Saturday, February 01, 2025 | Today's Newsletter | Login
Online tribe in paradise
Ben Keene was sitting at his laptop at home in Devon, England when he received an e-mail from a friend, Mark Bowness. It read: “A tribe is wanted.”
The challenge was this: to establish an eco-community on a South Sea island that would be created and controlled over the internet.
Within weeks they had launched Tribewanted.com, calling for 5,000 people to join an online tribe that would establish a real-life democracy on Vorovoro, a palm-fringed, coconut-groved idyll 25 minutes by boat from Fiji’s main island.
For a membership fee of about C$300 potential tribe members could buy the right to live on Vorovoro for a few weeks each year and help build a village.
All the decisions – from whom to elect as monthly chief to whether to build a treehouse – would be organised and voted for online by the rest of the “tribe.”
“The internet is the most powerful way to connect like-minded people,” says Keene, 28. “We’re tapping into the trend for social networks that allows decisions to be made collectively by people all over the world.”
In fact they had tapped into every man’s dream of living in paradise.
When The Sunday Times first publicised Tribewanted in April 2006, the response was immediate. “We were on Good Morning America; there were film crews in my back garden,” Keene recalls.
“I was invited on BBC Radio 2 and I got a call from a guy who had pulled off the motorway just to say, ‘I don’t want to miss my chance to be part of this’.”
The tribe quickly amassed 700 members from 35 countries, so Keene headed out to Vorovoro, reported The Sunday Times.
“I was thinking, business is easy.” But as he was about to discover, creating utopia would be anything but.
With just four days to go till the first 15 members arrived, there was no sanitation, no facilities, no power; just 200 acres of undergrowth set in crystal water.
No work could start until he presented a whale’s tooth to the landowner in return for timber.
Two days, and sleepless nights, later he found one at a market. He admits that by then he was feeling “physically sick” with anxiety. “When you create a business on an island,” he says, “there is a capitalist framework that you have to use and then you’ve got these ancient traditions and ideals of community living and there are moments when the jigsaw pieces don’t quite fit.”
Since then he has had to contend with a bushfire, a military coup, a number of cyclones and the threat of bankruptcy.
Tribewanted has turned out to be an ambitious mixture of online networking – the trend popularised by sites such as Facebook and MySpace – and socially responsible adventure travel, or “volun-tourism.”
But in some ways it was a natural progression for Keene, a politics graduate who had worked for a gap-year project company on programmes in places from Tim-buktu to Kenya.
Its members are predominantly from the U.S. and Britain and aged between 18 and 35, but they have had a 60-year-old yoga teacher and a Hawaiian spearfishing instructor on the island.
Some people come for escapism; others are fascinated by the idea of building paradise.
Leave a comment
