Last october, the third encounter of Tierra Común took place at Rio De Janeiro, the days before the AoIR conference. This time the event was powered by the collaboration of several organizations and collectives from Brasil, and took the name of Rede das Redes (network of networks).
Under the theme “Fissures and Bifurcations: Sowing Technopolitical Futures,” this gathering established itself as a space for collaboration among various networks, collectives, and researchers in Latin America committed to resisting processes of data colonialism and creating critical and solidarity-based technologies. The main objective was to build bridges, share knowledge, and sow alternatives aimed at achieving sociotechnical, racial, environmental, gender, and epistemic justice in the Global South.
Collaboration among the various networks, collectives, and participants is essential to confronting the profound power imbalances with corporations and addressing the complexity of digital extractivism and technological dependence in the region. In Brasil, initiatives such as Rede de Pesquisa em Governança da Internet (REDE), Lavits (Rede Latino-Americana de Estudos sobre Vigilância, Tecnologia e Sociedade), Coalizão Direitos na Rede, PimentaLab and the Observatório Digital das Mulheres latino-americanas, have been doing an amazing work researching and working on sovereignty, digital rights, and digital governance. Other initiatives from other parts of the continent included the Coalición Feminista y Descolonial por la Justicia Digital y Climática, Abya Yala Pluriversity, SURCO Oaxaca y el Centro de Ciudadanías y Tecnologías.
Structured as an “unconference,” the event included workshops, forums, roundtables, and working groups. These activities promoted active listening and collective creation in the face of today’s simultaneous collapses, addressing urgent issues such as colonialism and data extractivism, algorithmic surveillance, infrastructures of control, and technological governance. The discussions were interwoven as they championed decolonial, ancestral, and peripheral perspectives that value alternative cosmotecnics, preserve collective memory, and combat both material and epistemic extractivism in the production of knowledge.
This gathering demonstrated the vital need to foster exchange, active listening, and collective creation in order to forge alliances and build bridges among those who envision and sow the seeds of alternative technopolitical futures in Latin America. One of the core activities was the discussions in working groups to outline joint actions and put decolonial theories into practice. The groups’ proposals emphasized the importance of fostering technological and community autonomy, ensuring that solutions—whether decentralized servers or non-formal learning spaces—arise directly from the desires and needs of local communities, thereby avoiding the trap of technosolutionism. There was a broad consensus on understanding technology as a tool rather than as the center of transformative sociocultural and political action. Hence, the need was raised for technological development grounded in feminist, communality, and care-based ethics, as well as in processes of ecological and social regeneration that respect communal life and the cycles of nature.
Comunalidad or Communality
During event I had the opportunity to work with Kiado Cruz, an indigenous researcher and activist from Oaxaca and one of the co-founders of SURCO A.C. (Servicios Universitarios y Redes de Conocimiento en Oaxaca). As we thought about the urgent need of creating an Indigenous data governance principles for and from Latin America, Kiado emphasized the importance of embracing the framework of “comunalidad”. This framework has been developed by Oaxacan indigenous thinkers and leaders —specifically Zapotec intellectual Jaime Martínez Luna and Mixe anthropologist Floriberto Díaz— for conceptualizing a relational system, a concrete way of being, and an active path of existence that characterizes the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca, Mexico.
The framework of comunalidad (communality) is defined as a relational and experiential system deeply rooted in the daily and historical reality of indigenous peoples, serving as an active philosophy of resistance against capitalism, modern development paradigms, and Western colonial structures. This conceptual and practical framework is articulated through key pillars identified by Floriberto Díaz, which are the Earth as mother and territory, consensus in assembly for decision-making, free service as the exercise of authority, collective work as a form of recreation, and rites or ceremonies as the expression of the communal gift. Ultimately, this framework rejects state-centric power, the Western separation of human and nature, and individualist notions of “freedom,” proposing instead an ontology of mutual belonging and a “natural thinking” where collective life is guided by the principle of “ruling by obeying” (mandar obedeciendo) and the radical political act of sharing the world (compartencia).
Using this framework the working group “Autonomy, Communalism, and Sovereignty” at Red das Redes discussed the possibilities of developing decentralized infrastructure as an alternative to state and corporate hegemony, such as community internet servers and networks. Participants debated the need to decolonize sovereignty and understand autonomy from a collective and territorial perspective inspired by Indigenous peoples, proposing decentralized technological infrastructure as a fundamental path toward self-determination and communalism.
