Felipe Fonseca. MetaReciclagem. Brazil.

Good afternoon. It is great to be here with you all. These have been very inspiring days. I would
like to start musing about two themes I've seen everywhere here: the first is the question “what can
the future do for you”. The other is how that relates to the idea of “connected people”. I believe
people have always been connected. That's what language and society are all about. Maybe what
we're talking here is about less levels of mediation between people. We in Brazil have a lot of
experience on it, and I will show you why.

Future is a social construct. In his book Imaginary Futures, UK professor Richard Barbrook
suggests that some of our most common assumptions for the future are the result of a complex
political and symbolic process forged during the cold war. At the New York World Fair in 1964, an
impressive prospect of innovations was already sketched:

• artificial intelligence,
• domestic robots,
• free and unlimited electric energy.
• The colonization of the moon and other planets.
• Flying cars.
• Good-willing multinational corporations working exclusively to improve the quality of life
of mankind.

Up until today, that future is still nothing more than a projection. More than that, it helped shape a
culture that is
• individualistic,
• allienated,
• lazy and
• extremely competitive.

Of course, opposed to this utopic future is that of cyberpunk literature:

• corporations gone bad,
• high tech / low life,
• artificial intelligence gaining control
• imminent destruction of mankind,

As much as I like cyberpunk literature, I refuse to agree completely with those projections either.

If we are to believe that future can really follow the projections we make in the present, we should
start thinking of what kind of future we want to shape. That is exactly why I agree with lift – the
future I want is a future of connected people. But what kind of connection is it? What will be its
role in everyday life? How a networked society is any different? Let me tell you a bit more about
where I come from.

I don't know how familiar you are with. Brasil. Odds are you have heard about our forests, animals
and other natural beauties (ok, this one is not so natural) or important international
accomplishments. But I'd like to talk about Brasil in other terms.

Stefan Zweig – Austrian author who fled to Brazil because of the rise of nazi-fascism – wrote a
book called Brazil, Land of the future. A common joke in Brasil is that, decades later, we're still
waiting for that future. Anyway, Zweig claimed that the brasilian way to deal with contrasts could
be the solution for a world withour wars.
Indeed, Brasil is a land of Contrast. It is positioned among the 10 biggest economies in the world,
but it is the 11th with the worst income equality. Meaning: we have a huge number of poor people at
the same time as we have a reasonable amount of millionaires (as well as at least 13 billionaires,
according to Forbes).

But Brasil is also a land of diversity. Once a gigantic piece of land covered with forest and only a
few native indian tribes, in the last 5 centuries Brasil has been developing its culture as a true
mixture of all the nations it is composed of. I'm talking cultural hybridism, in a deep sense.

In the early twentieth century, poet/writer Oswald de Andrade defined brasilian culture as based on
symbolic Anthropophagy. Putting it shortly: we eat and digest other cultures in order to mix them
with each other and our own.

Some european friends have already praised Brasilian “multiculturalism”, a perspective with which
I mostly disagree. In the words of artist/activist Ricardo Ruiz, we are not multicultural – we are
pancultural. Brasilian people are a mixture of
• the portuguese and people from every other european country,
• dozens of native tribes,
• dozens of african ethnic groups,
• and some waves of asian migrations.

We don't learn to see national origins as a major difference between people. In the end of the
evening, everybody sings the same samba tunes. That leads to a general sense of tolerance that is
essential to maintain the harmony.

Brasil is also a land of precarity. Poverty was reduced in the last decade, but it is still huge. There
are lots of homeless people. More than that: up until the early nineties, we were a closed market.
Even those who could afford it were not allowed to import any electronics. Add to that a deficient
local industry, befriended with the military dictatorship to constitute practical monopolies. Either
there were not products available to our needs, or they were too expensive. That, among other
factors, led to the development of a great deal of tactical creativity, vernacular design, tinkering and
do-it-yourself solutions. Not as a hobby, but as a solution for the needs of everyday life - Fixing
things, making things, improvising with any materials at hand, exploring creativity in every local
context. We have an expression for that: Gambiarra. It carries a big emphasis on fixing and building
things instead of buying them. It is all about seeing the whole world as an infinite source of
materials that can be repurposed, mixed and transformed. You might have seen the “teach me to
make” workshop held here two days ago. That is very important, and it is emerging with arduinos,
beagleboards, affordable 3d printers and so on. The planet is already filled with manufactured
goods. Making the most out of them is something we must do. This perspective of distributed
creativity requires a great deal of openness. Ideas like open licensing and creative commons are just
a beginning. And yes, the proprietary approach of ipad is just evil.

Another relevant characteristic of life in Brasil is instability. Again, that has been gradually
changing in the last decade, but during all our history before that we came to develop a series of
survival strategies for a context in which the public institutions did not fulfill their role as mediating
the different forces in society. Even today in Brasil, the best way to fill any need is getting in touch
with someone. For instance, whenever I hear about a music concert that I want to attend to, I call a
couple friends who work in the area to check whether they can get me some free tickets. If I'm
buying a computer, I'll call my cousin whose uncle works in an electronics store. This is not casual.
In fact, it is the very essence of being connected – I won't trust an anonymous PC salesman, and I
won't waste my little money paying for a concert I could watch for free. There's always someone
who knows someone.

That came as a response to a situation, but also it helps perpetuating it. Make no mistake: this very
sense of being connected is deeply related to daily survival. It is simultaneously a response and a
cause to violence, authority abuse, informality and corruption. It is a survival strategy. A networked
one, in a context where there are no reliable institutions. Earning expertise and knowledge is way
less important than knowing the right people. We have always been connected people. I don't think
that is 100% positive. But I do think it is a clue to our global future. Connection is not a holy grail.
It's not supposed to.

Then let's get back to “rich” countries nowadays. There are a lot of issues arising – precarization of
labor, unemployment in the rise, economic crises, how to integrate immigrants and so on. I come
back to Zweig's book – Brazil, the Land of the Future. Last year, Brasilian anthropologist Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro said in an interview: “People always said Brasil was the land of the future, it
would be the great country of the future. No way, it is the future that became Brasil. Brasil didn't get
to the future, quite the opposite”.

So, what happens when Brasilian present and eternal future meet the “western” futures? In other
words, what happens when information technologies, electronic devices and the internet are made
available to our already connected communities?

Eight years ago, me and some friends were making the same question in an online community,
Projeto Metá:Fora. Most of us were working in internet or media companies. We watched as
internationally-funded NGOs implemented projects trying to convince people in popular
communities in Brasil that they should get computers to learn the ways of the modern people: write
letters or resumés with Microsoft Word, control the budget of their households or small informal
businesses on Excel Spreadsheets, create presentations on Powerpoint. But something was wrong:
first of all, most of those people were not used to writing letters at all. They never needed a resumé
to get a job. Why would they struggle to buy computers (and create another expense) to do
something they didn't even want or need to?

At Projeto Metá:Fora we were experiencing a different kind of social phenomena, that of the online
communities, cyberculture, self-publishing and so on. We decided to start creating projects that
instead of trying to adapt people to the new technologies, would try to adapt technologies to people.
The first such successful project was MetaReciclagem

MetaReciclagem. Its first focus was the reuse, repurpose and reinvention of discarded electronics.

1. We started as a small group in São Paulo. We had a partnership with an NGO that received
all kinds of donations and allowed us to develop our first Spore. A Spore is an autonomous
lab, integrated to the rest of the network via free online tools. We already used mailing lists,
wikis and blogs back in 2002 (a couple years before the term “web 2” was coined). The
focus of the work there was refurbishing donated computers using free and open source
software and then delivering them to different social projects. To avoid the prejudice against
used things, artist Glauco Paiva started painting the computers before giving them away.
2. Soon MetaReciclagem became an activist network of people who shared a view –
deconstruction of information technologies for social change, FLOSS, online integration. It
was open – everyone who followed a set of principles could claim her project to be part of
MetaReciclagem. It started spreading to other places with self-organised groups. IP in Rio,
Manaus in the Amazon forest, Arraial D'ajuda in Bahia and so on. Here's a current Map. At
the same time, the first group in São Paulo and later other collectives started to go deeper on
experimentation and play with technologies, going beyond mere reuse and relating to the
 context of new media arts.
3. Some time after that, we attracted the attention of governments – they have seen we had
something different from the “digital inclusion people”. From them on, we managed to
influence the conception and implementation of large scale information literacy programs,
while staying unorganised. The most emblematic was the Pontos de Cultura program.
◦ Pontos de Cultura (culture points, or culture hotspots) was a project by the Ministry of
Culture. It was supposed to support 100 grassroots cultural centers. The Ministry of
Culture (led by Gilberto Gil, minister and a famous musician) asked us to help
developing their digital strategy. Everything we suggested is there:
▪ the use of free and open source software
▪ focus not on technology, but culture instead. Meaning, people.
▪ online communities and social networks for self-publishing and distributed learning.
▪ DIY hardware hacking as a strategy for learning and experimenting
▪ copyleft and open licensing.
◦ Now there are 2500 pontos, at least 25.000 people working directly on them, nearly 750
thousand people involved in cultural activities, to a public of estimated 8 million people.

The digital strategy of the Pontos de Cultura provided a very rich (and naturally full of conflict)
contact between educated young urban middle classes and the realities of different marginalised
groups in Brasil – indians, quilombolas, landless workers. Popular cultures were put in contact with
digital culture, open hardware and the such.

Other projects, similar in scale and relevance, followed. MetaReciclagem is now a word on its own
in Brasil, being developed in some dozens of places I never heard of. The mailing list has 450
registered users, the website a thousand. MetaReciclagem earned an honorary mention in Prix Ars
Electronica and earned a national award on Free Media. Last year we organised our first national
meeting. We are proud to still receive a newbie every week that challenges everything we
understand about ourselves. Lots of people are learning not to be afraid of technologies and more
importantly, not being afraid of opening up technologies to see how they work from the inside.

Partly inspired on MetaReciclagem, an international network also related to free software, hacking,
open hardware and copyleft was created in 2006. Bricolabs has more than one hundred members in
dozens of countries, working in different institucional and social contexts. Last year, its first
meeting was held in Amsterdam. Members of Bricolabs are responsible for the development of
interesting projects such as dynebolic, the bricophone, the open source washing machine, the zero
dollar laptop, the internet of things council and others.

During all these years, we came to value even more the characteristics of brasilian cultures I
mentioned before:
• contrast leading to diversity and tolerance - panculturalism
• everyday creativity and gambiarra as a solution to precarity (and a quest for sustainability)
• networks and dynamic social compositions as a response to instability

We truly believe these are essential skills needed not only for the present of Brasil, but possibly to
the future of the whole world. How's that for a future of connected people?

Felipe Fonseca, @efeefe.