Computing from the Global South
Another computing environment has always been possible
by TC Silva & LF Murillo
In Brazil, a place already marked not only by the COVID-19 pandemic but also by tragic political pandemonium, it has become increasingly difficult to breathe outside our affective computer networks. Widespread uncertainty has made it extremely hard to talk about broader strategic agendas such as data security, net neutrality, and technological autonomy–as well as protecting minoritized cultural identities and diversities, territories, and local knowledges and traditions. Emergency actions have superseded all initiatives.
The “digital culture” initiatives that started in the 2000s in Brazil inspired reflections about the future of “digital inclusion” programs, shaping a public debate about the use of libre technologies during the first term of the left-wing government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Without much focus on technological autonomy in this period, governmental programs followed, unfortunately, with the policy of public procurement––that is, the distribution of resources to accomplish so-called “social/digital inclusion,” which eventually led our communities to believe that this intervention would be enough to assure our future autonomy as technologists building autonomous computing networks. Then came the coup and, along with it, the pandemonium in which we are currently living.
We used to have a strong community for libre technologies in Brazil, but this is no longer as well-articulated. We are still around, but mostly dispersed.
It was in these conditions that we held the end of our event “Computing in / from the South”––organized in partnership with the Rede Mocambos, the feminist technoscience journal Catalyst, and the research institute Data and Society. We set ourselves to the task of reflecting on the experience of weaving new networks for computing from other perspectives, historical experiences, and urgencies. Our goal was to bring together several collectives to share new ways of working with computing as an extension of life, territory, memory, and collective experience of those who are not part of the corporate structures that decide the future of digital technologies.
It is important to register here how happy we were to learn from all of those who came to share their experiences of creating a different present and future. Our event was not a minor one, given the conditions under which the Mocambos network managed to create and maintain its digital infrastructure: Let’s remember, a situation of precarity and structural violence imposed against Black populations has only intensified in Brazil in the last two years. It is also important to remember that the collective experience of learning and building autonomous networks extends from the 2000s to the present in the country, but also abroad. Our collective story is part of this genealogy of political work around digital technologies in Brazil and beyond.
Our collective story is part of this genealogy of political work around digital technologies in Brazil and beyond.
Since we use libre technologies for the creation of autonomous networks, we anticipated a number of difficulties that could impose themselves in our path toward reflecting on the state of computing North and South. We knew, for example, that we might have problems during our live broadcast due to the natural perception that many people have of computing from their experiences with corporate services. We had small problems here and there, problems with communication and remote organization, but in general we left the event with the feeling that we had achieved its fundamental purpose. To give you an idea of typical technical challenges, thirty minutes before the end of our event, a heavy rain started to fall in the city of Campinas (where the cultural center Casa Tainã is located with its community data center, whose machines hosted our event). Five minutes later, a blackout put the entire neighborhood in the dark! Luckily, the data center had a good UPS that kept us going online.
For every problem we identified in our evaluation of the event, there were underlying colonialist assumptions — assumptions that we have all written against in our contributions to our Catalyst volume on the political and technical projects for Computing in and from the South):
- “The multilingual confusion” that starts from the assumption that computing cannot be designed, developed, discussed in languages other than “standard English”;
- “The perception of low quality” that assumes a “quality standard” that is set by corporations that prey on every person with computing / communication needs;
- The “conversations out-of-scope” on computing that are criticized based on the definition of what “technology” is and can be according to the Euro-American tradition;
- “The (dis)connection of corporate infrastructure” which assumes that bandwidth is infinite and always available. For our event, our hosts could not serve more than 250 viewers on the English and Portuguese language channels, so we had to distribute the load).
At the end of our community networks, what we managed to build was a common space of recognition of our humanity in others — in collectives so different and so distant, but part of the commons that we share through autonomist techniques and technologies. What united us, in fact, was the reclaiming of our capacity to build computation presents and futures our own way, without the romanticization and exoticization that are typical of digital tech projects involving countries North and South.
What united us, in fact, was the reclaiming of our capacity to build computation presents and futures our own way, without the romanticization and exoticization that are typical of digital tech projects involving countries North and South.
In the middle of all this we were living, and we were still running out of air to breathe. We continued our resistance with resilience from the inside out, and, when we least expected it, we received an invitation to surmount this unusual gathering of people from different places who, without even knowing us, welcomed us, listened to us, supported us, respected us, and understood us when we agreed to collaborate in a project that, for us, without a doubt, represented the oxygen tank we needed.
Despite all the difficulties–and this is the best part–nobody minded leaving the infernal circuit of institutional meetings on Zoom that a good number of people were submitted to this past year. Another computing environment has always been possible, as other computing environments already happen! We just need to keep gathering and mobilizing to help maintain what we are building through meetings like “Computing from and for the South.”
We need to keep taking good care of all of us, and all the nodes of our networks, based on the (first) maxim of the African ancestral matrix: I am because we are; nothing for me, everything for us!
