Bricolaging
Description
Antonio Blanco-Gracia:
"The figure of bricoleur was introduced to cyberpunk fans by Bruce Sterling (1989). In contrast with the engineer mind, who plans materials, tools, and the precise sequence of steps needed for a project, the rules of the bricoleur mind “are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’” (Lévi-Strauss, 1968), which is never subject aprioristically to a specific purpose or project. When Lévi-Strauss made this distinction in his ironically named book “The Savage Mind”, it was to point out that those “are two distinct modes of scientific thought” that “are certainly not a function of different stages of development of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific inquiry” (Lévi-Strauss, 1968:15). As we have seen before, ethics centered on doing will not focus primarily on the powerful building of “abstractions on abstractions” (Fele, 2012) of the engineer mind - that is ready to defer doing in time until all the conditions for what is planned are met -, but they will focus on doing here and now. Bricolaging is “the science of the concrete” because it is “impossible to separate [solutions] from the situations in which they appeared” (Lévi-Strauss,1968: 31).Cyberpunks, hackers, and free culture activists in general, have seen in knowledge and opensource software the paradigm that has to be translated to the rest of social, economic and political realms of our society. Open knowledge is abundant because the marginal cost of sharing it is now close to zero. Knowledge behind paywalls is just a way of creating artificial scarcity in order to seek rents. It is also generative, because anyone can build her own knowledge upon it without restrictions. Knowledge that cannot be freely used and remixed is like those genetically modified Monsanto seeds that cannot reproduce themselves, so youh ave to buy them again. And this is a product of the bricoleur because knowledge and source code is used and remixed in order to create more knowledge and source code. Because technological progress makes this shift possible, it is only a matter of making a new economic system grow “like a creeper; not like a tree”, with a different organization of work and life."