Diego Fagundes da Silva and Erica Azevedo da Costa e Mattos
This paper contrasts the concept of innovation as it has been assimilated by the liberal capitalist discourse, built on the figure of the individual entrepreneur and currently reflected in the heroic image of the maker, to the process which we call emergent collective creativity, that can arise from complex organisation systems such as seen in hackerspaces. This process was observed within a particular Brazilian hackerspace through the techno-political action called “Revolta da Antena” (or The Antenna Uprising), which unfolded in a particular context of popular mobilisations that occupied the streets in 2013. That experience is now revisited in this paper ten years later as a starting point for a reflection on the relevance of the principles inherent in the hacker ethos and as an invitation to think about the future of our relationship with technology and control systems. Both the hackerspace organisation—composed of human and non-human elements—and this action catalysed by it will be presented from a systemic standpoint using concepts and tools provided by the fields of cybernetics and complexity theory, associating both phenomena to what has been defined as the edge of chaos.
KEYWORDS: systemic innovation, hackerspaces, cybernetics, complex systems, social systems
RSD TOPIC(S): Cases & Practice, Society & Culture, Sociotechnical Systems