Interview with Jader Gama.
The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here.
As I write these words of introduction, I cannot help but feel a profound saudade for my time in the Amazon with Gama. I arrived in Belém the week after COP30 had ended, just as prices were returning to normal. I have always been drawn to places not yet uniformed by the dictates of capital and consumer culture—like rural India—and the Amazon is one of them. Stripped of the myths and exotic fantasies that so often reach the Global North, I found a place that felt radically different, yet deeply welcoming and unexpectedly familiar.
The port of Belem.
Let’s begin with the food. A variety of long, white-fleshed fish I had never heard of, pulled from river waters sixty meters deep. And then açaí, the fruit of a local palm with extraordinary antioxidant properties, which has long been the staple of the regional diet. Because it spoils so quickly, it is usually exported as frozen pulp for ice cream; here, however, it is eaten fresh in a bowl. It looks like thick purple yogurt but tastes earthy and bitter, and it is served with sugar and small pearls of tapioca. Life, it seems, revolves around açaí: you quickly become addicted to it, as it accompanies literally any meal. In the morning, you must buy it early before it runs out, and you learn to look for the grossa (beware of vendors who dilute it with water!). If a restaurant runs out of it, people react with the stunned gaze one reserves for when a basic human right is missing.
The acai ready to be delivered.
The acai ready to be consumed.
After spending a few days in a hostel in Belém and then on the island of Cotijuba, a tropical paradise with a painful history as a former site of incarceration and slavery, I went to visit Gama at his home on the island of São João do Outeiro (Ilha de Caratateua). I had received his contact from Flynn, a friend in São Paulo. From the very first moment, Gama was extraordinarily kind. He invited me to lunch with his family—fried tucunaré and açaí—and I gave him a copy of my book. I spent the night at his place, browsing his library and resting in a hammock, an essential fixture of Amazonian life.
One evening, we attended the inauguration of a terreiro of the Candomblé religion, a vibrant Afro-Brazilian faith, the result of a syncretism between various African traditions and Catholicism. For a long time, it was marginalized and persecuted; before the landmark law proposed by the writer Jorge Amado in 1946, which guaranteed religious freedom, its practices were often criminalized and dismissed as sorcery.
Later, after spending 5 days going up the Amazon river on a boat while sleeping on a hammock, I reached Santarém, where I met Gama’s sister, Judith. She was equally generous and welcoming. We spoke at length about the myth of the boto, the pink Amazonian dolphin. In local folklore, the boto is a shapeshifter who transforms into a handsome, well-dressed man in a white hat to seduce women, often leaving them pregnant. Beyond its mystical allure, the myth has historically served as a social narrative to explain pregnancies outside of marriage or to protect the identity of fathers in the riverine society.
On the boat un the Amazon river.
I unfortunately missed the Yemanjá celebration—the great festival for the Queen of the Sea—on the beach, but we walked along the shore until we reached the astonishing Sumaúma tree, the symbol of the island. At low tide, its massive roots, the sapopemas, are exposed, creating the surreal spectacle of a giant tree that appears to float above the sand. The health of the Sumaúma depends on the richness of the soil beneath it; in a way, it embodies the very idea of terra preta, the fertile black earth created through ancestral technique, which later reappears in Gama’s project of cultivating a sovereign digital territory.
The amazing tree of Sumaúma at Praia do Amor.
Before the interview, Gama confided in me that he enjoys taking video calls with Europe from the beach, intentionally turning on his camera at the end to provoke a little envy. He also showed me a large building on the Praia do Amor that he hopes to acquire and transform into a center for the projects we discuss in this interview. We had planned to record the interview on the sand after a swim, but the wind was too strong for proper audio. Instead, we sat at his table and began discussing indigenous digital sovereignty and the digital citizenship initiatives he is involved in.
What I found particularly intriguing throughout our conversations is how counter-colonial and indigenous thinkers like Nego Bispo, with notions such as the colonization of the imaginary, intersect with continental philosophy of technology. Concepts like technical alienation, which Gama mobilizes in dialogue with Paulo Freire and Álvaro Vieira Pinto, are integrated with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and technical objects. Here the struggle for digital sovereignty, from being framed as a technical or infrastructural problem, becomes cultural, epistemic, and ontological: a question of how to cultivate a digital territory rooted in ancestral knowledge while engaging critically with global technological systems.
It is from that table, with the sound of the wind still echoing in the background and the sea only a few metres away, that the interview begins.
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What is your trajectory and why are you interested in digital sovereignty?
I was always raised near the river. I was born in a city called Santarém, which is a city located halfway between Belém and Manaus. I like to say it is the oldest city in the Amazon, which even before colonization was a great center of culture and economy in the region. A crossroads of rivers: three great rivers meet there, the Arapiuns, the Tapajós, and the Amazonas. Arapiun and Tapajó are names of indigenous peoples, and Amazonas is a colonized name they gave to this river that cuts through the entire great Pindoramic basin, today called the Amazonian basin.
I have always studied in public schools. I did my undergraduate degree at a public university in data processing and a specialization in technologies in education. My training is grounded in the construction of critical thinking. When I arrived at the university, I began to encounter technology and started thinking about it as: for what and for whom? I ended up seeking an interdisciplinary path because I saw that just the digital technology part, the engineering, did not answer social or economic problems. Later, I went to study development planning. My master’s degree was at the Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos [Center for Advanced Amazonian Studies] of the UFPA, here in Belém.
My doctorate was also at this same center. However, I changed my research line: I went to study economy and regional development. While in my master’s I studied public transparency, social participation, and electronic government, I then went on to study surveillance capitalism, data colonialism, and the knowledge economy. Now I am doing a post-doctorate that mixes a bit of all this, from the perspective of a project for territorial governance oriented toward data and traditional wisdom. It is a step toward that.
A book from Gama’s library.
Digital sovereignty is a contested word: what is the best sense, the sense that you use?
I have debated this concept of sovereignty for a long time, from a perspective of autonomy and, primarily, counter-colonization. Sovereignty is very much a term from political science. It is a term of world geopolitics. For a country to be sovereign, it must have territory, people, and the power of command—the power to use violence to maintain peace. There are many problems regarding this because, as much as it is said that Brazil is a sovereign country, Brazil is a country trapped in a dependency on the Global North. Now it is somewhat seeking, from the perspective of this multipolarity, a path toward China. But even so, from my point of view, it is a process of dependency.
But, as an Amazonian inhabitant and having contact with comunidades ribeirinhas [riverside communities], quilombolas [descendants of escaped enslaved people], indigenous and ancestral peoples, I seek to think of sovereignty starting from a technical autonomy grounded in the territory. So, the peoples I mentioned to you just now—the Tupaiu people, who are from the Tapajós community, the Arapiuns people—they have sovereignty in their territory because they are the local populations. Even though they are under the Brazilian State, they are populations and have sovereignty over their territory. So much so that when you demarcate an indigenous area, you are giving power to those people to self-determine in that territory. For me, this issue of sovereignty is closely linked to the capacity that peoples and ancestral communities have to self-determine in the territory where they act. It is this perspective that I seek to be inspired by.
For me, this issue is very important because while my colleagues speak of an origin of technology with the arrival of computers, the internet, and data processing, I prefer to think from the perspective of the origin of técnica [technique/craft], of how the populations that lived here developed techniques adapted to their cultures to solve their daily problems. This issue of inspiration in ancestral technique, for us to think about the digital today, leads me to think of a perspective of a digital sovereignty situated and grounded in the territory.
What projects are being developed here in this sense?
First, I want to tell you about the context, because that is where the projects begin for me. I started this whole story back in Santarém; I am one of the founders of a collective called Puraqué. The puraquê is an electric fish from the Amazon, an eel, a one-and-a-half-meter eel capable of knocking down an ox, paralyzing an alligator, or killing a person. According to biologists, it is a kind of environmental thermometer. Where the ecosystem is preserved, it inhabits. When this system begins to suffer environmental impacts, it is one of the first animals to disappear, to go elsewhere.
I participated in a group called GAEPA, which is the Grupo de Adolescentes Estudando o Pará [Group of Adolescents Studying Pará]. It was formed within the ideological, philosophical, and religious principles of base ecclesial communities, which worked from what became known as Liberation Theology. I was raised within this environment of popular organization. I participated in children’s groups, adolescent groups, and youth groups. I was mentored by a religious woman named Eunice Sena and a religious man named Leon Kenneth Bruni, an American. It was with them that I began to have access to reading, to learn what geopolitics, capitalism, communism, and socialism are. I began to study the life of Jesus Christ and see how there would only be an opportunity to transform my reality through unity in the territory where I lived.
We did many projects at that time. The issue of Eco 92 was very strong. Just as this COP 30 thing is present now, at the time of Eco 92 we gave lectures in schools, and one of the emblematic things we did was an environmental preservation campaign for a lake near the community where we lived. This woman and this priest were among the first people to have electronic typewriters. The first notebook I saw in my life was at their house. They had an office for project development and research typing called Puraqué.
One of my friends who participated in this group died in childbirth. The daughter survived, but she had eclampsia and passed away. That was a profound shock to our community. Her brother, who is a very close friend of mine, decided to return from Manaus to Santarém and was trying to find a new direction. It was in this context of grief and collective reorganization that the idea arose to transform our indignation into action. I said to him: “Let’s do a digital citizenship and digital inclusion project here in the neighborhood.” We lived in a territory marked by conflicts between adolescents, gangs, and violent disputes. The proposal was to create a space for training and belonging. We started assembling meta-recycled computers, true Frankensteins made from reused parts, and structuring computer rooms in the early 2000s. There, a process of digital literacy and digital culture was born that was, at the same time, technological re-appropriation and community reconstruction.
The Puraqué project became very well known in the city. We started spreading it to other cities in the Lower Amazon: Alenquer, Óbidos, Oriximiná. We began taking these initiatives to those places. When Gilberto Gil became Minister of Culture, he created a project called Digital Culture Action. I had a friend from Santarém who was married to the current Minister of Health of Brazil, Alexandre Padilha. She was very well-connected and said: “There’s going to be a meeting in Belém, a meeting of free knowledge, and I want you to come to meet people from a new project that is starting.” I went to this meeting, Tarcísio and I—this friend with whom we created Puraqué. When we arrived here, those people who were in the national debate experienced a recognition between us: what they were doing, we were also doing in some way back in Santarém. But it was something very endogenous because there was no internet like there is today. So we created our own êmicos emic, internal concepts regarding digital culture.
We didn’t call it a telecenter or an infocenter. We called it a lake, a “digital lake,” which was where the puraquês, the fish, were. And we worked with meta-recycling and environmental issues. There was a project called Reciclique as well, where people did selective waste collection. I gave an interview at this meeting. The meeting had workshops on shared management, audio-video editing, electronic publishing, and installing operating systems, all with free software. In this interview, the person who interviewed me needed to make a presentation to the Minister of Culture, evaluating the first semester of the project. He put together a 15-minute video and included a clip of me speaking for about a minute. I only spoke for a minute, but I said a lot. In the end, Gilberto Gil liked it very much and said: “And that boy from the Amazon, is he on our team yet?” The coordinator, Cláudio Prado, replied: “Not yet, but he will be.” A few days later he called me. We spent about four hours on the phone, with him wanting me to work with them. I asked: “Yes, Cláudio, but effectively, what do you want me to do?” And he said: “I want you to keep doing what you’re doing. Only now I’m going to pay you.” And so I joined the Ação Cultura Digital.
I started organizing free knowledge meetings here in the Amazon. But people from the South and Southeast were coming to do the workshops here in the Amazon. A friend of mine who coordinated the Ação Cultura Digital, named Chico Caminatti, got into a master’s program and had to leave the coordination. The team came to me and said they wanted me to coordinate the action here in the Amazon. I replied that I needed to assemble my own team, with people from here. Because it makes no sense for us to keep spending money bringing people from São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, or Rio de Janeiro here to do the training if the people here were already qualified to do it too.
I took all the people from Puraqué who worked with me and we formed the team; there were about eight people. We started doing these trainings in the Amazon, and we became the main reference in the Amazon for this thing of hacktivism, digital culture, and free software. Today, Puraqué no longer has the effectiveness it once had because, during the Dilma government, we realized there would no longer be government funding for these actions. We thought that the only place where people like us would thrive would be in universities. So we all went to do master’s and doctorates. In fact, from that group, there are three doctors and four masters. Everyone did their undergraduate degrees. Today we are somewhat like this: we meet to think about strategies and things, but Puraqué no longer effectively exists as a physical collective. But it is on the platform.
What is happening now here is a project called Terra Preta Digital [Digital Black Soil]. Terra Preta Digital is an initiative I thought in partnership with Guilherme Gitahy, and today it conducts digital citizenship training in the states of Amazonas, Roraima, Amapá, and Pará. These meetings are spaces for animation, mobilization, and training, and are part of a methodology built by many hands, with important contributions from partners like Luiz Sanches, especially in structuring the ecosystem of digital platforms, and Nara Pessoa, who plays a fundamental role in the digital citizenship meetings linked to Infovia 02. We developed a methodology based on virtual welcoming meetings, face-to-face meetings, and remote training, articulating technology, community organization, and popular education.
In this project, we created the Ecossistema Terra Preta [Terra Preta Ecosystem], inspired by the ancestral technique of cultivating what anthropologists and archaeologists call Indian black earth, a millenary technique created by the peoples who lived in this territory for soil enrichment and forest cultivation. This black earth does not occur only naturally: it is a direct result of the interaction between humans and the environment. Where there was intense and careful human action, a very rich black soil emerged which, according to biologists, houses some of the highest biodiversity indices on the planet.
This work also dialogues with the implementation of the programa Norte Conectado [Connected North program], conducted by the EAF—the state company responsible for installing sub-fluvial fiber optic cables that will bring high-speed internet to 92 cities along the Amazon riverbed. From my point of view, it is currently the main digital sovereignty project underway in Latin America, as it creates the material infrastructure necessary for local technological autonomy initiatives to flourish.
Inspired by the thought of Nego Bispo, a philosopher from here, regarding the category he created of counter-coloniality and the perspective of counter-colonization of the imaginary, we thought: just as our ancestors, thousands of years ago, created a technique to cultivate the territory, to organize the territory, we are in a historical moment where we need, in defense of our autonomy and the sovereignty of our bodies and our territory, to also cultivate our own digital territory. The way we are finding to cultivate this digital territory in a sovereign and interdependent way—because free software is that, participating in a global community—is to cultivate platforms for the organization of popular movements in the Amazon.
We have a PeerTube, called tvterrapreta.org.br. We have a WordPress that creates sites for organizations, terrapreta.org. We have an audio streaming system for setting up web radios, radio.terrapreta.org, where today we have 10 web radios in the Amazon, and our idea is to increase that. We are also starting a space called viveiro.terrapreta.org.br, which is a Nextcloud, a “drive” to organize our information, files, and the information flow of the project, so that each person on the team knows what everyone else is doing.
Additionally, we have a partnership with the Coletivo Digital from São Paulo, where we use a Jitsi instance called rede.sasikse.jitsi/terrapreta, which is our videoconferencing tool for virtual meetings.
Are digital platforms being developed here?
Yes, because these actions are organized within a space of collaborative governance, a common good that was also developed by us, not in this project, but in the previous project, called Plantaformas.org. Plantaformas is a platform for popular organization, aimed at movements, collectives, organizations, research groups, and also government organizations, as a space for the exchange of collectives, the sharing of experiences, the construction of common projects, and the organization of the work of these entities.
You can organize your meetings, encounters, conduct polls, research, and account for projects. The platform, I would say, is the communicative backbone of these initiatives, and it is similar to Decidim in Barcelona. Today, our main project underway is this. From Terra Preta, we held a meeting here on the Ilha de Caratateua, which was the 4th Digital Citizenship Meeting. From the meeting of forty-some organizations from this territory, a Forum for Innovation, Technology, and Culture of the insular region emerged.
I am also doing work on articulation and fundraising because our idea is to create a technological pole here on the island. Today it is basically that. Beyond my activism and my academic life, I also have a company, Nomade Tecnologias, specialized in the implementation of these platforms. Our focus is really on Decidim and Liane, which is another digital marketing tool that uses Meta’s API for data collection and organization of information, campaigns, and political mobilization movements.
Are there specificities of Big Tech colonization here in the Amazon? Is it different from the rest of Brazil?
I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s different from Brazil, or Europe, or anywhere in the world, because, from the point of view of domination, we are all in a process of colonization. Now, here there is a specific aspect. And I won’t even talk about digital addiction or gambling addiction. I won’t even talk about an aspect that everyone knows: that we are under a system, a business that is based on capturing people’s attention and data.
But the impact it has here in the Amazon is, for me, from the perspective of environmental colonization. This is a differentiating point that occurs in the Pan-Amazon and also in Africa, because of the dispute over critical minerals, rare earths, but mainly lithium—lithium in Bolivia and gold in the Amazon. Gold is also at the base of the world’s technology chain.
Another aspect that draws attention, regarding the actions of Big Techs in the Amazon, is the use of digital infrastructures that end up being appropriated by networks linked to environmental crimes—illegal miners, loggers, land grabbers—who use, for example, low-orbit satellites to communicate and organize their strategies.
There is also the process of cognitive plunder related to the biological data of the beings of the Amazon. There is a very well-constructed process of plundering biological data and knowledge from the Amazon, often camouflaged in the form of “international cooperation.” The amount of projects here collecting data on the plant and animal life of the Amazon is very large. This resource that comes from these Big Techs, which comes from the Global North, is very rooted in the higher education institutions of the Amazon. So it is the same process of manipulation, modulation, technical alienation, and cognitive and data plundering that is normally used anywhere else in the world, but here it has a special aggravating factor. Why? This data should be safeguarded.
This information, this knowledge, this saber about the Amazon, has the safeguard of ancestral peoples. And you see a process of biological data plundering and cognitive plunder without any benefit for these populations. This is also a differentiator of this face of data colonialism, of Big Techs acting here in the Amazon. At COP30 you saw this in a very blatant way.
What did you think of the COP30?
A space for political, economic, and geopolitical lobbying. A space where there was little structured listening to Amazonian voices. But I think it was good because many people came here, mainly from Latin America, but at COP30 itself, we had a very limited, very small impact. For me, the Peoples’ Summit was much more interesting, where I had an active role, met many people, managed to make articulations, and I think it strengthened our network as a network of people who think, just like our ancestors, in technical systems of life generation, and not death generation.
The terra preta of the indigenous peoples was a technical system of life generation. The technique from the Global North that arrives here, which also works on the issue of productivity and food production, is a technique guided by a productivist logic that ignores life cycles, necropolitics, that will use pesticides, chemical products, genetic manipulation—in short, all that you already know, technique used for an enhancement that, as Nego Bispo would say, is synthetic.
Who is Nego Bispo?
He is a philosopher, a quilombola sage who wrote several books showing how colonialism, monoculture, and also Christianity are elements of colonization of our imaginary and end up taking away our capacity for self-determination and uprooting us from our territories. In this place where you are sitting, Nego Bispo has already sat eating piracuí, a kind of dehydrated fish flour, an ancestral technique of the peoples who lived here. Nego Bispo is one of the founding thoughts of what I told you, because he leads us to understand that, to counter-colonize our imaginary, we need to engage in a war of denominations. And what is the war of denominations? It is calling things by the name that we have, that we give. That is what I have been telling you from the beginning.
Today, Big Techs determine all relationships, including the relationships of social movements. Social movements have lost their capacity, their technical autonomy to organize, communicate, and mobilize, because today they have to adapt to the standards of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
This also depends on the fact that when social networks arrived, which became famous in 2010, there was the whole narrative of emancipation—such as the Arab Spring, against powers—and decentralization, which turned out to be completely false.
A Trojan horse, right? Nego Bispo always placed himself in this position. It is a position very linked to other thinkers, like Paulo Freire, or Álvaro Vieira Pinto, who is a Brazilian philosopher of technology. He, along with Paulo Freire, created the term naive consciousness. I articulate this with the war of denominations, Nego Bispo’s counter-colonial movement, and the thought of Gilbert Simondon, where one of the categories I use most is that of technical alienation.
When you join technical alienation with naive consciousness, that is exactly what happens: the social movement, starting from this technical alienation, builds a naive consciousness and does not realize that it hands over the entire strategy, the entire form of political articulation and training of its bases to these corporations. People think this is natural. I see it as if we were in the dictatorship, with a training and study group, and an undercover Army agent came, stayed here talking to us, and captured all the information of what we are discussing.
For me, when I arrive at the debate with social movements, popular organizations, and NGOs interested in this subject, I don’t start by talking about digital sovereignty. I start by talking about information security, about information organization, about self-determination regarding data. Any serious company today does not put its knowledge inside these infrastructures. No matter how expensive it is, they pay to have sovereignty over their data. I think this is a fundamental point, and I perceive that this will, more and more, create an environment of criticality regarding digital technologies, because people are starting to become aware that there is data plundering, the sickening of the population, issues related to addictions, and how the design of these platforms determines people’s behavior.
This is my work today: through digital citizenship, digital literacy, and digital sovereignty, to lead people to understand that information is important, that the data generating this information is important, and that this information, when worked on, generates knowledge. And that this knowledge, from this collected data, can help think about improving the quality of life in the territories where we inhabit.
From my point of view, this action of critical digital literacy strengthens even community processes and democracy in local environments. I know there are many criticisms of democratic processes here in Brazil. It is terrible to see our Congress today, represented by conservative sectors strongly linked to specific economic interests. Most are clientelist and self-serving deputies who are there working for themselves and not for the people. However, I think that democracy is still the best path we can have. And only from a formation, a popular education in the territories, can we lead people to have critical thinking regarding their experience. This critical thinking can lead to the strengthening of democracy and the organization of civic movements, where we can have other types of candidates—male, female, and non-binary—who lead to political diversity in our country. As you must have noticed, we live in an environment of extremely high polarization in Brazil, as in every part of the world.
Concretely, how can platforms like Plantaformas help in popular organization?
I think the main contribution is the understanding of spaces like these as common goods. You take responsibility for that digital territory. Just like the physical territory, the digital territory demands responsibility. Another point is that these tools are more appropriate for popular organization. Today I see, for example, large-scale movements in Brazil that organize within WhatsApp groups. This tends to generate more noise than structured organization. There is a perspective of a design that helps in the organization of information, in the promotion of more direct participation, where people can send proposals, vote, document meetings, and visualize maps of their actions. I think that is a real contribution.
The other is the process of technical de-alienation. Because it needs people who understand computational infrastructure, systems analysis, software development, communication, community animation, community management, event organization, data science—it needs a large amount of saberes and knowledge. When you have this in a shared digital environment, you end up creating a culture of collaboration.
Projects have already been registered on the platform, meetings have already been held. I still don’t have a way to measure this with precision, but I am sure that, in projects alone, in these three years, at least 10 million reais have already passed through the Plantaformas, among the people who joined. For example, today we were meeting with the Irmãs da Horta [Sisters of the Garden], with the people from Slow Food, which is an international network. Plantaformas was the locus of this meeting, and whoever was absent will be able to view them. It is documented. I think that to generate trust, transparency is necessary, and the platform is a place for that.
And at the government level, what do you think of the development of public digital infrastructure in Brazil and the discourse of digital sovereignty?
Honestly speaking, either there is a structural technical alienation, or there are economic interests that hinder this debate. Because, for me, these contracts with Big Techs compromise the informational sovereignty of the country. Besides handing over the personal data of Brazilian citizens to these infrastructures, we pay billionaire contracts. This resource could be being invested in Brazil, in Brazilian companies, generating work here and, mainly, in the network of universities and federal institutes—there are more than 500 institutions, counting universities and institutes, not to mention the state ones.
There would be conditions in Brazil, even, to create a sovereign and federated network that would provide support for Latin America, because Brazil has the largest infrastructure. This network of universities would have to reinvent itself, because today the university is technically alienated, cultivating a naive consciousness regarding the knowledge economy.
In the government, in the same way. If you follow the international geopolitical debate in the last six months, the word President Lula spoke most was sovereignty. Do you know how many times he spoke about digital sovereignty? Very few. Because the theme still does not occupy the centrality it should in the government’s strategic advisory, or because there is a very heavy lobby that prevents this debate from coming to the agenda.
But this debate will come to the agenda, especially from the perspective of digital citizenship and the organization of information in the territories. I don’t believe in any other model than from the bottom up. If we can’t organize this at the base, it won’t ascend to the central infrastructure of the government, because there is no space to debate it. We have in Brazil a front for digital sovereignty. But we haven’t managed to have an impact on the federal government because the contracts are already made.
But is Pix a path to improve the situation?
Certainly, certainly. I make a point of using Pix for everything. For me, that is counter-colonial policy. But it is not seen that way: it is seen as a technical solution, not as a techno-political solution. I’ll give you an example: when you don’t politicize public policies, you end up alienating the people. There are Black people against the quota policy of federal universities, and these people graduated because they studied thanks to the quotas. When you don’t politicize public policies—when you don’t say “people, Pix is this”; when you don’t say “quotas are a historical reparation for a historical debt that this country has”—you end up creating people who form their consciousness from meritocratic thinking, believing they won in life on their own.
For me, digital policies should be politicized. Have a debate with the population, say: “People, Pix exists because American Big Techs, with every purchase you make, capture a fraction of that payment; now imagine what that represents when we are talking about billions of transactions per year. With Pix, we are going to free ourselves from part of this economic drain.” This fight between the United States and Brazil has, yes, a part of raw material plundering, cognitive plundering, biological plundering, but also the maintenance of these colonial resource suckers, like credit card corporations.
It was very good that you said that whenever a new technology comes, it appears disguised as salvation. It is fundamental to understand the intentionality of each technology because they all have interests. I think Pix is a great example that countries in the Global South have the conditions, human and technological, to create instruments of self-determination and economic and digital sovereignty, as is the case with Pix.
What are the pragmatic steps in the coming years to develop digital sovereignty?
For me, it is about taking the debate to popular classes. It is taking advantage of the public policy of digital literacy, the computational thinking that is being implemented throughout the country, and bringing critical digital literacy to teachers. This is the main path, so that in the next 5, 10 years, we begin to change this positioning. Why? The dominant thought of the colonizer tells us, and especially the teachers, that there is only one way to do things. That is a big lie. There are other ways to do people’s digital training. There are even “unplugged” techniques, where you teach the digital without a computer and without a cell phone.
I think it is fundamental to think of strategies that bring critical thinking regarding technology to the population. Today, my neighbors here are being run over by these platforms, especially by what they call, for marketing purposes, “artificial intelligence.” They are going to be run over by this technology and won’t even know what happened because they are outside the possibility of thinking critically about the use of information technology. So, this point is fundamental to be done. Pragmatically, it is training.
