Colectivos y comunidades tecnológicas venezolanas: una ecologia de saberes para pensar la cultura libre del Sur Global

Abstract

The imposition of colonialism in Our America and the implementation of modern science allowed the construction of abyssal lines that delimited our existence and still continue to influence all areas of our lives. Contemporaneously, with the presence of digital technologies and their appropriation by hegemonic technological groups, power relations and practices were structured under colonialist, capitalist and patriarchal logic; at the same time, this has given rise to groups that resist and struggle from the perspective of freedom, collaboration and cognitive justice. In Venezuela, under a political-philosophical project and a legal framework that points to technological independence, there are groups that share this vision, use free technologies, seek to build a free culture and that, until now, have not been studied. Hence, we set out, as a general objective of the research, to understand how the practices of Venezuelan technological groups and communities, around free technologies, can collaborate with the constitution of the free culture of the Global South. For this, the methodology was qualitative of an exploratory type, and we used bricolage to combine elements of ethnography, virtual ethnography and the circumstantial method. The field of research was in the various states where the three groups and two technological communities that are part of this study live, but motivated by the Covid-19 pandemic, five of the participants were in different states of Venezuela, one in Colombia and one in Spain, so we use virtual spaces for the production of information. Therefore, semi-structured online interviews, informal conversations, participant observation of the Telegram groups and the Twitter profiles of the five participating groups were carried out. We use Discursive Textual Analysis to understand the information produced and as a data organization strategy we use the free software IRaMuTeQ. The (non) final reflections of the study point to the fact that these collectives and technological communities preserve collective memories as an act of resistance, of (re)existence and resignification of coexisting elements, they have common values with which they form a collective identity and guide their actions practices. These practices are of resistance-alterity and are made up of a triad of formation actions, production for the common and activism, which, between signs and traces, mark a Technopolitics path that seeks the technological sovereignty of the country. We argue that their practices of resistance-alterity are in an emergency phase and constitute a "not yet" of free culture in the Global South. However, within their potentialities, the participants stand out as collectives and communities of educational-technological alterities that, through their ecology of knowledge, in a perspective of collaboration and freedom, dialogue with the needs of the Venezuelan context and the Global South.