I have been doing more reading in a week than I used to do in a month, and I always keep a notebook (those made of paper, not electronic ones, remember?) in order to make notes. This week I was opening and reading, with no discipline, Negri and Hardt's Multitudes, one book by Paulo Freire and another about him, Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux vol. 1, Hakim Bey's TAZ, the last year UnCommon ground session reader, and some of the hundreds of PDFs I'm willing to read in the near future. In between, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Calvin and Hobbes. All that while reorganizing metareciclagem website and thinking about the two presentations to make in Amsterdam in two weeks. Follow some notes I got from my notebook.
Knowledge Transfer is an illusion. Teaching as an intransitive verb. Teaching as ethics. A political act, always.
The contents of MetaReciclagem? Howtos. People who get together not because they oppose to something, but because of an interest in how things work. Metaphorical learning - opening and tinkering with hardware may be the same as hacking software, as playing with the meaning and ethimology of words, as sharing cooking recipes, as building your own drums, or piling up bricks in one's home or in a community center back in the neighbourhood. All those actions are a continuum. Opening up means deviating, overcoming the invisible and often invented limitations of purpose, lifetime or meaning. There's an ethics behind deviation, one of non-conformity, of inventing and creating things. Treating the world as raw materials.
Still active. New people every week in the mailing list. A 16 yr old skater, a 15 yr old boy on "MetaReciclagem" classes. And they are not treated as n00bies (except when they ask for it ;)
People tend to be disappointed because I am not a software hacker or something like that. I know how to solve some problems by using the web and irc, but that's all. I can't program a line of proper code.
MetaReciclagem as sensibility. Not what but how.
Co-dependence.
People who share a sensibility. People who experience. Epiphany: I understand. People keep on arriving.
Deviance, howtos, lowtech. Inner parts, almost in a erotic sense. DIY whatever.
It is in the process that MetaReciclagem defines its own purposes.
Network shape. Rhizome
Ethics of collaboration, humanism, improvisation and collective effort.
Curiosidade epistemologica.
Not including people, but growing a network.
Sergio Amadeu asked me: but MetaReciclagem requires people who want to understand technology from the inside. No, but yes. We are not serving the public good, looking for equality or access to everyone. That is important, and happens during the process. But MetaReciclagem, the organless body, is constantly looking for potential innovators who will join the network and transform it somehow. The "users" exist and are well treatedm but they are not as important as the transforming nodes.
A drive to see things from the inside. Erotic discovery.
Purpose is liquid.
Autonomy needs catalysers. De-centralization is never accomplished by silencing the active nodes. Collective construction follows individual efforts. There is no collective without individuals. Actually, there is, but it is always stupid.
Treating multiple as a substantive. Multiplicity.
Even rooted trees make rhizome.
Mutirao is the tropicalized multitude.
When I say MetaReciclagem is anything, do not take it as a fact, but hope.Feeling lost. Epiphany. Understanding.