Ritualised repetitions

A short note (September 2024): I started writing this text around June 2024 as I prepared to participate on an event about open source. Since time is not always linear, it took me longer to finish this one than to write a narrower report of the event and my reflections about it . If you read that other text first, some of the ideas below will sound redundant. It feels fitting, however, given the main topic here. I even considered for some months not publishing this one, or keeping it for a future book. But my habit is of sharing ideas and asking peers to help me understand them, so here we are.

Every year the nonprofit organisation Global Innovation Gathering (or “GIG”) organises the GIG Week, an in-person meeting in Berlin in which its members from various parts of the world come together to exchange, learn, explore, decide, and create. I’ve been going to these meetings since joining GIG in 2022, but only this year was I able to be more present in the activities. As I attended presentations and workshops, two fragments of conversation caught my attention in particular. They seemed to be symbols of an apparent contradiction, which in my view deserve further reflection.

The first side of the potential conundrum was the impression I had upon hearing someone half-complain that there was hardly anything new in the conversations. It would feel, from that perspective, as though we have been repeating the same keywords and concepts over the years. Meanwhile, projects evolve slowly, and the broader global situation only gets worse. Despite whatever small accomplishments we can muster, the obstacles seem to get exponentially harder to overcome. Repeating ourselves, still under that point of view, won't solve incoming challenges, or the new forms of the old ones.

On the other hand, during one of the panels another member asked something like “when did we accept the defeat, and stopped caring about topics like privacy, data ownership and long-term dependability?”. Here, the long-standing battle for autonomous digital infrastructure was silenced just as most of us conformed to using convenient big tech solutions for most of our needs regarding communications, project management, collaboration, and dissemination. In other words, we would have stopped insisting on the importance of values that used to be central. Values which had a role in bringing us together in the first place.

So, what is it? Are we merely repeating ourselves and not adapting to changes in the scenario, or are we by virtue of not repeating ourselves enough failing to reaffirm essential principles and dropping the ball as time passes? To my sensibility, a bit of nuance can help here.

First, saying again the same things is not always an exact repetition. The word “redundancy” comes to mind, and how it seems to have a stark negative connotation in English than I remember the Portuguese “redundancia” had to me in Brazil. As I recall, “redundancia” in Portuguese is a relatively more neutral concept, if perhaps denoting slight annoyance. One can be called “redundante” when saying something that others are already aware of. Still, it's usually not such a big thing. In fact, resources, tools, parts can be “redundantes” and that sometimes brings about a feeling of safety and reliability. Likewise, a message can be “redundante” to ensure that communication has indeed happened, against a backdrop of unstable technical infrastructures. I'm certain that this meaning is also present in English when it comes to technical infrastructure like data storage. However, I feel that “redundancy” in English on non-technical contexts often sounds more clearly negative (as a non-native speaker, I admit the possibilty of being entirely wrong on this understanding. Allow me still to insist on that direction for a moment). There even seems to be a moral take on redundancy. Redundant objects seem excessive, wasteful. Efficiency and productivity must prevail, from the perspective of whoever has the power to decide. Likewise, being made redundant basically means losing one's job. Humans are treated as replaceable (fungible, if I may drop a joke for my crypto readers?) assets. Redundant.

Even under the risk of mistaking distinct concepts as one and the same thing, I believe there are important points to be made on the value of repetition and redundancy. I'm not implying that we should all rewrite the Don Quijote, as attempted by Jorge Luis Borges' Pierre Menard. But there is political significance in escaping the spectrum of efficiency – the alleged ultimate measurement of a neoliberal worldview – and intentionally rebuilding alternative realities with every collective iteration to go beyond such superficial standpoints. Telling the same stories on a different time and context can be an important way of resisting the cult of novelty and the notion that everything should be replaced by a newer, shinier version.

One can in that sense see repetition as an instrument for the ritual re-enactment of communities. A reaffirmation of radical commonalities – the roots of what multiple beings have in common. A way to communicate in at least two different dimensions: multilaterally between community members old and new (while also adopting a role in the recruitment and socialisation of prospective members); and in both directions of time (interpreting the past with present eyes, while also interweaving potential futures with the knowledge acquired over generations). The river is never the same, and we ourselves are constantly changing, as Heraclitus had it thousands of years ago. We return, but are never the same. Time moves circularly, whilst not elliptically. It never reaches exactly the same point, as pointed by professor Germano Afonso when explaining how native South American peoples described time along a spiral shape .

Those are the bases for my interpretation of a supposed redundancy in our discourses during the GIG Week as essentially positive, a sort of collective self-care. It is through such ritualised re-assemblages over time that a community continues to design itself (as pointed by Escobar), resists disappearance, and keeps telling stories that postpone the end of the world (to echo the wonderful Ailton Krenak). For centuries, stories being retold by travelling griots in west Africa are said to have had the important role of maintaining the relationship and a shared history between communities spread apart. Such agents acted as living synapses, the connections between neurons whose reinforcement ensures the durability of our memory.

Beyond this ongoing and necessary sense of maintenance and regeneration, though, I am still unsure on the other part of our equation here. Have we after all given up important fights as time passed? I would like to believe that, on the contrary, we are constantly deciding on and picking the few fights we have a chance of at least acquiring small victories at. A more crude account would have it that we have no chance of winning, and still will keep on fighting. To be honest, I'm not sure. A question I have made to different peers recently is “what does it mean to be tactical today”? Some of us have been working to raise awareness about the many contradictions brought about by the irreflected dissemination of digital technologies, and help people and organisations protect against the most obvious dangers. But that won't be enough to build a better world, will it?

Here again, a slight shift of focus may be useful. The stories we (re)tell each other, ourselves and the world can be seen as ways to maintain our connection to the past whilst fine-tuning to present conditions. They are seeds for the ongoing maintenance of communities. However, seeds don't germinate in the void. They need nutrients present in soil, as well as water, alternated exposure to sun and shade, time, and in some cases intentional care. In that sense, it is not that our stories would build a better world by themselves. They can, of course, help recognise and praise that which is working at the present time. And alert us for the dangers around, naturally. This way, they can make us mindful of present possibilities and reminds us not give in to defeat.

In this continuous reconstruction of reality and possibility, at some points we can decide that some specific seeds will not grow. It may not be the right season for them right now. It may be that this particular soil is not prone to that specific species, or that it needs first to be prepared with other species. It may be that we have indeed tried and never got them to germinate. But that doesn't necessarily imply that we should simply discard those seeds. We should always be mindful of keeping the ones with potential safely inside of our carrier bags, to follow Ursula Leguin.

The griots are not simply repeating their stories word by word. They reconstruct reality at every iteration. Every repetition, every turn of the cycle, every story re-told is also an edit. Positive or more significant points are reinforced. Problematic or presently irrelevant ones are suppressed.

I am currently writing a few texts in paralle, as one such exercise. I am picking from my carrier bag some stuff that the reader may have already seen or read. In fact, all the paragraphs above are a sort of diversion. I want to distract you and excuse myself from the fact that most of the other stuff I'm writing is not new. There are parts simply copied or slightly edited from texts I published earlier. There are also personal interpretations of ideas I learnt from smarter people.

My current writing, to be more specific, reassembles earlier pieces produced in different moments of my recent life. It is an attempt to turn once again my gaze onto the topic of openness, what it can possibly mean, and the implications it entails. It is simultaneously redundant and self-diverging, following an intentionally spiraled shape to reaffirm its roots and hopefully clean out parts that lost relevance over time.

The intention here is not so much an exercise in “re-writing”, nor of repeating past perspectives. It is more like “writing-again”—sometimes translating past texts in Portuguese to English, while also reflecting on what has changed since I first engaged with the themes of openness, open-source, and open-ended processes. Open everything, as used to be the motto in the Bricolabs network.

Such re-writing happens amid necessary reshaping: large language models challenge definitions of openness that have been more stable in the past, in conceptual, political and ethical senses. Mounting problems with extremely high complexity, which Haraway calls “the trouble”, require humanity to act fast, decisively, and in ways that prioritise the global majority. We need new types of systems and institutions for that. A culture of openness and more nuanced understanding of being in community will play an important role in that construction. This text and the others I intend to post soon are my small contribution.

This text was originally published on my blog .