Agentic Bricoleur
Definition
Alessandro Longo:
"A maker who builds software by recombining materials already at hand (other people’s games, code, examples) with the help of an AI agent. The figure extends Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur to agentic coding: it gains a new capacity to make, while depending on proprietary infrastructures it does not control."
(https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-58-mods-of-production?)
Description
Alessandro Longo:
"The Agentic Bricoleur I’m summoning in this piece moves at this economic height: never able to set the market’s terms, but working in its interstices to capture local value.
Arvidsson, however, is the first to warn that this middle layer is never immune to capture. Capital accumulation, he argues, increasingly depends on the ability to control a multitude of industrious actors who remain formally independent of the corporations that profit from them. Digital capitalism achieves this through “a combination of mass industriousness and top–down despotic control”.
His clearest example lies near Liangzhu. The “Taobao villages” are rural communities that turned into networks of small enterprises by selling through Taobao, the e-commerce platform of Alibaba, and in his account they generated 37 million jobs. Each villager owns their shop, but it is Alibaba that owns the marketplace, sets its rules and collects its data, and even regulates access to microcredit for small businesses depending on scores calculated from their online behaviour. Silvia Lindtner’s Prototype Nation tells a similar story of how the Chinese state captured the maker movement born in Shenzhen in the late 2000s.
In this dialectic between capitalist centralisation and its lines of flight, what matters most for Arvidsson is the creation, or liberation, of new commons.
All the Agentic Bricoleurs we presented are slowly but certainly producing a commons of this kind: code, templates, tutorials, reverse-engineering techniques, in the form of examples that circulate from one bricoleur to the next. But the commons cannot stop at the software produced through these networks. The substrate on which this production runs is itself part of the political question."
(https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-58-mods-of-production?)
Discussion
< " The Agentic Bricoleurs have learned to mod the products. The question is whether they can mod the infrastructure that produces them. " >
Alessandro Longo:
"The alternatives, however, exist. Agentic Bricoleurs can run open-weight models on hardware they own, groups can pool GPUs instead of renting cloud compute, and communities can maintain their own knowledge bases, model weights and templates. None of these infrastructures will necessarily match the scale or performance of the proprietary frontier. But this is not the point. Each of these choices changes where value accumulates: whether it flows upward as rent, or remains partly within the networks that produce it.
This is perhaps the most important contradiction of the Agentic Bricoleur. The same technology that makes software production more distributed can make its underlying infrastructure more concentrated. China, and Liangzhu in particular, offers a glimpse of both possibilities at once: a culture of small-scale, situated software production emerging inside an infrastructural environment that remains highly centralised.
Whether on Chasm’s Discord server or in Liangzhu, their networks are today a little of both: bazaars where people build what no publisher would have licensed, and workhouses where they rehearse their dependence on a few providers."
(https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-58-mods-of-production?)