I also transformed the introduction (but this is less of a change):
intro: take back the future
“Take back the future” is an expression that emerged from parallel conversations, documents and communications in the context of Brazilian autonomist networks. The specificity of those Brazilian projects reside in a hybrid transdisciplinary methodology they employ. We claim they are “singular technologies” we mean intentional and contextual technologiesi, they exist most coherently in decentralized technological infrastructures, they develop along different paths, their hybridization with a community or a place creates spaces of resistance. They converge with community organization to create a unique terrain for identity construction, resistance, expression, and solidarity, that contrasts with dominant perspectives.
Working from a necessary distance, this writing was led by the direct implication of one of the authors in those networks, and a long term relation of the other through independent international online groups and mailing lists that have been active for the past 10 years, which also highlights the long lasting international connection of those initiatives. We used a participatory methodology and worked through an online platform where we invited active members of the projects to comment from the beginning. The platform is open and accessible to all upon subscription ii, it reveals many of the preparatory conversations. The cross-reading of the digital archives, is also referenced along the text.
Technology usage and production is a place where oppressions intersect often resulting in technological illiteracy, augmented by the sense of a lack of legitimacy to even approach those tools. From a feminist perspective we will look at how the initiatives we discuss relate to infrastructure and technology developement by refering to different existing community "knowledges"iii and from this epistemology transform the practice and the production of technology, sometimes allowing to address different layers of oppression. This approach considers necessary principles of intra-action (Barad), accross the study apparatuses are conceived in situation and opening ways to understanding phenomena emerging from their agents.
The analysis we offer of important, although minorized free software projects in Brazil, is aimed at understanding the resistance spaces they have contributed to build. Our essay focuses on seizing a specific discourse of digital activism in the Brazilian context, to describe how technical alternatives emerges from an anti-colonial position and cultural narrative re-appropriation. In the light of the historical Manifesto Antropófago iv , a historical Brazilian decolonial reference presenting an anthropofagist model for the reapropriation of the colonial assets by the oppressed. We will consider their anthropophagist organization, in which modernist practices in computer networks and technologies are absorbed and regurgitated with a transformed discourse and practice to the use of Afrobrazilian communities. Our study presents will three projects: Metareciclagem that toke place in a number of pontos da cultura around the country, Baobáxia refering to the afroancestry in Brazil, and Technoshamanism (TCNXMNSM) who associates with the Pataxo community. They expand in time from the beginning of the 2000s to the present day, but to the exception of TCNXMN that is more recent, they were especially dynamic during the first decade of the century as government organisations supported free software and “cultura livre”. We will also look at Base Comum a recently organised feminist community network in Sao Paulo. We will describe them separately then examine how the process they put in place addresses epistemological issues from the grounds up and how this allows re-configuring of technological infrastructure proposing also institutional arangements (Ostrom 1990) by and with the communities concerned including concepts and vocabularies.
ipetites singularités. (2018) Singular technologies and the third-technoscape. JOPP (Journal of Peer production)#11 city, Singular Technologies & the Third-TechnoScape » The Journal of Peer Production
iiComputing in/from the south call for papers
iii"knowledges"; is used here as a reference to Dona Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 575-599
ivOswald de Andrae, Manifesto Antropófago, Em Piratininga, Ano 374 da Deglutição do Bispo Sardinha, (Revista de Antropofagia, Ano I, No. I, maio de 1928.) http://www.ufrgs.br/cdrom/oandrade/oandrade.pdf
