We are going to investigate three digital open/free source infrastructures that compose part of the case studies analyzed in this research: SMART, HERMES and Alertas+. The first is a tool for mapping and monitoring environmental preservation areas; the second consists in a digital data transmission system by means of short waves, convenient for isolated areas, where the access to telephone and internet networks are restricted; last is a platform that brings together and organizes – in the form of infographics and statistics – data about environmental degradation originating from different sources.

A common point in all three infrastructures is communication in network, whose structure¹ favors:

1. Horizontal bonds and connections between autonomous and diverse elements;
2. Free and open circulation of information;
3. Collaboration by means of non-centralized coordinations and based on democratic decisions;
4. Self-management of the information that travels in the network.

Based on this common point, we carry out an investigation about the relation between technology, communication and power, based chiefly on Manuel Castells’ communication theory. From then on, we will try to justify the hypothesis that it is by means of the relation between these three elements that the analyzed infrastructures work against the noxious advance of climate changes. This performance is operated through the capacity of communication to influence power relations, since it produces meanings, directing our mode of thinking, which, ultimately, ratifies the norms and values rendered concrete in the institutions that constitute society.

Let’s start with the definition of power given by Castells (2019, 83): a relation asymmetrically established that allows for a social actor² to influence, in favor of his or her interests, wills and values, the decisions of another social actor. That is, in a power relation, there is always a social actor with a greater degree of influence, so that the instances composing this relation – the one who dominates and the one who is dominated – do not exert reciprocal influences.

In this sense, in a society constituted by power relations, whoever holds it shapes the social institutions according to their interests and values. Conversely, where there is power there is the possibility of counter-power, which is the capacity of the social actors to resist domination and eventually transform the institutions by means of which it is exercised. This takes place when resistance and rejection overlap conformity and acceptance, the latter elements inherent to those who find themselves in the position of the dominated in the logic of a power relation. In the extreme, when power is exerted by means of force or violence alone, so that the capacity for resistance is eliminated, it ceases to be a social relation. In this case, the power relations become non-social relations, because a social relation ceases to exist as soon as one of the terms that sustains it is eliminated (CASTELLS, 2009, 11).

Coercion, which is given by means of violence or the threat of violence, is a fundamental form of the exercise of power, of influencing the actions of a social actor in favor of the interests of those who occupy the dominant position. However, as noted by the author, few institutional systems manage to last long if they exert their power only through violence: “Torturing the bodies is less effective than shaping the minds” (CASTELLS, 2009, 83). In this way, information and communication play a relevant role in the clash between power and counter-power, because, instead of coercing, they persuade. Persuasion shapes people’s minds, and, ultimately, is the way of thinking of people that drives the institutions’ fate, which reflect the norms and values on which a society is built.

This can be seen in the manner state power is legitimated in a democratic system. The basis of the exercise of legitimate power is built on the sharing of a meaning in common, such as the belief in a representative democracy. The State’s intervention in the public sphere ceases to be legitimate the moment in which it is driven by private interests,  becoming more a domination tool than one of representation. It is through communication networks, place where the citizens’ interests and values gain expression, that are built the conditions for the civil society to discuss and deliberate in the public domain the content that grounds the State’s actions, securing a legitimate exercise of power to democracy. As Castell states: “The democratic exercise of power is ultimately dependent on the institutional capacity to transfer meaning generated by communicative action” (CASTELLS, 2009, 13).

Communication, thus, plays a conditioning role in the establishment of power relations, because it is through the transfer of information that meanings are produced and shared. This affects the way in which people think and, consequently, conditions the meanings of the actions that people deliberate to themselves and to the community of which they are part.

Having said that, and taking into account communication technology in the digital era, which extends to several domains of social life by means of a network at once global and local, generic and personalized, it follows that the construction of power relations increasingly takes place in the field of communication. This construction, which articulates into a single place technology, communication and power, puts forward for debate a plurality of social actors, thus promoting a clash between several interests and values of the groups involved (CASTELLS, 2019, 84). It is up to us to try to understand the specific characteristics of the conflict that operates from this technological context.

Castells (2019, 84) takes two hypotheses as a starting point for the development of his theory regarding the relation between media and society: a) mass media transformed the way of doing politics, because besides transforming the political processes themselves, it has contributed to a large measure to what we today recognize as the global crisis of political legitimacy; b) the technological and transformational changes in communications, chiefly regarding the advent of mass self-communication – a concept employed by Castells to describe a socialized communication established by digital networks of horizontal character³ –, have decisively changed the operation modes of media politics. These two points distinctively characterize the form of the political clashes in network societies, so that:

The uses of both vertical mass communication and mass self-communication in the relationship between power and counter-power, both in formal politics, and in the new manifestations of social movements and insurgent politics, have transformed the landscape of power struggles in our time. (CASTELLS, 2019, 84)

Regarding point “a”, Castells kicks off from the thesis presented above that power depends on the capacity to influence the way people think, which is given by means of the long-reach socialized media. This role would be played primarily by television, which manages to establish a mass communication channel between the citizens and the political system. Despite the fact that this means of communication is not exempt from the influence of corporate and ideological forces shaping the message in favor of the power relations that interest them, this does not seem to be its greatest problem. For Castells (2019, 85), the absence of a message in the media is more significant than an explicit message aimed at shaping the minds in a given direction, since “[w]hat does not exist in the media does not exist in the public mind, even if it could have a fragmented presence in individual minds”. Without a presence in the communication media, that is, without visibility, the social actors find themselves by principle unable to intervene in power relations.

The words by educator and environmental activist Sandra Regina Gonçalves, spoken at  The climate story lab Amazônia, in November 2021, were vehement as she brought attention to the exclusion of certain identities from the media – indigenous peoples, quilombolas, the sea people, the river people – from media space: “Enough of living inside big invisibility. For the government we are invisible, we do not exist”⁴. According to her, this exclusion process involves institutions ranging from the big media to the curricular grid of the education system. Without visibility, the erased identities do not participate or feel represented in the decision processes on issues that affect them.

In Castells’ (2019, 85) view, every political message is “necessarily a media message”, because, despite the medias not being the holders of power directly, it is within them that power relations are established and re-articulated. In the field of political marketing, this means to convert voters’ attention into votes for a certain candidate. As voters generally do not read the parties’ or candidates’ political programs, attention is concentrated on the headlines of news broadcast in the mass communication media, which can propitiate a voting decision based, above all, on the trust the voter places on a specific candidate. As a consequence, one of the main strategies of political marketing consists in linking certain values to certain candidates, giving politics a personalist character, where the most effective message is the one that builds leaders from the projection of characters that flesh out an image of credibility and of trust (CASTELLS, 2019, 86).

In face of this media-informed and personalist scenario, politics is induced to one further characteristic: it unfolds by means of scandal. In this logic, values such as credibility, trust and character are the central elements in the decisions of a political dispute, therefore, the destruction of such values is one of the most promising resources for the political adversary who intends to impose his or her own reputation. This basically results in two consequences. The first can be observed in the short term: when a scandal involving a certain candidate puts his or her credibility in question, the voters rethink their decisions, and this is reflected on the ballots. The second consequence is the constitution, in the long run, of a generalized discredit regarding the formal political system: everything that involves electoral promises, political leaders and parties is seen with skepticism (CASTELLS, 2019, 87).

We should have in mind, though, that our generalized disbelief does not imply in depoliticization. As Castells observes (based on empirical researches – CASTELLS, 2019, 88), several citizens still believe that they can influence the world by means of mobilizations, but mobilizations that take place outside the scope of formal politics. This leads us to the second hypothesis, raised a few paragraphs above in order to understand the relation between media and society. As already stated, power relations are reconfigured in the media space, because this is the premise in any democratic intervention in the public space. And given that traditional media is submissive to governments and corporations, who only reinforce the model of the formal political systems, an insurgent politics sorely needs a new media space.

Castells attributes this new space to mass self-communication, fit for political insurgency, which we can understand through the following main characteristics⁵:

• Many-to-many: while the communicational foundation of industrial society was characterized by an unidirectional mass media, in which the message is distributed massively from one to many, in the network society what is in place is a horizontal global communication webs, constituted by an interactive exchange of messages from many to many, able to connect the global and the local synchronically or assynchronically;

• Self-generated content: in principle, any person with access to the internet enjoys the autonomy to generate content and publish it for free, a condition that has been driven by increasingly cheaper electronic devices, such as notebooks and smartphones, and by the availability of a myriad of open-source softwares, ranging from operational systems to text, image or video editors. What a few decades ago demanded the collective travails of professionals from different areas, such as recording, editing and distributing audiovisual or textual content, today can be carried out with a smartphone;

• Self-directed emission: the one transmitting a message selects the channel – with a specific potential audience  – by means of which the message will be distributed, such as email, message exchange applications (Whatsapp, Signal, Skype), discussion lists, online forums, blogs, social networks etc. It is worth noticing that, once broadcast, it is practically impossible to control the reach of a message. A message sent to a single and specific addressee, for instance, can be redirected to other channels – be it due to a technical glitch, to a criminal act, or to an attitude by the addressee him or herself – and potentially gain global reach, as demonstrated by the leaks in which private messages are exposed to a wide audience;

• Self-selected reception: in a certain way, the message does not go out to the receiver, as when we switch on the television or the radio, but the receptor, by means of the channels at his or her disposal in the internet and in the communication electronic webs, seeks the message of interest to him or her. In this sense, the receptor plays an active role on the reception of the message.

These are the general outlines of a media space that we can consider as the communicational foundation of networked society. Its pillar is the computer network, its language is digital, and its participants interact globally. And even if Castells does not support the thesis that the medium – i.e. the very communication vehicles – determines the content and the consequences of its messages, he seems optimistic regarding the possibilities that mass self-communication features in producing meaning⁶: “it renders possible the unlimited diversity and the largely autonomous origin of most of the communication flows that construct, and reconstruct every second the global and local production of meaning in the public mind” (CASTELLS, 2019, 90).

Let’s try now to understand how mass self-communication renders counter-power viable, i.e., to what measure social movements and political insurgency articulate by means of it. As stated above, counter-power consists in the capacity by social actors to oppose institutionalized power relations in society, eventually changing them. This clash is a permanent characteristic of societies, in place wherever there is a form of domination, be it political, cultural, economic, psychological etc (CASTELLS, 2019, 90). In this sense, together with the legitimacy crisis of the traditional political institutions, contemporaneity has witnessed the growth of a variety of social movements, whose source of inspiration and meaning for social organization projects and institutional reform is based, for the most part, on identity issues, involving ethnic, territorial, national, religious identities. Generally, such movements oppose institutionalized values under which they do not see themselves represented (which does not necessarily mean that their demands hold an inherently progressive character):

Very often, social movements and insurgent politics reaffirm traditional values and forms, e.g. religion, the patriarchal family or the nation, that they feel betrayed in practice in spite of being proclaimed in the forefront of society’s institutions. In other words, social movements may be progressive or reactionary or just alternative without adjectives. But in all cases they are purposive collective actions aimed at changing the values and interests institutionalized in society, what is tantamount to modify the power relations. (CASTELLS, 2019, 90)

Mass self-communication allows for social movements to speak for themselves – and not through institutions of communication media that would represent them from a point of view that is not theirs, thus allowing for them to autonomously present their own projects, in their own terms. A relevant example of this is the self-documentation project by Uru-eu-wau-wau indigenous people from Rondônia, northern Brazil. After the death of Aruká Juma, the last remaining entirely Juma person on the planet, in February 2020 due to the Corona virus, Bitate, a young indigenous community leader, descendant of the Juma and Uru-eu-wau-wau peoples, by way of mother and father, respectively, decided to close his people’s territory to visitors. They later set up a team to document, by means of cameras, drones and other media technologies, how they survived for over a year with no serious instance of the disease⁷. His words express the aspiration of his people of telling themselves their own history:

Self-documentation is an opportunity to record our own history, our own reality. There are many journalists who want to come over here, but who do not understand a thing about our way of life. This is a great opportunity for the indigenous peoples to learn how to make films in order to record the history of our people⁸.

Txai Suruí – coordinator of Kanindé (Ethnoenvironmental Defense Association), of the Indigenous Youth Movement of Rondônia, and column writer in Folha de São Paulo newspaper, one of the biggest printed newspapers in circulation in Brazil – makes a reference, in her participation in The Climate Story Lab Amazônia, to the project headed by Bitate, besides highlighting the role of technology and of communication in the struggle against the climate crisis and in the preservation of indigenous culture:

By means of communication we still preserve our culture and show the world the beauty and knowledge of the indigenous peoples, which features such solutions [against the climate crisis]. Solutions to really change and transform and provide an exit to this crisis. This crisis that is already hitting the whole world and whose consequences we are already suffering. And this does not show up in the traditional media, this is the truth. What we see, chiefly what is happening in the indigenous territories, is said by ourselves, through our autonomous media, through our communicators. We have Mídia Índia, Apib, Coiab⁹. It is the indigenous communicators who are inside the territories speaking out to the world “look, gold prospecting is killing the people, here the invader is getting through, here there is cattle inside my land”. And who is doing most of this work? Youth.¹⁰

Still on autonomy, it is worth adding that it is an inherent characteristic of the internet itself. It is correct that the project that originated it, the Arpanet, was developed by the US Defense Department – by means of the ARPA research unit (Advanced Research Project Agency). However, as Himanen wrote (2001, 183), the extension and the meaning of this governmental participation in the internet’s beginnings tends to be exaggerated. According to this author, because university researchers have taken up, at that time, managerial roles, the development of the internet was driven by principles of self-organization, common to scientific practice. The most expressive achievements of this initial development were carried out by the Network Working Group, a group of hackers¹¹ formed by talented university students. The way they worked already looked like the open-source operational model.

The Network Working Group operated on the open-source model: anyone was allowed to contribute ideas, which were then developed collectively. The source codes of all solutions were published from the very beginning, so that others could use, test, and develop them. (HIMANEN, 2001, 183)

Likewise, the World Wide Web – the hypermedia engineered based on the internet – was not created by a corporate or governmental fiat. Tim Berners-Lee, the person behind the initial project for the construction of the Web, relates:

Interested people on the Internet provided the feedback, stimulation, ideas, source-code contributions, and moral support that would have been hard to find locally. The people of the Internet built the Web, in true grassroots fashion. (BERNERS-LEE; FISCHETTI, 2000, 47)

We also have to acknowledge the social and community perspective that Berners-Lee projected for the Web:

The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect – to help people work together – and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the World. (BERNERS-LEE; FISCHETTI, 2000, 123)

In this sense, the mass self-communication technologies are not just a tool whose deployment allows social movements the autonomous development of their projects, they are also a social construction, the product of a culture that emphasizes the individual’s autonomy (CASTELLS, 2019, 91).

Furthermore, as we speak of the use of technologies, it is important to observe that, for the indigenous populations, the very domain of such tools represents a rupture with a place that is imposed on them by prejudice. Still in her talk at the The Climate Story Lab Amazônia, Txai Suruí mentions the case of a bolsonarista right-wing congressman from the State of Rondônia, Coronel Chrisóstomo (PSL), who, in an audience summoned to discuss the deaths of two indigenous children in an area of illegal prospecting within Yanomami territory, mocked indigenous culture stating that one cannot take an Indian with an Iphone¹² seriously.

And we have also been doing this work [of indigenist communication] in order to demystify the still colonized heads of people who think that we, indigenous peoples, can’t have a cellphone, for instance. We saw the confusion yesterday [24.11.21] as a deputy called us fake. Why? Because we can’t have an Iphone? And no, the indigenous communicators have been bringing this up and demystifying this idea, that the indigenous peoples can be wherever they want, and that we have the right to have anything we like. People still look at the indigenous peoples with a mean gaze, implying that we, the indigenous peoples, are poor, and that we have to live in misery.

It is not incidental that a Brazilian parliamentarian makes a statement as prejudiced as that. At the end of the 1970’s, the occupation policy of the Amazon region promoted by the then military regime intended to develop juridical tolls to allow the distinction of indigenous from non-indigenous persons, so that the State could cancel the special citizenship status of the “Indians who had ceased to be Indians”. For the State, it would be enough to summon experts who, by analysis and ostent, would tell apart who was to be indigenous and who was not. Against this project, several organizations emerged or consolidated, such as the Comissão Pró-Índio, Associação Nacional de Ação Indigenista (ANAÍ), Centro de Trabalho Indigenista (CTI), Povos Indígenas no Brasil (PIB) – which is at the origin of the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2006), indigenist anthropologist that has lived through all such events, wrote about that time:

Our political and theoretical aim, as anthropologists, was to definitely establish – and we didn’t manage to; but I think one day we will – that to be Indian is not to wear a feather headdress, apply urucum paint and wield arrow and bow, something apparent and evident in this stereotyping meaning, but instead a matter of “state of mind”. A mode of being and not a mode of appearing. Actually, something more (or less) than a mode of being: indianity designated to us a certain mode of becoming, something essentially invisible but no less efficacious: an incessant infinitesimal movement of differentiation, not a massive state of “difference” preceding and stabilized, that is, an identity¹³.

We made this brief digression just to elucidate that the mere use of technologies seen as modern, independent of what they are capable of doing, already bear a different meaning when indigenous populations are involved.

Let’s return to the issue of mass self-communication. Besides allowing several social moments and different cultures to express by themselves their desires and demands, the peculiar characteristics of mass self-communication also encourage a phenomenon that Castells (2019, 92) denominates instant political communities of practice. This phenomenon is characterized by a reactive political insurgence, a spontaneous revolt prodded by indignation in face of oppression, of corruption or of the indifference of the elite in power. Generally, such revolts are sparked by a particular event, producing webs of protests that are set up from the use of the internet and of cellphones. Such mobilizations, which can take up gigantic proportions in a short time, have in their essence the use of horizontal mass communication networks. A few examples include the protests in Tunisia in 2011 that led to the deposition of the then president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, to which one can attribute as a starting point the self-immolation of street vendor Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, who set his own body on fire in response to the seizing of his belongings, and to the humiliation and harassment from security municipal agents¹⁴.  With the same characteristics of a specific starting point and the numerous and spontaneous joining in processed by mass self-communication, we can also mention the May 2013 demonstrations in Brazil, headed by the Free Pass Movement (Movimento Passe Livre – MPL)¹⁵, whose origins are found in the increase in the public transport bus fares in the city of São Paulo.

The decentralized and expansive features of mass self-communication is reflected on the forms of political organization of the more recent social movements. As observed by Juris (2004, 349): “The internet does not simply provide the technological infrastructure for computer-supported social movements, its reticulated structure reinforces their organizational logic”. Analogous to the communication technologies that they use, such movements appropriated the network format, so that its actions and practices are based on non-hierarchical structures, in the horizontal coordination among these autonomous groups, in the open access, in direct participation, in consensus-based decision making, in free and open circulation of information. Differently from the party or trade union politics, which operates by means of a vertical and hierarchical structure, based on representativity, in the recruitment of new members and in the establishment of a hegemonic politics, the way of doing network politics works out by means of the expansion and articulation between different groups, collectives and other networks who converge to a point in common. This takes place through a flexible and decentralized organizational structure, which, besides interfering neither in the identity nor in the autonomy of the groups involved, renders viable wide ranging communication and coordination among themselves.

This reverberation of technology in the forms of political organization can be noted in the passage below, taken from a project elaborated by Coolab, a collective that works with the implementation of community networks in communities who face difficulties in accessing communication networks:

As a result, the strengthening of the associativist process of the selected communities is expected, securing self-management and sustainability of the community providers created. Coolab seeks further to stimulate the decentralization and the appropriation of this methodology by other groups, acting locally. In order to do so, we followed the premises in the use of free software, as well as carried out documentation of the methodologies and technologies used¹⁶ (Sic).

It is interesting to note in this quote how the notions of decentralization and sharing related to the concrete space of political organization – in this case, the communities where community networks are set up – are thought of as a consequence of the directives that define the use of free software.

Analogously, like the structure of the network technologies increasingly manifest in political organizations, network societies demand new network technologies. There is, as Welman clarifies below, a positive feedback between these two instances:

The technological development of computer networks and the societal flourishing of social networks are now in a positive feedback loop. Just as the flexibility of less-bounded, spatially dispersed social networks creates demand for the world wide web and collaborative communication, the breathless development of computer networks nourishes societal transitions from little boxes to social networks. (WELLMAN, 2001, 228)

Another important characteristic is that the frontiers conditioned by space-time are rearticulated in the network society. To bring people together does not imply necessarily in them being on the same space at the same moment, because data travels in the network for long distances and in principle are always available on demand. But despite this virtualization possibility, that works without presential meetings and assemblies, the social movements, besides using the communication technologies to organize direct actions and coordinate campaigns, do not cease to act locally and presentially. In this sense, it is worth bringing up the term “glocal” (JURIS, 2004, 347; HAMPTON, 2004, 226; WELLMAN, 2001, 236), which can be used to designate the at once global and local action mode of such movements, since a local action, as it enters the information flux of the communication networks, acquires the potential of global reach: a protest organized to take place in certain city can be replicated, from the sharing of sources and information – possibly in real time – in any part of the world.

All such factors brought together form, ultimately, an amalgam composed by the technological infrastructures, the data that travels in them and the people who use and feed them. The confluence of these elements constituted what Pierre Lévy defined as cyberspace:

Cyberspace (which I will also call “network”) is a new communication medium that emerges from the worldwide connection of computers. The term specifies not only the material infrastructure of digital communication, but also the human beings who navigate and feed this universe. (LÉVY, 1999, 17)

And as we remarked earlier, cyberspace establishes conditions that make room for new practices, values and ways of thinking – that, all together, we can define with the term culture. In this context,  the MariaLab project is illustrative. This is a feminist collective that seeks to rebuild and reappropriate the way in which we develop and interact with technological infrastructures. The following passage, taken from the primer Weaving Care Territories: a guide for the learning and construction of community networks, gives us a good example of how appropriation of a technique or of a technological infrastructure is manifested in culture and vice-versa:

There are guides that seek to work out all the phases [technique, governance, training]. Other materials separate the technical work from the educational or political work. This role division often reproduces gender roles so common in our society. Men configure the equipment and women take care of the learning process.

This split does not interest us. We are women and we want to talk with women, in all phases of the process, aware that technology is political. As feminists we deny that the different knowledges can be hierarchized in a way where ‘technology’ is reduced to digital technical knowledge in opposition to other processes. We do not believe, also, that the role of manipulating digital technologies belongs to men and that the roles of caring for the learning process, of articulation, of food and other technologies necessary to the implementation of a community network are necessarily feminine roles¹⁷.

In this excerpt, we notice how cyberspace sets up conditions for the culture where it is manifested to be confronted and reconfigured. The building and use of a technological infrastructure – a wi-fi community network – propitiates the conditions for the issues of machismo, gender inequality and arbitrary hierarchies to be challenged. Thus, simultaneously to cyberspace there is the set of practices and values that are developed alongside it, or better said, there is cyberculture, as defined by Lévy:

Regarding the neologism “cyberculture”, here it specifies a set of techniques (material and intellectual), of practices, of attitudes, of modes of thinking and of values that are developed together with the growth of cyberspace. (LÉVY, 1999, 17)

Following the same author, it is important to mention that cyberspace does not determine the culture or the society where it takes place, but only conditions it. Even if technique follows, translates and favors the developments of a civilization, it would be too much to state that a society is determined by the emergent form a specific culture. As exemplified by Lévy, the invention of spurs has given birth to a new mode of cavalry, which has driven feudalism’s political and social structures. However, this does not allow us to state that the invention of spurs is the cause of feudalism, despite the fact that, if spurs did not exist, it would be difficult to imagine how the knights in armor would ride their battle horses, how the cavalries would have been set up, how wars would have been conducted etc. A state of a social or cultural fact is fruit of a complex and “partially undetermined” process of interactions, which practically renders nonviable identification with a precise cause. Thus, we can say that  spurs indirectly condition feudalism, but do not determine it. That is, to state that technique conditions a certain social fact means to say that some possibilities could not “be taken seriously” if this technique didn’t exist, but this does not mean this fact would not exist if there wasn’t such technique; or, still, there are social facts that could have existed – given the possibilities opened by this technique – but that did not consolidate and we did not even imagine them (LÉVY, 1999, 25).

Following this reasoning, we can say with Castells that technology in itself does not play a determinant role in social transformations, however political and social autonomy, fundamental element for a social and cultural transformation, are related to the communicational autonomy rendered viable by the new communication technologies:

[T]echnology per se does not produce cultural and political change, although it does always have powerful effects of an indeterminate kind. Yet, the possibilities created by the new multimodal, interactive communication system extraordinarily reinforce the chances for new messages and new messengers to populate the communication networks of society at large, thus reprogramming the networks around their values, interests, and projects. In this sense, the construction of communicative autonomy is directly related to the development of social and political autonomy, a key factor in fostering social change. (CASTELLS, 2009, 414)

Next, we analyze separately a few open-source digital infrastructures that we have studied in the course of this research. Taking into account the classification proposed by Eghbal (2016, 46) with regards to how digital open-source infrastructures are organized and are funded, that is, considering the categories that she proposes: Within a company, As a new business and By individuals or a group of individuals, we can say that all the projects we investigated can be framed in the last classification.

A project within this category is characterized by being developed mostly by individual contributions, by featuring a decentralized work method and by been self-organized, devoided of strategies and explicitly defined and shared missions (LINDINGER, 2020, 5). And specifically in the case of the projects we investigated, most of them are developed within non-profit organizations (not directly related to the development of digital infrastructure, but to socioenvironmental causes), which at a certain point employ digital technologies to improve the carrying out of their aims.