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 Media Autonomy and Digital Sovereignty  Since the beginning of the alter-globalization movements, notably marked by the World Social Forum in 2001, Latin America has been witnessing the growth of alternative media practices in various formats. Increasingly, traditional forms of indymedia such as radio or diy-tv have found in free software movement, peer-2-peer production, and copyleft property rights the means of extending political autonomy in the digital domain. Because they come as a response for a particular political context – one in which the major part of the media industry is controlled by private monopolies protected by state laws - the political stakes of old-media had richly informed the introduction of new-media (which have come relatively late in comparison to European or North American context). Moreover, having to respond to a situation of historical dependence enforced by technological “underdevelopment”, the implied socio-technical autonomy of such movements has been appropriated by governments as potential ways of ensuring economic/technological independence and strength sovereignty. Recently, Brasil has been called the “republic of free-software” when the government started to foster cultural and educational programmes to stimulate free-software use and production at national scale. Similarly did Ecuador that has incorporated the Free-Software “four freedoms” as part of their new Legal Constitution. Bottom up from old media autonomy movements towards a new digital geopolitical paradigm, and back. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX I would like to thank Matthew and Luciana for inviting me to this seminar and for the opportunity to bring today some ideas to discuss with you. Although I brought some written notes, this is not meant to be a lecture – but rather an open debate based on the reading s I suggested for this session and by some ideas I would like to explore in relation to “media practices” that are happening in the Latin American context. What I hope to show you is how this “media practices” inform a certain type of political agency, and potentially acquire a more significant “geopolitical” dimension in the context of contemporary forms of production, circulation, and exchange which are highly mediated and increasingly rely on immaterial forms of property and labour. Aesthetics - - - - ??? Just to start, a brief introduction about how my work connects to what I am calling “media practices” – for the last 10 years or so I’ve been involved in a collective radio in Brasil, a project called “Radio Mute” – in Portuguese Radio Muda – which is an autonomous radio collective that broadcast without governmental license - i.e., the so called “pirate radio” – as well as a recently formed television collective that also broadcast without any permission of the Brazilian government. Both these experiences are described by our collective as “free” – free radio and free television. Just for you to have an idea of what the experience of Radio Mute, and other autonomous media practices effectively stands for, as you may know, we were very much informed, at least conceptually, by “autonomous” practices in Europe in the 70s, mainly through the thinking of someone like Felix Guattari who was in Brasil in the 80s and was one of the reponsibles for activating this sort of practice during the process of re-democratization of Brazil – so our key words were (are) – subjectivity, collective, auto-controlled organization, non-hierarchy, so on and so forth… Now this is a long story and to make it short, just for you to have an idea about the context we operate, you have to imagine that the Latin American media landscape is mainly characterized by corporate-lead, highly centralized, forms of tele-communication: it is a form of state-controlled structure, operated by large private “trusts” which is somehow an inheritance of the authoritarian governments of the 70s. Although much progress have been made in democratic process since the wave of dictatorships that hit Latin America 30 or 40 year ago, the same pattern of regulating and producing “media” still present throughout the continent. (this is evident in Venezuela, for example, where huge disputes between the Chavist government and the private press have happened, this was also made clear in the recent coup in Honduras, when all the media was controlled by the parties who waged the coup, and no less evident in Argentina where a recent tele-communication legislation that attempt to reorganize the system of licenses distribution is being largely contests by large media corporations). So, for you guys in Europe, perhaps Radio is an old, dated technology, but in Latin America I would say that to “practice radio” still holds a political potential, and not only political, but as well as aesthetical, insofar as the media system are heavily codified and allow little space for any deviant pattern of language and form in terms of music, films, and so on. Just for you to have an idea, last year, more than 200 “clandestine” radios were closed down in Sao Paulo by the Federal Police – so radio still largely used as a means of structuring various types of communities. Although it seems to be “old” technology, facing the overspread digital networks that now dominate the production of media and communication, there is something that is very important in the practice of radio and that I think still relevant for us to think how we produce media today – it is the emphasis on “infrastructure” – i.e, the emphasis on the appropriation of the medium itself. The idea that, to achieve autonomy, you have to be able to control the means of production, the form of organization of this production, and the way in which this production is governed, is managed, is shared among certain collective. Now this is a point I would like to emphasise – the “infrastructure” – not really infrastructure, but the tools, the access to the technical dimension of the tools, the engagement with its technical organization, but technical insofar as this technical dimension is already social – i.e., by means of the appropriation of the technical ellemnts of a collective, the very collective can become something else. This point is important because we will later on connect to the idea of “free software” – or what Adrian Mackenzie calls “the social organization of code” – which operates in similar fashion – the code is not purely technical but already social, insofar as the collective – humans and no-humans, man and machine – is already a technical assemblage. In other words, the ways technical assemblages are organized interfere in the way the collective is constituted and vice-versa. So this is the background – “radio”. OBS – A. Mackenzie text – I guess what is important for me is the way in which Mackenzie emphasizes the cultural importance of the code, sth that he often call “infrastructure” as a culturally loaded, rather them only conceptualizing the infrastructure as the means of support or basis for cultural meaning construction. - - The importance of infrastructure – the cultural production of infrastructure and its technological appropriation It is important to have in mind when it was happening – a more general context: as I am sure you may know, the radio practice we were active in was part of a broader movement that could be historically framed inside the “alter-globalization” movement that has marked the conflicts against the advance of neoliberalization around the globe – which roughly speaking should be characterized as forms of struggle which did not attempt to get into power, although claimed for different power structures and relations. The politics present herein is the politics of autonomy, of collaboration, of participation – it is a politics that tries to establish spaces beyond the codes of a increasingly commodified life and social relations, but also a politics that does not believe in achieving sovereignty in order to transform the world. So in a way – several media practices that started to appear in Brazil in the 90s and had came together after the World Social Forum in 2001 are both resistant to the capitalist organization of society as well as to the over disciplined forms of state control. I am saying this because I think now there is a slightly change in that political landscape, and this has mainly happened through the “digital domain” – and that is what I mean by media autonomy and digital sovereignty. I will come back to this. Before, let me show how two projects that can give you an idea of what I am referring two. - Nomad Transmitter During this experience with Radio, together with some friends, we set up a collective to develop and extend some projects and to try to bridge the gap between different fields of knowledge as well as btw practice and theory in relation to our “media practices”. This collective was formed by anthropologists, computer scientists, political scientists, sociologists etc. One of the projects was a mobile radio transmitter, which broadcasting frequency could be modulated accordingly to the location it was set up. This transmitter had travelled several cities in Brazil mainly, but also other countries in LA. The basic idea behind this project – which we can call “Nomad Transmitter” – is an antenna, a transmitter and the coming into being of a collective around this technical equipment. Eventually, what was a “localized” experience – Radio Mute – started to appear as a form of territorial networked organization. But the principle of this network was not informed by the detachment of the local which very much inhabited the critical debate of the internet in those days, but to the contrary, the enhancement of local media practices, contextualized media environments, that latter on could be possibly integrated into a vaster network connected by the digital domain. Setting up transmitter – workshops – mix between theory and practice – Radio was only a means of achieving a collective organization – but here the medium is not neutral, but rather the integral part of the collective. Again, the technical dimension is crucial and determinant – and this was so crucial for us that what was being broadcasted was not as relevant as the form by which it was being broadcasted – collective and autonomous organization. - Autonomous Transmitter During and after the social forum there was a meeting between various “media practioners”, among them radio collectives, and free software activists, who were mainly working inside university campus and so on. Eventually, this grew up in the form of another project – an self-organized, autonomous web server, which was meant to support this “localized network” and provide connection among the peers. It was as if the “free radio” movement had met the “free software” movement and shared some basic principles, or in other words, the autonomy in the field of media production found in non-proprietary software the medium for extending the same type of practice into the digital domain. The server – called “Sarava” – is a project in itself. Besides hosting several others collectives and giving technical support and highly security standards for communications, the collective develops free software in different arenas, most relevant audio and video streaming softwares which is now already part of several GNU/Linux media distributions. - - - - Now here I get to end of the first part – which I called “media autonomy” – what is interesting in this movement of this type of collective practices is how this type of collective agency has infiltrated into the “official” policies of governmental bodies, mainly in Brazil, but also in other countries of Latin America as well, and more importantly perhaps, is how those strategies of autonomy were understood or translated as a means to enforce “technological sovereignty” by the State. This is of course a paradox – one which has been much debated inside the activist movement – for it was also read as the appropriation by the state of such forms of practice and therefore, it was read as a form of a type of regulating and controlling social movements which were happening more or less without need of the “state apparatuses”. Two things are important to highlight here – this process did not came through the “democratization” of the “old-media” – newspapers, radio and television remains highly centralized in Brazil and Latin America – but it interestingly came through the digital domain, mainly through the use at national scale of free software as an option for over passing the monopoly of corporate companies such as Microsoft. What is even more interesting is that this movement was not only conceived in economical terms, but rather as a cultural strategy in first place, i.e. as a mode to liberate cultural production from the tight bounds of the market. Moreover, it also became a sort of “geopolitical” strategy, insofar as knowledge based products are increasingly shaping the political-economical landscape at global scale. I suppose you have read the article about how Brazilian government is basing its cultural policies in the use of free software as well as stimulating the development of expertise on this field. This process was largely based on the network which was built during the “autonomy media” period: 1) large part of the actors which were involved in the construction of this autonomous networks started to work on governmental bodies 2) on the other hand, government started to highly in those more flexible, less controlled forms of agency to generate this type of economy. So governmental programmes started to be less centralized, and in a certain way embodying the type of “rizomatic” organization of media autonomy, as well as embodying the shared modes of production of free software. The other example, even more relevant than Brazil, is Equador, which recently incorporated the GNU/LINUX “four-freedoms” inside its legal constituency. (0- The freedom to run the program, 1 - The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish, 2 - The freedom to redistribute copies, 3- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others) It is important to acknowledge that the incorporation of the four freedoms is not just a technological/cultural strategy in the case of Ecuador, but comes together with a much vaster process of social reforms which goes until the recognition of indigenous rights and the rights of nature in its constituency as well. So “free software” starts to inhabit the political discourse of a liberation project and autonomy at the scale of the state. I know this is very much open to debate, but it is important to see this broader picture. - Unintended Consequences A broader picture in which the possibility of controlling the means of production – in that case access to the knowledge that comes with access to the code, as a possibility of generating the solutions for the internal demands of the society, and adapt technological systems to different forms of cultural organization. What is relevant here is to point out how there is and intrinsic relation between domination and technology, specially in the context of “under-developed” states as it is the case of Latin America. I give an example – Brazil is attempting to enlarge its aerial force by buying several military aircrafts. It does not have the technology to build this machines, so Brasil has to buy it from somewhere else. The government launched a call for proposals – it received proposals from Sweden, US and France. The crucial condition for Brasil choosing Sweden and not US is that Sweden is willing to build transfer the technology/knowledge of production of the machines to Brasil whereas US wants to keep the “proprietary rights” of how to do so – translating – Us wants to keep the source code closed and just to deliver the software for use, but Brasil wants the possibility of accessing the code and latter on programming according to its own demands. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Readings: A. MacKenzie, 2005 The Performativity of Code Software and Cultures of Circulation M. Delanda, 2001 Open-Source: a movement in search of a philosophy http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/delanda/pages/opensource.htm R. Stallman, Why open source misses the point of free software? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html (for references on current Latin America use of Free Software, the following published news) A brief blog discussion on Ecuador Free Software policies: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2007/05/24/ecuador-the-president-pushes-free-software/ And an Article on Brazilian free-software government programmes published at NYT attached. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX |