the emergence of a decentralized form of activism in brazil

7/30/2019 The emergence of a decentralized form of activism in Brazil

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MARXISM AND NEW MEDIA PROCEEDINGS

DUKE UNIVERSITY, 2012

http://literature.duke.edu/conference2012

https://itunes.apple.com/au/itunes-u/marxism-and-new-media-2012/id525624660

The emergence of a decentralized form of activism in BrazilRodrigo Savazoni (Federal University of ABC - UFABC, Brazil)

Cicero Inacio da Silva (Federal University of So Paulo - UNIFESP, Brazil)

An authentic knowledge economy would be a communitarian economy(Andre Gorz)

Revolutions are not the locomotives of history but the emergency brakes that are used to

stop a train that is heading for a disaster ...

(Oskar Negt in an interview in Alexander Kluge's film News from Ideological Antiquity:

Marx-Eisenstein-Capital)

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to analyze what we call the open networks of immaterial production

and political action, which could also be called "cooperative and communicative networks of

social work" as conceptualized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their now classic book

Multitude. These networks appeared in Brazil in the 21st century and can be analyzed based onthe critical theories that focus on the transformations of capitalism in its present age. The article

analyzes three networks: (1) MetaReciclagem, (2) Fora do Eixo network (Out of axis network)

and (3) Transparency Hacker, seeking similarities between them and that are aimed at the

completion of this article when we describe what may be the embryo of a new political

movement that perhaps already requires a new rationality about what may be called a

post-spectacle society.
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Keywords: activism, digital culture, cognitive capitalism, information society, networks, hacker

culture, cultural networks, immaterial production

INTRODUCTION

Open networks of immaterial production and political action are a contemporary political

phenomenon in Brazil. In this analysis, we will explore how these networks evolve from a

diaspora - in order to obtain new spaces - to free software communities displaced in different

groups basically in the young sector of the Brazilian society. These groups are transforming the

ideas of freedom present in the hacker movement organizing new ways to produce and act in

different fields, i.e. the struggle for human rights in slums.

The focus of this paper is a brief description of the "cooperative and communicative networks of

social work" as we define them from the conceptualization made by Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri in the book Multitude. For the authors, the networks can keep "the constituent power of thecrowd," which constitutes the main force to contest the "Empire" (Hardt & Negri, 2001). In this

paper networks are analyzed due their power to cope with capitalism which in its cultural step,

focusing on immaterial production (Gorz, 2003), no more mobilizes only the production but

ways of living.

The hypothesis here is that, precisely through the joints based on the appropriation of new

advanced technologies, these networks operate inventing free colonies within the society of

control. To substantiate our criticism, we analyze three networks operating in Brazil: (1)

MetaReciclagem, (2) Fora do Eixo network (Out of axis network) and (3) Transparency Hacker.

These networks will be described in their specificities, aiming to describe the course of theirdevelopment and how they are organized. The choice of these networks is due to the fact that

they have a great reputation among their peers and have strong international connections. It is

not simple to create an approach between them, since each one is dedicated to a separate

aspect of the everyday life - in some cases they are not related but operate in similar ways. It is

possible to identify several similar characteristics in their formative process, whether the tactics

in the interpretation of the political process, which taken together enable us to say that we are

facing a work in progress, with potential to reorganize the political action of the young generation

in Brazil.

In this article we understand the hacker culture as the culture of those who share an "ethics

based on freedom of knowledge and the sharing of codes." (Silveira, 2007, p. 24) This culture

began with the experts in programming and security of information systems, but over the years it

has been appropriated by different social actors, i.e. a process that we call hacker diaspora,

better described at the conclusion of the article.

NETWORK AND POLITICS


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The use of Internet as a representational tool that allows people to build political alternatives is a

reality nowadays in many countries around the world. In Brazil, a group of people took part in the

process of a political construction called altermundism, especially since crucial moments of

global mobilization that took place in Porto Alegre, capital of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, a

city that received the first edition of the World Social Forum. Analyzing the anti-globalizationmovement, Andr Gorz finds out that these networks are a common matrix of free

demonstrations at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, based on "non-hierarchical structures"

and in "decentralized horizontal networks and in the process of self-production and

self-organization, founded on the principle of a "consensual democracy" (Gorz, 2003).

In the year of the second edition of World Social Forum, held in January 2002, the metalworker

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected President of Brazil, taking for the first time in the history of

Brazil the Workers' Party (PT) to the Presidency of Brazil. This historical fact promoted the

attraction of a set of anti-globalization activists and militants into the Lula government. Many of

these activists were responsible for the management of major public policies.

To understand this important induction, which was formed as a central aspect to the

strengthening of networks of immaterial production, we must return to 2003, when two vectors

are articulated within the Lula government: the policy for use and promotion of free software, led

by sociologist Sergio Amadeu da Silveira, newly installed president of the National Institute of

Information Technology (ITI), under the Civil House of the Presidency, and the strategic

redirection of cultural policies in the Ministry of Culture, which with the arrival of the musician

Gilberto Gil, started to have a focus on the "forces of Brazilian culture" (Gil, 2003). These two

events, as narrated by the researcher Eliane Costa in her book Jangada Digital, ended in the

development of public policies on digital culture that inserted Brazil in the international spotlight inthis field. During the next eight years, the organizers of these networks of immaterial production

have become co-managers of policies in several spheres of government. Some example of

actions that have been developed by sectors responsible for digital inclusion programs by

fostering connectivity of the population and the share of popular culture are the Cultura Viva

(Living Culture - responsible for the network connectivity of Points of Culture). These networks

were also partners in the first drafts of policies bills whose focus was to strengthen the freedoms

in the digital age, such as the proposed reform of the Copyright Act, the draft Law on Public

Information, the Marco Civil da Internet, a civilian digital rights drafted by the Ministry of Justice in

partnership with the society through an open web platform dedicated to the discussion and

submission of suggestions by the society.

Andre Gorz in his book The Immaterial attributes to "artisans of computer programs and free

networks" the role of confrontation of contemporary capitalism for opposing the enclosure of

knowledge. For him, these groups constitute a "social and cultural dissent" (Gorz, 2003, pg. 63)

that proposes a new conception of society. This were the perspectives that guided the cultural

policies in Brazil under Lula and this are the the analytical approaches that we will use to analyze

the members of these networks of immaterial production and political action in Brazi.


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NEW PHENOMENOLOGY OF CAPITAL AND EXCHANGE NETWORKS

"Given that there is a beach in agricultural settlements, Phoenician ships appear. The

crew on the beach spread goods: pots, iron tools etc.. The inhabitants of the coast at

night collect these interesting objects, they take it as a gift from the gods. The ship's

crew organized a punitive expedition, which ignites some of the settlements. They

returned to the ships. Now the people who do not know the exchange, but the sacrifice,

try to appease the gods. On the beach lay valuable gifts as food. As the ship's crew, the

night before the massacre, brought to the ship the stolen goods, spread them again

during the morning. Two rows are displayed next to each other: the goods of the ship

and the sacrifices of the inhabitants of the land. The educated people, after the

departure of ships and much hesitation, in memory of severed limbs, destroyed homes

etc. just take what they believe that would be fair. Until the next time they learned what

is exchange value. "

(The violent impregnation of exchange - according to Marx, Adorno, Benjamin and Kurnitzky -

Alexander Kluge's News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital).

(1) MetaReciclagem

The MetaReciclagem network, built around the platform http://www.metareciclagem.org, started

from the mailing list project Met:Fora (a pun with the word metaphor), which brought together,

from 2002 on, organizers of actions related to new technologies with interest in "understand and

propose applications for a reality where we will be permanently connected." In the same year, in

discussions on the mailing list, the term MetaReciclagem appears, as described on the official

website:

The MetaReciclagem is a distributed network that operates since 2002 in developing

decentralized and open actions to appropriate technology. The network started in So Paulo in

partnership with the NGO Agente Cidado (Citizen Agent) as a project to collect and refurbish

used computers that were later distributed to social projects. The MetaReciclagem ideology is

based on the deconstruction of the hardware, the use of free software and open licenses, in a

network based action and in the search for social transformation.

Many of the agents of such a network would have a basic role in the digital inclusion public

policies of the Lula government, especially in the Cultura Viva (Living Culture) project, whosemain action is the Pontos de Cultura (Points of Culture). During the years 2003 and 2004, a

network of young organizers proposed to the Ministry of Culture the creation of multimedia kits,

using free software, which would be distributed to the Points of Culture, civil society

organizations awarded through public grants and that are recognized for their contribution to the

Brazilian culture, especially focused on popular culture.


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From 2009, with the dissolution of actions linked to the Ministry of Culture and with the deepening

of international cooperation, the group began to be understood primarily as "an open network that

promoted the deconstruction and the appropriation of technologies" in order to promote social

transformation. As Fonseca says in his book Post-Digital Labs, "a genuinely MetaReciclagem

network was designed and implemented in a distributed and totally free way." (FONSECA, 2011,

p. 18). In the same text, the activist makes five claims about the origins of the Metarec, as it isknown by its agents, which includes the comprehension of the "cultural character of free

networks, the emergence of new forms of social networking and the innovation that it is created

from them." (FONSECA, 2011, p. 18)

Currently, MetaReciclagem network has about 500 members on its mail list and has in operation

10 local points of articulation, known as spores. This dimension of a stated quest for "social

transformation" describes this eminently political network, whose decisions are taken internally

by means of consensus and self-organized meetings.

(2) Fora do Eixo (Out of axis network)

The Fora do Eixo (www.foradoeixo.org.br) is a network of collective cultural production that is

present in all states of Brazil. Its history dates back to the creation, in the State of Cuiab, of the

collective Cubo Mgico in 2002. It would be through the leaders linked to the Cubo (Cube),

whose major innovation was the creation of a social currency, the Cube Card, that organized

local youth musicians in the capital of the State of Mato Grosso began the project Fora do Eixo.

The network was articulated in 2005 through a partnership between producers in the state of

Mato Grosso and its peers in the cities of Rio Branco (Acre State), Uberlndia (Minas Gerais

State) and Londrina (Paran State). As Pablo Capil states, an activist who is the chief

spokesman of the network in an interview in the book Cultural Production in Brazil.

"The Fora do Eixo emerges as a social movement, without clear legal status, but that was more

willing to discuss behaviors than the productive chain of music. It was a way to visualize how

complementary currency could interfere with the behavior of the productive agent. We seek,

instead of producers, collectives that wanted to discuss with this social movement. The Fora do

Eixo project worked to organize the third sector, understanding that from the movement

connected to music, we might better understand the anthropological sense of culture, which was

not only market, but it was behavioral. The circuit appears in the middle of it. "(Capil, 2010)

The Fora do Eixo is nowadays a political and cultural Brazilian expression with national reach

and great reputation. It brings together in its articulation about 2 000 members who participate in

collective local and national organizations. Its conformation as a network of immaterial

production transcends even what is often considered as culture by the government and the

market, usually centered on the recognized art and artists.

"The main point is the breakthrough that we have been able to definitely leave, from the prospect

of music collectives to a perspective of social technology collectives. The crew managed to


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understand that culture is not exclusively artistic language. What we try to establish is a

behavioral transformation in which each of these collective agents can build a a foundation for a

variety of languages, but not necessarily within the art. " (Capil, 2010)

As Capil states, it is important to pay attention to the cultural shift provoked by the Fora do Eixo

network in the cultural production since they are a network of social production of technology. Itwas from the creation of projects like the Fora do Eixo that came other initiatives of great

importance in the contemporary Brazilian cultural scene, as the strengthening of the Brazilian

Association of Independent Festivals (ABRAFIN), the creation of the Party Culture, which has

been seeking dialogue with the traditional political class on issues of interest among younger

generations, the meeting of the University of Culture, which has developed open standards

training. In 2011, the Fora do Eixo took a permanent action in Sao Paulo, where they rented a

house in the neighborhood of Cambuci that serves as operational headquarters for the national

command. That same year, similar houses were created in Porto Alegre, Fortaleza, Belo

Horizonte, Manaus, So Carlos, increasing the power of the circuit. It is important to note that, as

the productivity publicly shared organization reports show, most of the value produceddomestically is still exchanged through the use of social currency, which makes the Fora do Eixo

pioneer in the use of economic solidarity in the articulation of circuits of immaterial production. In

the Fora do Eixo houses residents share all their property through a collective box, used for

current expenditures and the basic needs of its inhabitants.

Pablo Capil, in the Fora do Eixo inauguration speech, declares that the access to high speed

internet played a central role in the democratization of the information. To Capil, it was through

the network that he could articulate the first actions with peers and it is through new technologies

that he keeps building associations with the Fora do Eixo network.

"The Internet is as fast as what we're building. This is a political platform that can look at us as

equals. We are affiliated with it. As fast as the internet. It is the ideal tool that made this story

happen. Were not for this, we hardly would get to where we are, in this deterritorialization, in the

area ofcontamination, in the exchanges in technology and collaborative intelligence. "

(3) Transparency Hacker

Transparency Hacker community is the most recent network in analysis in this article. For this

reason, there are just a few documents published on what is being developed by this collective

that is formed predominantly by developers, journalists and policy makers interested in

promoting transparency in politics. Daniela Silva, one of the main articulators of the network,

explains:

"Transparency Hacker is a community of hackers and activists concerned with new ways of

doing politics in the network. This includes the question of public information, data, open, free

technologies, but also corresponds to a higher cause - which is about to reverse the way as we

deal with collective issues, engage with groups that previously did not participate in the public


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action and in the public discourse (for lack of space in the debate or lack of interest in very old

formats), to make change using the resources we have,

simply because it is possible. I like to think that we are activists of the right of doing...It's bizarre

to realize the amount of impossibilities to which groups and individuals undergo when they want

to provoke change. (..) So the activists of the right of doing or the right to act publicly and

collectively on behalf of what we believe is important - are needed. "

The group gained notoriety when cloned the blog of the Planalto (the Brazilian White House),

which was launched by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva without allowing users to interact

through comments. Hacker activists created a page similar to the official one, which reproduces

in full the original content, with the difference that the fake one allows interaction without any

moderation. After that they carry out public meetings to hack data and create political

applications. Currently, the list of discussion of Thacker, as they are also known, has surpassed

800 participants. Daniela Silva evaluates the characteristics of the network specific policies that

she helped to articulate:

"Looking at these two years of the community, I realize that Thacker expressed some principles

in his practice. We have no letter of ethics, rules of use. What I mean is that, according to what

these 800 or more people do, we can understand what are the principles that make us

participate in the same network. To cite a few: cooperation, freedom, autonomy, hacker ethic,

openness to new ways of acting and thinking about the world, emerging and changing political

values (or mutant) and a certain taste for provocation. All these things are highly political. "

One of the recent initiatives articulated by the community is the Queremos Saber (We want to

know) project. The Queremos Saber is a portal where the user can send questions to online

contact channels of public services. There is also SACSP (Service to help clients of the StateSo Paulo), which hacked into the data of customer service of the citizens of the city of So

Paulo, and the Congressman Analytics, which uses public data to create a rank of congressional

behavior.

These initiatives are built very quickly by activists from Thacker, based on the perspective of "do

it yourself." This way of acting is one of the central characteristics of this network, but not only,

as detailed in Daniela Silva:

"Talking about references and about our interactions with contemporary movements, I think it is

worth noticing that we were inspired by the very independent and at the same time cohesive

communities of free software, but we do not identify ourselves with any of these restrictions of

the traditional social movements. Many of us are active in several other groups linked to the

opening to freedom - free culture, open educational resources, free software, for example, which

makes absolute sense, it is an organic and natural connection.

The activist, during the interview, also highlighted the fact that networks articulate processes in

which the ability to create and invent new ways is more important than the reproduction of


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established procedures.

"No individual would have been creative enough to create the Internet cafes. No government,

NGO or social movement would have made an entrepreneurship project based on very few

resources, experience and local marketing. The emergence of this idea ensures that we keep

glimpsing the potential to transform the network - and it is implemented autonomously by peoplewho are on the periphery of politics and society and bringing their peers inside the

communication processes. It is a revolution not only in content but in format... "

CONCLUSION

The movements analyzed in this article reinterpret, each in its own way, the hacker ethic, the

ethic of free software developers, applying it to different areas of knowledge - the production of

art, communication and leisure to social mobilization for human rights in the suburbs. But what

is this ethic? As Pekka Himanen writes in his book The Hacker Ethic:

"At the core of our technological time stands a fascinating group of people who call themselves

hackers. (...) Their "jargon file" emphasizes that a hacker is basically "an expert or enthusiast of

any kind. From this perspective, the hacker ethic is a new work ethic that challenges the attitude

to work that has held us in its thrall for so long, the Protestant work ethic, as explicated in Max

Weber's classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905), To some

computer hackers, this kind of linking of the hacker ethic to Weber may at first seem alien. They

should keep in mind that in this book the expression hacker ethic is used in a sense that extends

beyond computer backerism, and that for this reason it confronts social forces that are not

normally considered in discussions concerned exclusively with computers. This expansion ofthe hacker ethic thus presents an intellectual challenge to computer hackers, as well. But first

and foremost the hacker ethic is a challenge to our society and to each of our lives. Besides the

work ethic, the second important level of this challenge is the hacker money ethic-a level that

Weber defined as the other main component of the Protestant ethic. Clearly, the

"information-sharing" mentioned in the hacker-ethic definition cited above is not the dominant

way of making money in our time on the contrary, money is mostly made by information-owning.

" (Himanen, 2001, p. 4.)

To analyze the relations between these collectives described in this article, we present an initial

systematization to introduce a discussion about their methods and goals.

(1) the operation of the networks is the program

The networks of immaterial production and political action comes from articulations whose

origins are not in the party structures, unions or social movements that emerged in Brazil in the

final three decades of the 20th century (such as the Movement of Landless Rural Workers - MST

- or large associations of struggles for human rights - as IBASE and Educational Action). These


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networks will not cling to rigid ideological affiliations. Their brand is the action. Practice is the

program. They are strongly influenced by the libertarian left thought, but these movements are

also notable drawing methods and symbols drawn from the corporate culture, promoting a kind

of dispute within the post-spectacle.

(2) networks are producing innovation and commonThis allows us to say that networks are producing innovation and directing their efforts to build an

open source society, since the symbolic exchanges that operate are all done through flexible

licensing of intellectual property, such as GPL and Creative Commons.

The search for radical politics and democracy, which are being gradually trapped by economic

interests and the vacillations of the traditional political representatives, is the central role of

networks of immaterial production and political action.

A notable difference, however, is that they are not movements that deny the traditional political

act, since they are dealing and keeping the dialogue with the powers and also occupying someopen spaces for participatory democracy promoted by the State. In the Metareciclagem case,

they are helping in the design and implementation of public policies for digital inclusion, in the

Transparency Hacker case, they are working in preparing and drafting the Law on Access to

Public Information in collaboration with public transparency, such as with the public agency

Comptroller General (CGU), and in the case of Fora do Eixo in the action with municipal and

federal Culture councils. There are more examples that could be quoted. This relationship,

however, "constructive", does not prevent these organizations from a speech strongly toward the

construction of another democracy.

(3) networks are formed by "agents-developers"

It is common that people that articulate and act in the field of new technologies are usually called

entrepreneurs. In the case of managers of startups, small businesses aimed at obtaining profit,

the term fits very well. It is not the case, however, to the organizers of free networks, whose

action is not defined by the transformation of its creation into a traditional venture capitalist

corporation. Even if they are not developers of code, they are developers of other forms of

production and ways of living, basically based on the pursuit of pleasure.

The diversity of methods and plurality of views between members representing these networks

is remarkable. Also the diversity in the production of language and expressions characterize

mainly the work of these collectives in the contemporary multicultural kaleidoscope on the

political and cultural Brazilian arena.

the emergence of a decentralized form of activism in brazil

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