Felipe Fonseca. MetaReciclagem. Brazil.

Good afternoon. It is great to be a part of Glonet. I will keep on with the Brasilian track here. Fala
Brasil, alguém ouvindo aí desse lado?

Anyway, I am Felipe Fonseca, from Brasil. I am one of the founders of MetaReciclagem – a

network that counts hundreds of people in the whole country working with the creative
appropriation of information technologies for social change.

So, here we are in the middle of Future Everything. I'd like to follow that path and explore some
ideas here.

Future is a social construct. In his book Imaginary Futures, 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. As early as 1964, in the New York World Fair, a remarkable
prospect of future innovations was already sketched:

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

Up until today, that future is still nothing more than a remote projection. More than that, it helped
shape a culture that is

• extremely competitive
• individualistic,
• allienated, and
• lazy

Of course, opposed to this utopic (and boring) future is that of cyberpunk literature:

• corporations gone bad,

• high tech / low life,
• artificial intelligence gaining control, and
• 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.

It is understood that our future will be ever more networked. But what does that even mean? How
the networks relate to everyday life? How can a networked society is any different? Where is the
information it generates and how can people access and use it?

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, our
animals and other natural beauties (ok, this one is not so natural) or important international
accomplishments.

But Brasil also houses a huge urban laboratory: São Paulo. In fact, it is so big that the very idea of a
city must be challenged. Unlike many places in Europe, Brazilian cities are not the result of an
evolutionary process of millenia. During the colonial times we inherited not only populations but
also the ideas according to which those populations should organise.

During the 20th century, wave after wave of economic crises brought a very fast increase in urban
populations. As a consequence of that, urban planning paradoxically is always lagging behind
reality, trying to cope with the ways cities develop.

São Paulo It is a creative city, but in a different sense than most people are used to. At the same
time, any urban environment in Brasil usually mixes the aspects of unfinished ruins. In a sense,
our proper cities are still to be developd somewhere in the future.

São Paulo is today an organic context. There is a huge informal economy, as well as alternative
local powers, violence and instability. Instead of a relevant middle class, we have plenty of different
social compositions. Information circulates through several parallel infrastructures. The european
idea of public space does not exist at all – we have private spaces and no man's land.

In some senses, São Paulo can be seen as an accelerated sample of what has been happening or will
happen in every big city in the world. That also means some global futures are being tested there.

Stefan Zweig – an 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. Zweig stated 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 number 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 to our own.

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 even 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. It
brings also a need of a wider understanding of “creativity” - not the encapsulated, hyped creativity
of politicians, but the distributed, everyday one, done with any materials at hand.

The planet is already filled with manufactured goods. Making the most out of them is the least we
should do.

This perspective of distributed creativity requires a great deal of openness. Thinking of the cities as
immense flows of information that should be widely accessible and 'hackable' is only the beginning.
It can also be a solution for deeper problems.

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, as Lucas
mentioned an hour ago, 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 is a survival strategy. A networked one, in a context where there are no reliable institutions.
Shaping a future in which these survival strategies are empowered by the use of open data is an
amazing picture. There are some project in Brasil drawing attention to

Then let's get back to this side of the Atlantic again. 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?

I am a part of a brasilian network called MetaReciclagem.

MetaReciclagem. Its first focus was the reuse, repurpose and reinvention of discarded electronics. It
was created in 2002, proposing to mix the typically brasilian cultural characteristics I mentioned
before to the idea of deconstructing information technologies.

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 last year it earned a national award on Free
Media. Also last year we organised our first national meeting. We are proud to still receive new
people every week that challenge 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.

• everyday creativity and gambiarra as a solution to precarity (and a quest for sustainability)
• contrast leading to diversity and tolerance
• 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.