Desobediencia tecnológica

It's been five days since I actually left my shitty job.  I still don't
fully realize that I have regained my freedom (or let's say a form of
freedom away from 24/7 subordination and blackmail for subsistence),
but I already feel a bit better, thank you.

d1337, one of our good fellows in SDF, pointed out to me that, in this
phlog, I complained a lot about my (now) past job (he didn't said it in
a mean way).  In fact, I replied, I originally wanted this space to
become a place of sharing and good stories.  But this past few months,
I realized that every time I opened my text editor, it was to complain. 
Which explains mostly why I haven't published much since January.

Anyway, I'm sorry for being such a Calimero.  Now this is over, so I
guess I can move on and go by the "sharing and good stories" moto I
want to have for this phlog.

Speaking of which.  As we were discussing with d1337, the topic of the
sneakernet came up.  This is a topic that I love.  I even already
mentioned it last year in one of my posts in August.  As I was saying
back then, it strucked me while I was deep in the country in Oaxaca,
MX, during some holidays.  These are places that are really on the
resourcefulness, with what they have at hand, always using their
ingenuity, the You Do system, and cuting the corners to achieve what
they need (not only in the country side, I think it's a whole culture
in Mexico).  People there lives very far from everything and it'd be
the perfect place to organise a real sneakernet.  But I don't know
nobody there, and it was just an idea like that.

But since then, I thinked more seriouly creating a sneakernet when I
saw photos of one of my friends in Acapulco.  He is a delivery man who
distributes bread and meat (mainly dried) for local grocery stores all
around the Guerrero State.  He goes to places far into the montains, in
villages entrenched in the depths of what looks to me like a jungle. 
It is beautiful, the nature is big, wet, and green.  But at the same
time they are places where it is difficult to even get a GSM signal,
and where electricity can be a rare commodity.

The thing is that my friend goes, necessarily, by these places in a
very regular basis, at least once a week.  As a result, him and his
little truck would be the ideal vector for a sneakernet.  He could take
hard drives with him and deliver them there, take the empty ones, and
bring them back with him, etc.  The grocery store (sometimes the only
store in the village) could be the center point of the village
sneakernet.  Gods, I'm telling you, I would be amazed to be able to put
that kind of infrastructe together.

d1337 told me that he always enjoyed the subversive nature of the idea,
and how people in Cuba were sneaking USB drives to make "copies of the
Internet".  He actually put words of what I had in mind.  I don't know
exactly why but I feel the same.  I like the "subversive nature" of it
too.  Then, as I was wondering about it, a connection was made and it
hit me!

I think it is wider than the sneakernet idea and might be related to
the "technological disobedience" (hence the title of this post in
Spanish) as it was pointed out by Ernesto Oroza in a study he called
"RIKIMBILI, A Study of technological disobedience and some forms of
re-invention", published in 2009.  It's a little book in French and, as
far as I know, unfortunately there's no translation in English of it. 
The study describes how Cubans have adapted and recycled industrial
objects during fifty years of US sanctions.

The general idea behind technological disobedience is not being
constrained by the "natural" or fictitious limitation of a device, as
it was thought and built by engineers.  This is something that is very
familiar in the digital world, especially if you are versed in the FOSS
movement.  Moreover, the hacker spirit we know of has grown and
expanded to other fields than computer science.

In the corner of the world were I live, this "subversive nature", this
disobedience can be found in fablabs.  Sort of little bubbles of
freedom in an environment where everything comes with its official user
manual and a few hundred pages of EULA explaining extensively you don't
have the rights to think outside of the said manual.

But imagine this spirit of initiative, this technological disobedience,
not on the scale of a group but on the scale of a whole country!

The title of the book by Mr. Oroza is coming from the word Riquimbili. 
Anthony Boadle, who wrote an article about it in the Havana Journal in
June 2009, the 9th, was then asking: "Take a Chinese bicycle, attach a
stolen chain-saw motor, a plastic bottle for fuel tank, a bent pipe
from a bed frame for the exhaust and what have you got?"

"A riquimbili, Cuba's home-made motorbike that's noisy but effective",
he answered.

One can find photos of what they look like on Mr. Oroza's HTTP blog:

- http://www.technologicaldisobedience.com/2021/07/26/rikimbilis-2021/
- http://www.technologicaldisobedience.com/2021/07/26/rikimbili-ii-2021/

I guess that, for the author, the Riquimbilis are the best example of a
nation a lot into the technological desobedience.  He even explains it
very clearly in an interview he gave to Motherboard in 2011 where he
gives few examples of the innovation in Cuba since the trade embargo
that the coutnry suffered from the 60s:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-XS4aueDUg

In it, is mentioned two books widely distributed by the Cuban
government in the early 90s, "El Libro de la Familia" and "Con Nuestros
Propios Esfuerzos".  If you know the ressources shared by Hesperian
Health Guides, you already understand the spirit (for instance, agk
shares some of them taken from "Where there is no doctor" on her
gopherhole at gopher://sdf.org/1/users/agk/1st).  The difference is
that, here, it's not just about healthcare.

To put it succinctly, the purpose of these two books is to give the
reader knowledge and techniques to repair, and/or create objects,
tools, as much for the daily life at home, but as well for
transportation, cooking, or even hunting.  This goes even further since
we can also find in them botany, agriculture, breeding agriculture,
herbal medicine, a thousand first aid techniques, and only the gods
know how much other things.  And all this using the means at hand.

In 2019, with the help of the ULB Fablab located in Belgium, Mr. Oroza
produced and put online the scans of these books as PDFs.  They
represent an invaluable mine of information of all kinds with
explanatory diagrams.  No need to be an engineer (except in the
spirit), it is "enough" to have just a bit of initiative and good
practical sense.  Somehow, bibles for the preppers, I'd say.

- http://www.technologicaldisobedience.com/2019/11/27/pdfs-el-libro-de-la-familia-y-con-nuestros-propios-esfuerzos/

Obviously, everything is in Spanish.  I heard there was talks of doing
an English translation, but I couldn't find any more information than
that.

Of course, this is not just a Cuban phenomenon.  One can easily find
other examples in other countries, like in the Republic of Ghana for
instance.  Even there's a lot of ressources in the pages of the
LOW←TECH Magazine by Kris De Decker.

My previous link to Mexico was not in vain though.  Indeed, it is
something I also came to appreciate when I lived there.  The "art of
resourcefulness", to call it like that, is in this country a second
nature.  And it's clear that this way of seeing things, this way of
evaluating not only objects but also situations for what they could be
and not just for what they are, inevitably leads to some bending of the
rules imposed by the dominant system.  Liberating bends.

As already said, in France this is often found in certain digital
communities, or to be broader, in communities linked to information and
communication technologies.  Further than the simple desire to
understand and the detour towards innovative ideas, it also leads to a
whole new way of considering the relation to the world, to others, or
even to our social fabric itself.  And it doesn't matter if these
practices go against the established doctrine.  Or is it the other way
around?  I don't know.  In fact, I'm not trying to disentangle the
chicken from the egg here, but I will read again Hakim Bey's T.A.Z. to
remind myself that an other world is possible; better yet, that it
already exists.

It is in this context that I liked a lot the reflection of Mr. Oroza:
summarizing the relationship of Cubans with the technology by their
disobedience to it, by a subversive approach to it, is very inspiring. 
In his own words, Mr. Oroza explains that Cubans have detached
themselves from the "authority" held by the objects that surrounded
them.  And, the pressure of the crisis was so great that it pushed them
even more to go beyond this barrier, to the point of breaking all the
limitations set for these objects--be they aesthetic, economic, or even
legal.  Bringing the Cubans, he concludes, to a moral liberation.

And I guess that, at its little scale, it is what I find so appealing
in the sneakernet idea.


                                            f6k, 2o23/o4/o5