Repair spaces and technological cannibalism in Bogota, the Athens of South America

Repair spaces and technological cannibalism in Bogota, the Athens of South America.

Institute of Communication Research

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In January 2016, the first security meeting of re-elected mayor of Bogota, Enrique Peñalosa, focused on fighting cell phone robbery in Bogota. In an event covered by local media, Peñalosa walked in the streets of San Victorino, a downtown neighborhood in Bogota to visit the “Persian” markets where stolen mobile phones were sold. The police targeted repair shops arguing that there were proofs of their link with transnational networks of stolen mobile phone trafficking. While some arguments stressed the manipulation, and reprogramming that took place in these businesses, it was also a new opportunity to present this zone of the city as an anarchist and uncontrollable space. However, the role of San Victorino, as many other repair spaces in the city, has been central to the process of making Bogota a global and connected city. Repair and maintenance spaces had a key role in allowing low-income populations to join the so-called information society in Colombia, as in any other global south countries (Qiu, 2009).

In this paper, I want to focus on the history of repair shops in Bogota, as a way to complicate histories of technology leaded by innovation (Edgerton, 2007). As making and tinkering are becoming popular as a practice that encourage innovation, I want to consider how this framing intersect former practices I have found in the history of Bogota, Colombia. By focusing, on technological cannibalism (Thomas, 1995) I want to stress the level of risk and illegality in which some of these repair shops exist in Latin American cities. However, I also want to explore this network of repair as an adaptable network to changes in urban life, driven by economic policies and new legalities towards technology. (Philip, 2005)

Historicizing repair practices in Latin America

What I want to continue from this approach, is the role of historical research to trace longer genealogies and forces shaping practices of hacking, tinkering and repair. As Honghong Tinn (2011) has shown in the constitution of computing in Taiwan, tinkering and repair had been central to the developmental aspirations in this country. In that way, I want to rely in the concept of “surdesarrollo” (South-development) coined by Argentinian scholar Hernan Thomas(Thomas), and his work on theorizing technological innovation in Latin America. Thomas defines Surdesarrollo as a technological development model, in which we can verify “late” industrialization processes, characterized by a dominant and generalized presence of technological recycling and non-authorized copy. (Thomas, 1995, p. 59).

Historically, Thomas goes into Latin American process of industrialization, and the role of technological recycling practices as necessary to launch a nationalist model of economic development. Technological recycling also defined multiple practices from adaptations to reverse engineering. Among these practices, Thomas named technological cannibalism, practices where “sometimes the “technician” modifies the piece to adapt it to another model” (Thomas, 1995, p. 75). However, such transformations have legal implications.

Colombia is well known for its nation-building project between legitimacy and violence (Palacios, 2006). The peace process signed a few months ago, symbolize a step in ending an internal war that dates the 1950’s. In such framework, it has been clear that local histories of technology have privileged a legitimate narration of innovation, in which illegality is avoided. However, Colombian sociologist Yuri Jack Gomez (2013) has called to consider technological innovation in informal and illegal productive chains. As Gomez states, this is a taboo in Colombian society, as it has connections with anti-drug trafficking policies (p. 435). While we should recognize the relevance of this approach, it will be also necessary to consider the legal/illegal divide under a critical lens. Moreover, from an ethnographical standpoint, it must be necessary to examine daily interactions and relationship is which actors “legitimize a lifestyle and modes of work” that states “criminalize as illegal, and often immoral”. (Galemba, 2012)

Such attention is special in Hernan Thomas’ definition of technological Cannibalism. Cannibalization for Thomas, extends in Latin America in such grade that it explains some criminal acts cars robbery, and the emergence of some commercial branch: los “desarmaderos” (a place for dismantling) and the business of “repaired” spare parts. (Coming from stolen cars as from damaged parts repair)” (Thomas, 1995, p. 75). At this point is relevant to say that the everydayness of repair is disrupted by media coverage of urban delinquency. Although I have been working on a recent event related with stolen cell phones, in my archival research I found stories about these spaces in the 1980’s in relation with cars. Such is the case of this “Transplant Clinic” located in the northwestern side of Bogota, and in which a great number of car repair shops are located. In this space, automobiles were “disguised” with parts interchangeable to make it impossible to identify them. Moreover, according to the journalist, this locale was the center of an extensive network with connections to main cities in Colombia.

These networks of interchangeable parts have captured my attention, especially as a unit of analysis of media as a technology. Mostly, because several experiences of repair and invention, from technological recycling to cannibalism, understood such devices as an assemblage of parts. Moreover, this circulation of electronic parts, connected with the Caribbean and more recently with the Pacific market, exist but has been irrelevant when discussing consumer electronics consumption. Some of the commodities and knowledge that circulate here, are part of the routes, nodes and channel that anthropologist Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (2012) had stablished as one of the level to understand processes of “globalization from below”. As such, as I’m interested in the role of repair shop in Bogota, I believe that such network approach is also necessary to understand, not only transnational, but also local and regional circulations and articulation of repair practices in Bogota.

In such networks, practices of technological cannibalism represent an historical ambiguity. Cannibalism, as stated by Jauregui, has been a fundamental trope in defining Latin American culture, from the first European visions of the monstrous and savage to narratives in which the cannibal has been redefined in relationship with postcolonial and postmodern identities. (Jáuregui, 2008). As such, Jauregui urge us to consider the material and exploitation relations which overdetermined such trope. Are technological cannibalism practices exclusive to industrialization, or does are they attached to class distinction between manual and intellectual labor? Are considering it as the stigma of savagery and the barbarism of the New World or, from the post of view of antropofogia cultural movement in Brazil, as cultural appropriation? Again, I want to consider Cannibal when talking about tinkering practices, especially to recognize the role of media repair in context of scarcity, in a different framework where one of the affordance of technological devices is to be repairable.

Conclusion

In my research, I want addressed how while some of the hacking and tinkering practices are sponsored by the Colombian government, some other have been historically relegated and more importantly, put under new regimes of technolegality (Philip, 2005). If maker cultures are a possibility in countries like Colombia, I want to know how they encounter with these networks that precede current hacking practices in Bogota. Moreover, to trace the geographies of innovation, with an eye in how repair practices have been central to the global aspirations of the city. As we travel through Bogota, such spaces of repair reveal histories of class, technology and consumption that must be linked to a possible technological future.

References

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