Ribeirão da Paciência

For the writing of this piece we walked along the Ribeirão da Paciência, patience river, one of the main rivers in our neighborhood. We literally walked in the river, got our feet wet, hydrated our ideas. We walked in search of the intersections of our two commons: the water and the internet, in the small scale in which they present themselves in our surroundings. By commons we mean what belongs at the same time to everyone and to no one.

Commons are shared resources that everyone needs. Without them life would be impossible. We have always needed water for drinking, cleaning, cooking, irrigation, power generation, and many other purposes. The internet, on the other hand, is only a resource declared a basic human right by UNESCO in 2016, so we wonder: Is it as fundamental as water to our survival?

We are in Monteiro Lobato, in the Serra da Mantiqueira, a mountain range in southeastern Brazil known for its waters, as its Indigenous name implies: Mantiqueira, amana (rain) and tykyra (drop)

What follows is our reflections about the path of water and information.