Documents from Gilberto Gil's Private Archive

ur-geek father of free software himself: Richard Stallman. Stallman, flanked by Sarney and ranking emissaries of the Lula administration addressed the assembled dignitaries - including Gil - in his stocking feet. Later that week he donned a robe and a halo made out of a compact disc and declared himself "Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs" - a gag that usually slays at more hacker-friendly events but no doubt lost something in translation at this one. If Stallman thought he was going to be the most provocative speaker at the event, he wasn't counting on Gil, whose own speech traced the origins of open source software and digital culture generally to LSD. "What I said," Gil remembers, was that this whole process that led to the com- puter, to the personal computer, to Silicon Brazil led the way. The open source alliance now includes tiny nations like India, South Africa, and China. Valley, this extraordinary degree of cogni- tion that arose from the intersection of math and design and the crystallographic struc- tures of quartz was made possible by acid trips." He laughs. "Or not only by acid trips but without the slightest doubt empowered by them. this intelligence-empowering tool that is the digital world." The goal is not a uniquely Brazilian one, as other developing nations are starting to recognize. Already the outlines of an inter- national open source alliance - a coalition of the penguin, if you will have begun to emerge. India, for instance, is mustering a political commitment to free software that Stallman himself has declared second only to Brazil's. And at the last UN World Summit on the Information Society, Brazil led a bloc including India, South Africa, and China that thwarted an attempt by the US and its allies to harden the UN's line on intellectual prop- erty rights, insisting that the final confer- ence document recognize just as strongly the cultural and economic importance of shared knowledge. A small victory certainly, and maybe only "And Stallman was like, Wait a minute there, that's not quite the way it went," Gil recalls. "It freaked him a little to think I was associating the free software movement with the movement to legalize drugs." But in fact, that wasn't quite link Gil was making. He was suggesting that the free software movement and the '60s counterculture had a shared goal of trans- forming culture from the inside out. Gil talks a little crazy, sure, but he's no fool. Tropicalization, for all its truck with canni- balism, subversion, and rock guitars, is ultimately for Gil "the margins of Brazilian society getting access to the digital world. The creative impulses of the people getting access to the digital world. The repressed intelligence of the Brazilian poor, of the Brazilian middle class, getting access to a symbolic one. But the countries that fight against it ignore the message at their peril. Developing nations, poor in IP rights and in the muscle to enforce them, may have a vested interest in the success of the open source paradigm. But so, in the long run, do rich nations. The rate of technological change now is such that modernization pro- ceeds more chaotically than ever, and with every flip of the clock cycle, the whole world's reality looks more and more like Brazil's: a high-contrast, high-contact confu- sion of microcultures and inequalities. What Gil has learned from that reality is the same thing any country looking for an edge in the coming century might do well to learn: You do yourself no good by trying to control the confusion. You grow, instead, by letting it in. You open the cultural conversation to all comers. You loosen the reins on technical and scientific knowledge and let it wander, from the university to the slum and back. You build your songs out of whatever washes up on shore and then you throw them out to sea again to see what somebody else makes of them. You tropicalize. 16 Matmos/ Action at a Distance Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt have used ounds iposuction surgery, the pages of a Bible turning, and amplified crayfish nerve signals in their left-field compositions. Daniel even built one song out of hundreds of unlicensed snippets of recordings by by popular R&B vocalists, tweaking and and distorting the syrupy melisma into challenging sound art. "The reflexive lameness of mass cultural products becomes painfully obvious once you torque or twist the surface content even a little bit," says Daniel, who - you guessed it - is also a grad student in Renaissance liter- ature at UC Berkeley. "The expense of clearing samples is keeping some really good music from being heard," he says. "It's watering down pop music." - A.D. --- (-Acknowledgements Wired thanks Lawrence Lessig, Glenn Otis Brown, and Neeru Paharia at Creative Commons; David Whitehead; Darren Hill: Vickie Starr, Katie Hawbaker, Steve Martin; John Silva, Mike Martinovich: Kalani Tifford, Keryn Kaplan, Tom Sarig: T. Takahashi; Ricky Domen; Julian Dibbell, Yale Evelev, Hermano Vianna Dan Gill; Franz Fleischli, Gary Gersh; Paulo Andra; Ronaldo Lemos, Claudio Prado, Toni Isabella; Tony Margherita Management, Colin Guthrie; Michael Anderson; Joi Ito; Brian Hardgroove; Jeff Antebi and Waxploitation, John Perry Barlow, Hilary Rosen; Matt Donner, Marc Hawthome; and, of course, the Wired CO artists.