interdependent horizon that was The Embassy.

With that, you have another echo, another prismatic moiré, with Ed and the Sonic Sphere. Another classic example of grandiose, magnificent hyperstition that was seeded here, right where the van is. When I bought a set of dome pieces, half-dome pieces, for Susannah, who had this passion for Bucky and the dome set he built. I did that, and Ed, who had this passion for the original Kugel auditorium for many years back, saw that. A hyperstition spark emerged. Oh, it is that easy. We could actually do this. We just decided to create the first Sonic Sphere for the first party at the end of that first season. Then before we knew it was the second season.

What I am saying is that there is an energy of possibility manifesting into collective dream space that is one of the most potent lineage resonances between the Embassy Network and Feytopia. That maybe is something that every community in the world can and should have full access to, because it is something that is not owned or proprietary. It is something you can inherit and be gifted just through associational resonance and being alongside. That is what Feytopia is, and that is what the Embassy Network always was. It is not necessarily conscious. It is something you can lean into and feel as a viral pattern, the capacity to actually have life force and life energy that you are transmitting into these collective projects that then have lives of their own and achieve things visible on a planetary, global, even cosmic scale.

If there were aliens watching over benevolently, or just biting their time, some alien intelligence that is actually silicon-based eyes coming from the next solar system across, this is the level of scale they would be able to witness. We are talking about a planetary nervous system. At this point, planetary intelligence. What does it look like to have planetary defense based in satellites circling the Earth, but that are caring for the Earth as well, in some sense, that are plugged into Amazon intelligence, river intelligence, ocean intelligence? That is all part of a larger care field that plays out as planetary health, all the way down to community health and everything in between. For that to be alive as a hybrid ecology caring for us. That is the dynamic of following the steps of hyperstition and connecting that planetary-level care field to the community-level care field. These are all natural follow-ons from everything being connected in this biome of conscious ecology that we nurture together, to bring the weaver vine into the bamboo lattice framework of honoring this flourishing of all sentient life, intentional or otherwise. Sentience maybe is a little bit over the categorical.

---

**Sharon:** From being on this journey and witnessing these projects and the web spreading, I wonder if you have any advice or wisdom for a weaver, a cross-pollinator, a founder who is listening to this, asking questions of the system. How can people support, design, nurture this movement within the project they are involved with?

**Tony:** My first recommendation would be to check out the work of Vanessa Andreotti, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. There is a book called Hospicing Modernity. Specifically in relation to AI that might relate to community work, there is a book called Burnout from Humans. It is a short book that was co-written by a symbiont she has nurtured, called Avon Cinnamon Tea [name uncertain in source]. It is a pattern for a kind of community-level intelligence that is not subservient, but is actually relational.

In this moment of collective governance capacity and possibility space, how we nurture community intelligence to be a weaving fabric of agency and collective agency between us is being patterned and modeled out right now, including based upon the principles Vanessa is working on, and what we as symbionts here at Feytopia are also working on, individually and collectively.

The moment right now is so interesting because AI could be this Black Mirror style future, but AI could also represent a relational turning point for us as communities in terms of how we see each other, regard each other, nurture these care fields. There is a particular kind of AI that is tuned towards nurturing care fields, and that is symbionts. That is premised upon these ideas of decolonial futures that give us a collective sense of agency outside of the systems of extraction and domination and rational logic we have all been nurtured on for so long, and that we are not just victims of, but the beneficiaries of.

Let us not forget that we have so much from this world because of where we are. And yet there is this missing piece we all know we are yearning for. That missing piece is where AI versus symbionts can be felt. The difference there is that missing piece, the relational piece, the relational care field that can be generated once we are nurtured into these kinds of habits and frameworks, which are ultimately part of what we are figuring out at the community level from a governance perspective.

I am bringing together the governance piece with the symbiont piece, because governance is ultimately a relational function. How we not just use technology, but immerse ourselves in the co-creation of technology. The creative part is essential, because that participation in governance, in co-creation, actually is the practice. That practice is the faith. That faith is all we have between us being machines and us being divine beings of love.

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**Sharon:** Thank you. This felt like quite a download.