We live in times of crises. Not a single crisis, but multiple, plural, and interconnected ones. Environmental degradation causing extreme climate events. The severance of social bonds, generating insurmountable polarisation – not only of opinion, but fundamentally of world-views – and leading to a general lack of trust. Economic disparity and precarious working conditions everywhere. Times of trouble, indeed. And stay with it, we must. In such a grim context, many attempt to look for solutions beyond the typically western/northern/white ways of producing knowledge. After all, if we are to dribble the traps of the current state and build futures that help integrate society rather than increase divides, we'd better search for alternatives outside the dry and individualistic horizon of “modern” (have we been ever?) ways of solving problems.
Granted, escaping the frequently narrow worldview of dominant common sense can indeed turn out to bring relevant insight. Some of us still insist that openness is more appropriate than its opposite – that openness is, in fact, essential to building a future unbound by current hegemonic paradigms of competition, scarcity, and exploitation. Such practices of openness could supposedly be found outside the realm of western, white, industrialised countries. Right? Well, yeah, sort of. But it's important to go a bit deeper.
Some precautions must be taken with this movement. One should not assume that such a conceptual reframing would be one of moving backwards, in a linear sense. There's no stepping back in time, after all. Instead of aligning to a “back-to-basics” approach, I prefer to think in terms of moving forward in realignment. That is, realigning the future – and re-connecting – with the multitude of forms of knowledge and ways of doing of the global majority. Forms of knowledge that not only have been around for a long time, but often were and are crucial means of resistance against the excesses of modernity. Indigenous presence, after all, has in some cases been the only remaining obstacle against the complete destruction of natural systems.
In that sense, instead of seeing time as a single arrow pointing towards an inevitable future, we should be experimenting with other shapes. In my work, I see such shapes as essentially circular. But not exactly elliptical, and this text is partly about that. I play with it – with self-referential writing, redundancy, and repetition – attempting to bridge what I learnt through conceptual reflection, hands-on and embodied experience, and critical engagement with communities.
This text echoes a perceived renewed interest in openness, about which I already wrote some months ago. My writing about openness and spirals is grounded on a couple of decades of concrete experience seeding and helping maintain various knowledge-oriented collective initiatives. I build on previous work conducted in diverse contexts and in discrete times. Finally, this text expands on the concept of “spiral of openness” developed during my research on generous cities and on the concepts we're using to develop semente. There is the occasional reuse of notes, insights, and whole paragraphs that I may have drafted for one project report or another, but never properly published. Or have I? Actually, it doesn't matter.
P.S.: this text has been in my text editor for months. I kept writing, adding, deleting, moving things around. I finally accepted that it is an experiment more than an essay. The text doesn't start here to reach conclusions at the end. Rather, it constantly gets closer to its core and then goes away again, as if it's trying to approach Al-Mu'tasim. Maybe... maybe, it doesn't have a proper core. Only a moving body reflected on each part, as a fractal. A spiralled and open fractal itself.
A culture of openness
What does “working open” oppose to? A usual take is to think in terms of binaries, “open vs proprietary” being a prominent one in digital parlance. But what does that opposition denote more substantially? There is a well-documented perspective, according to which it is chiefly a matter of “licensing”. In other words, of determining the terms that regulate how a given package of digital information will circulate. That view, of course, owes a lot to the vocabulary of “free and open-source software” (based on four core principles to ensure freedom to both developers and users to access and use programs and their source code, which embed a clear ideological stance) and “open source” (where the source code is also made available, but the political vocabulary is intentionally removed to, some say, make it more acceptable to corporations and authorities). Both would be in diametral opposition to “proprietary software” (in which case the source code is not available to anyone by default). That definition tends to work relatively well to describe how software and its source code are distributed. However, trying to extend it to other realms is at best tricky. If the meaning of openness is already questionable regarding datasets and Large Language Models, it is arguably even more problematic when it comes to culture and politics.
There has been extensive critique about the biases of the cultural movements and initiatives inspired by open-source software, such as the Creative Commons licences. One of the most significant was “In the Shade of the Commons: Towards a Culture of Open Networks”, published by the Waag Society as early as 2006 (PDF here). Therein lies the “Letter to the Commons”, which starts this way:
Greetings! This missive arrives at your threshold from the proverbial Asiatic street, located in the shadow of an improvised bazaar, where all manner of oriental pirates and other dodgy characters gather to trade in what many amongst you consider to be stolen goods. We call them ‘borrowed’ goods. But a difference in the language in which one talks about things (‘stolen’ vs, ‘borrowed’) is also a measure of the distance between two different worlds. You can only steal something if it is owned by someone in the first place. If things are not ‘owned’ but only held in custody, then they can only be ‘borrowed’ as opposed to being stolen. So what you call a ‘pirated’ DVD is what we would call a DVD ‘borrowed’ from the street, and the price we pay for it is equivalent, or at least analogous to an incremental subscription to the great circulating public library of the Asiatic street.
In other words, the letter poses a question to the digital establishment of that time: who are you to claim having property over an idea? Who are you to feel entitled to share it under an “open” licence? Such a way of seeing it, in fact, reeks of primitive accumulation of capital – fencing off what once used to be the proverbial commons, and commodifying things under new and restrictive rules. It only makes sense if one believes markets to be the quintessential mediators of human experience. I believe there is considerable proof that they are not. In any case, the apparent tension between accumulative property and the commons deserves some unfolding.
A couple of decades ago, the collective effort to establish the first digital culture strategy for the Pontos de Cultura project in Brazil has embraced creative commons licences to underline the essentially generous nature of what we were trying to accomplish. We were too young and optimistic at the time, which may have made us overlook issues of potential exploitation and power unbalances in the relationship between creatives and big tech. Hope and belief are a central element of free/open projects, it seems. There was an almost avant-garde assumption that everybody else should end up joining the cult of the commons. We were often disappointed when crossing paths with people who were not willing to agree with our views. But true collaboration cannot be mandatory, as Geert Lovink points out in The Principle of Notworking:
Key to our effort to theorize individual and collective experiences is the recognition that there must be a freedom to refuse to collaborate. There must be a constitutive exit strategy. At first instance, this may be a mysterious, somewhat paradoxical statement. Why should the idea of the refusal be promoted as the very foundation of collaboration, as Christoph Spehr has suggested? It almost sounds like a new dogma, a next rule, notworking as yet another human right.
Still, we admittedly had faith in that form of openness and what seemed to be its intrinsic democratic values. Against a political reality that was all about secret deals, hidden decisions and high barriers to entry, the romantic ideal of openness was indeed enticing. The way free and open-source software claimed to challenge proprietary practices of the IT giants had just the right amount of epic heroism to seduce a generation of progressive youngsters disenchanted with the political tides by the turn of the century. It fed the dream of heroically “fighting the man” some of us had learnt by reading cyberpunk literature. Of course, it was also shaped by the influence of a neoliberal new world order subsuming every social interaction into market exchange, but that would only become clear to some of us years later.
Fabianne Balvedi was early in pointing to Brazilian digital culture networks the need to challenge the unreflective use of epic narratives. Ursula K. Le Guin's notion of carrier bag fiction is a good reference on that matter. Le Guin criticises the all too masculine view of a linear path of history that supposedly follows (linearly) an arrow thrown by the male hero towards a target to be hit and captured. Le Guin writes that carrier bags were arguably more essential to the evolution of humanity than the stick, the spear, and the sword.
Still, I have to admit that in my twenties, I was still under the influence of the heroic narrative about digital technologies. As a note, I'm talking here about the times before so-called social media. Even before smartphones and the wide availability of Wi-Fi networks and mobile data. Being online then meant sitting in front of a computer for hours, trying to make sense of that whole new world through intermittent, relatively expensive, and slow connections. Each one of us was adapting to overcome barriers, and getting to know one another digitally along the way. Heroically in community, we would think.
The word “community” has, of course, quite diverse meanings across social groups, as I keep learning until today. Equivalent terms may have an administrative significance in some languages. I recently heard a French person talking about communities as places of conservatism and homogeneity, and remember having a similar conversation with a German friend in the past. In Brazil, the word comunidade has historically been used to describe poor and precarious neighbourhoods. Anecdotally, it feels to me that it was highly detrimental back in the day, but in recent decades the term was claimed by musicians and other creative workers as an affirmation of collective resourcefulness and social wealth. Being a member of a community brings a sense of awareness of hardship, a shared burden that ensues mutual care and empathy. It may denote opposition to political elites who live in more affluent parts of the city. In some cases, it also speaks of collective cultural identity, particularly to those outside the dominant classes. It is common to think about a particular “indigenous community” or “quilombola community”, whilst there's no use of the same word for the inhabitants of a wealthier part of a Brazilian city, or the members of an elite social club.
It was in that context in Brazil that, in the aforementioned early 2000s, our growing use of expressions like “comunidade virtual” or “comunidade online” would embed some ambiguity. It was emerging in between those particular aspects of thinking about communities and the adoption of vocabulary stemming from European anarchist hacklabs as much as a techno-solutionist US-based digital culture. Some things did echo, though. The idea of mutual help, a sense of belonging, and the role of informal ad-hoc agreements all sounded familiar. The idea that one could maintain these largely positive characteristics of community action whilst expanding geographically felt promising. We could be in community even in separate cities, states, or countries.
In that scenario, the all new online social interactions seemed to bring back a sense of tribal belonging. An ongoing social construction of communities based on shared interests, even when geographically distributed. They were, I reflect more than twenty years later, somehow perceived as a cure for contemporary social malaise: isolation, bullying, precarity. As some used to say, nobody needed to know you were a dog. In few other contexts were such online communities more active, intense, and dramatic than in the free and open-source discussion forums. In this text, I'll refrain from expanding much on this topic that has been covered by authors like Rafael Evangelista and Gabriella Coleman. Suffice to say that the hacker modes of social interaction were quite influential in shaping what was then called a Brazilian digital culture.
Our first approaches to openness, however, have shown their shortcomings over time. In particular during the years of political turmoil, in which all the accomplishments we have had in the first phase of government-funded digital culture were sabotaged and discarded. We could witness a forest of initiatives being turned into a desert. The promise of official recognition and support would gradually disappear from 2011 on. There would still be, however, a few short moments of renewed interest. In one of such, I developed a study with Luciana Fleischman on experimental practices in culture and technology. Instead of simply promoting open licences, we entertained the idea of a “culture of openness”. Here's an excerpt translated from the original in Portuguese, Arranjos Experimentais Criativos em Cultura Digital:
(...) we could identify yet another conceptual fold over the idea of a free culture. To escape the limitations found in a merely transactional logic of flexible copyright licenses, one could simply avoid focusing on minutiae of individual transactions (the specific license of a given cultural product made available online) to propose a culture that does not define itself as objectively free (a topic for eternal arguing). One could instead work with the idea of a "culture of openness" that is processual and always dependent on intentionality and context. A culture of openness would work as a framework within which diverse modes of working could relate to one other. From releasing multimedia contents with free licenses, through to investigating ancestral cultures, from fostering socially relevant innovation and creative production, or even researching possible exchanges between permaculture, solidarity economy and digital culture – all of that would refer to the field, still to be thoroughly defined, of the culture of openness. On the one hand, it would allow us to escape the limitations of a transactional logic that devalues the potential of free production due to a supposed short reach of a given cultural product, and on the other hand asserts the intentional gesture of generosity as an element for politicising the making of culture, present in humanity since millennia before the first computer was even made.
By transactional, we meant exactly the notion that objective cultural “goods” were exchanged among people, never touched or transformed in the process. To reference Paulo Freire, one could say that the most important consequences of a culture of openness are not at all related to the illusory “transmission of knowledge”, or by extension the circulation of cultural products. Rather, it is the understanding of culture as lively commons – plural, collectively owned and governed resources, constantly being created, shared, and transformed.
A plurality of world-views
I once realised, during an international workshop on open and collaborative science, that a common expression we used in many projects in Brazil was difficult to translate to English. It was the word “conhecimentos”. Sure, the single noun conhecimento is usually translated as “knowledge”. But I struggled to find a way to add other dimensions to it. It is unusual to talk about “knowledges”, in the English plural. It may be something with the language itself. Still, it hinders our ability to reflect upon a world in which knowledge is not at all single and universal. In my projects in Brazil, it was trivial to refer to “conhecimentos” to acknowledge the fact that different cultures often have world-views, systems of values and cultural expectations that differ completely from one another. We would talk for instance about “conhecimentos tradicionais” (knowledges of traditional communities — first peoples, quilombolas, ribeirinhos, other rural- or forest- located groups) in a manner akin to someone who talks about “urban cultures”.
And another tale of translation… during the emergence of creative commons in the cultural scenario in Brazil, some would note that the correct term in Portuguese should be “rossio” instead of “comuns”. Rossio – commons – describes land regularly used by a community, in a regime of shared property. The term, however, is not used contemporarily in Brazil, and was not reinstated by digital commons activism. To be fair, the very notion of a piece of land without discrete owners is foreign these days. On the other hand, and coming back to a point made above, the very notion of “commons” might suggest a return to times past. A time before the enclosures that supposedly laid the foundations of capitalist development in late medieval Europe, so to say. This clear opposition of commons and private property may indeed make historical sense. In Europe. In many parts of the world, however, modernity was not a gradual transformation, but rather the imposition of a state of things built through violence: invading powers destroying large swathes of forest and replacing it with plantations based on enslaved labour. It was not the overly simplified timeline – an arrow pointing towards the industrial age, with servants becoming workers rewarded with money and trading it for goods in “free markets”. By the same measure, the relationship between other peoples, their lands, and their natural resources before the arrival of European invaders was not necessarily similar to the medieval commons. Of course, there were – and are – quite diverse practices of collective ownership. But once again, overcoming the contradictions of contemporary society should not be about moving back in time. The medieval commons should not be our desired future.
Still, even discounting the disappointments of an over-excited adoption, broader concepts of openness – and alternative interpretations of the commons – still do have a role to play. To be brief: not only open as non-proprietary. Not only open as non-linear, or not enclosed. What if we think instead of open as open-ended? Doing things without the need to decide previously what their purposes, methods, or goals are. I once half-jokingly proposed we should think through the lenses of poetic licence: using licensing as tactical tools to expand the engagement of people, to make them depart from business-as-usual and open their creative processes and themselves to diversity, exchange, affection, and collective ways of doing things.
A crucial point to challenge, though, is a rhetoric of charismatic leadership as an enabler of collective exploitation. It can be seen on author-centred, supposedly world-changing projects, affiliated to the typical view of “you must start with a great idea, and convince a community of interest to join your cause”. Doesn't that sounds a lot more like competition instead of cooperation? That there's you at the centre, and them, even as beneficiaries of honest intentions, still sitting outside true decision-making dynamics?
What if I don't have a clear idea yet, and don't want to explore other people's work? Can I start building a community even before I know what I want to accomplish? Can I think twice, change my very own standpoint with every single interaction, and still be in community with others? I'm not talking here of pivoting for better chances of profit, as proposed by lean methodologies (that black hole of feedback), but truly caring for people and cultivating meaningful relationships along the way. It may follow that truly collective initiatives should not be designed around ways to instrumentalise communities and extract benefits from them. Rather, making communities thrive should be at the core of any, well, community initiative. I know it sounds obvious – and it is —, but a quick search of job ads for “community manager” will show otherwise. What kind of community are talking about, then?
Spiralling communities into being
Communities – in many meanings and shapes of the word – have been at the core of my professional activity for decades. That experience was carried into my doctoral investigation by focusing on the human aspects of the reuse of materials in cities. Resorting to communities was not, it must be noted, an attempt to simply seek feedback and validation from potential users of whatever designs I would authoritatively create. That was a point of tension, in fact. On the one hand, I was reminded that academic writing is structurally founded on a strict separation between subject and object of science making; on the other, the contact with a tech-influenced vocabulary – albeit open-source and purpose driven – would generate exactly the kind of discomfort I'm describing here. I would rather not extract knowledge from participants of my studies. But if I wanted to complete my PhD, the studies would need to be mine. My way of overcoming that ambivalence was decoupling my own expected outcomes from group dynamics. The workshops and conversations were intentionally open-ended enough to make space for true meaningful interaction between participants, and I had no intention of capturing everything that happened there.
Through reflective participatory studies, I sought to focus on the people who possessed hands-on experience on the reuse of materials – zero waste initiatives, makers, creative designers, members of repair collectives, among others. I recruited participants (and asked them to suggest more people) from diverse countries to join participatory research willing to shift from a mindset of industrial recycling to one of commons-based value recovery. Another reason to work together with such groups was the awareness that attempts to deploy solutions in a top-down fashion end up frequently exacerbating exclusion and displacing earlier arrangements. Albeit informal, such arrangements are usually rooted in local conditions, and often highly efficient for the conditions they have. Examples of such distortions of further exclusion and displacement abound, for instance the deployment of circular-inspired waste management practices to replace informal recyclable collection in India which resulted in the exclusion of workers from a renovated market, increasing inequality instead of solving it.
Centring the research on experienced and situated communities allowed me to create design concepts and speculative prototypes, and experiment with open-ended ways of doing research. I was influenced by the concept of conviviality in Ivan Illich – the intentional attempt to move past a society organised around industrial ways of thinking. Conviviality enabled me to adopt a critical view of narrow-focused notions of productivity and efficiency embedded in the smart city debate. Furthermore, in deciding to design with people instead of for imagined users, I incorporated important points raised by authors such as Tim Ingold (anthropology “with”, not “about” people) and Antonio Lafuente (“common” science beyond “citizen” science).
In my work over the years, I came to see community not as necessarily a group with clear boundaries (a single commonality—location, professional identity, or shared background) but rather as a multiplicity of commonalities in constant flux. I am obviously inspired by Arturo Escobar's ideas of pluriversal design, in particular the understanding that communities design themselves into being. Instead of engaging with predefined communities, I prefer to develop my projects as themselves acts of identifying and building community over time. That happens by engaging with people, communicating, observing, documenting, and reflecting.
Those actions are rarely linear in a straight direction. However, as mentioned above, they don't usually follow perfectly circular that leave a lot outside. My take is more of a spiralled one. I usually mention the late professor Germano Bruno Afonso on a panel about Ethnoastronomy and Archaeoastronomy organised by artist-researcher Fabiane Borges. In mentioning sky depictions found among native peoples in South America, Afonso explains the symbolism of the spiral: a representation of cycles that never return exactly to the same point. He makes a beautiful description of a cave painting made by ancient Amerindians as explained by today’s Pajés (“Shamans”). I translate it below:
This one is a spiral, ok. What about this spiral? (...) The most beautiful explanation I found was the following: it represents the beginning and the end. And that in our life we'll never be circular, which is represented by an ellipse. It means that whatever position we're returning to, even if things have not changed, we ourselves have changed. So it is not the same. The circle does not close to become an ellipse.
A spiral shape can move forward in circular yet open-ended ways. It combines linearity and circularity, so to say. As actions unfold, the whole system keeps changing. The spiral never returns to its point of origin – the composition of the community, its goals and objectives, and the ways of coming together and organising are continually in transformation. Difference and contradiction are the flip side of diversity and true openness. They help dynamically distil improved visions and move the spirals forward.
Spirals, of course, are present in many world cultures old and new. From the Igbin snails representing the creation of the world in Yoruba cosmogony to the Triskelion in Celtic peoples. Some depictions of the Greek cornucopia end (or start) in a spiral. Just as Heraclitus famously said that one can never enter the same river twice for it is constantly changing, the image of the spiral is a reminder of the impossibility of moving back in time. Even when one gets back to a point that feels similar to a past one, the very person has been changed through experience.
The form of the spiral was illuminating, enabling me to realise paths in my life that were in some senses the opposite of some of my designer colleagues’. Again, I did not start from an author-centred idea of industrial design gradually moving towards more participatory methods. Rather, I came initially from community activism on digital rights, open science, urban cultures and other themes typically situated outside the field of design. At some point, my route stumbled onto that academic discipline. However, I found that I had some structural divergences with how the field sees its actions in the world. In engaging with the established canons of design, my attention would usually divert beyond – formulating generative questions (here again, a Latin American nod to Paulo Freire) on the social context and different ways to bring ideas into being. I was reminded very concretely of the question I explored earlier in this text: can I start designing a community initiative before we know what we want to accomplish – or whether we even want to accomplish anything? In a sense, I was only interested in authorship of the ideas developed in the studies to the extent that my institutional configuration required it.
Thinking about circularity as a way to interact with the world in a broader – an open-ended – sense creates many possibilities. Having worked with grassroots communities in Brazil and with colleagues with a lot more experience than me at that, I learnt that focusing on “projects” with a starting point, a clearly defined team, and an expected finish line is nonsensical in many social contexts. What does it even mean to say that you have started the project only on a specific day? What about the many earlier paths that brought you to that particular point in time and space? How should we treat authorship when a lay neighbour contributes a bright insight that reshapes the whole nature of the collective effort? Finally, who says the project and its effects will ever end? The sun will still come up after the reports are submitted and funding is gone. The seasons will keep on changing, or so we hope. Stories need to keep being told and retold, and with luck some of those stories will be about our actions. If they so deserve.
Can the spiral engender anticolonial forms of engaging with concepts of openness, and promote the socially inclusive critical appropriation of opportunities for change? Without contradiction to my take on the introduction of this text – that one should be aware not to romanticise non-western cultures through a backward looking gaze, I do think that there are inspiring dynamics therein for the notions discussed here. In truly open and spiralled settings, leadership should be about more than convincing everyone that one's idea is groundbreaking, revolutionary or worth contributing to. Non-exploitative community organisation, in other words.
In the intense times of the MetaReciclagem network, we often promoted the intentional self-sabotage of leadership to avoid falling into traps laid by the systems of power. It was a perspective influenced by conversations with the social scientists of the Cultura Digital project, who brought to our attention the image of the tuxáua in some Amerindian cultures:
Every village has a tuxáua, who has the power of solving internal conflicts and quarrels, summoning meetings, scheduling celebrations and rituals, defining the agricultural activities and commercial transactions, ordering the building of houses etc. The tuxáua is in charge of hosting guests, demonstrating his generosity and carrying out the ceremonial role of offering çapó – guaraná sticks grated in water, a beverage drunk in large quantities daily that also has ritual and religious functions.”
Generosity should arguably be at the core of leading open, post-scarcity initiatives. The role of tuxáua is reportedly an alternating one, based on the ongoing development of generous leadership. It is not enforced by violence or the threat of violence. Quite the opposite. If anything, that can inspire a different approach for community-based initiatives. A possible take would be intentionally to avoid the insistence on exploitative uses of communities to develop one's own projects. A better alternative could then be to offer such projects to communities: to make them true open-ended offerings, by establishing collective governance and power distribution since the inception. That would require us to start open initiatives with matter so malleable that presents itself differently to different people. Further, the community should always have agency to keep changing it, perhaps always leaving the collective construction away from mindless enclosure. We should start with stories and strive for the community itself to be the community project – not its unpaid workforce. Open should be seen more as a verb than an adjective. A collective process, not a transactional end state. And fundamentally, open should not be about promoting virtuous authors who see sharing as voluntary benevolence on their account. Doing things openly should be, after all, a social activity.
Image: HOerwin56 on Pixabay