Genealogies and Contradictions of Digital Cultures

How is the authority of a manifesto in defense of the Internet constructed?

Questions such as the following have often been posed, completely reasonably, it seems to me: Who excavates the minerals necessary to build the machines that make the ‘New Technologies of Information and Communication’ (NTIC) possible? Who gives up their health and dreams to work impossible hours for ridiculous pay to assemble the pieces of those computers and cellphones? And who spends their life cleaning rooms, washing clothes, feeding, and caring for the ‘creative workers’ (and their children) who use the NTICs?

With all due respect for the differences, which are many, these questions resonate with others that perhaps allude to similar situations, in a sense that must be determined: who finds the time to write and correct the thousands of entries in Wikipedia? Who spends their nights subtitling the films and series that circulate in P2P networks? Who spends their free time responding to strangers’ questions in Internet forums? And who takes on—without being asked—the mission of producing, labeling, ordering, distributing, and making attractive all the uncountable, anonymous, accessible content on the Internet so others can use it?

Let's take, for example, a 9.5-byte file, a pdf document called ‘Manifiesto en defensa de los derechos fundamentales en Internet.’ No matter how almost irrelevantly small it might be, just like any other fragment of digital information, it wouldn't exist without a series of material processes dedicated to it through the limited abilities and finite energy of a few human beings. Many people today have easy access to writing or reading a text file like this one. But the apparent immediacy and ease with which they do it tends to obscure some of its conditions of production—in particular, everything related to building the hardware and the minimum quality of life requirements that will enable us to read it and write about it. But it's also true that another type of condition, which in some sense can also be considered one of production (particularly related to the file's circulation and reception), far from being concealed, becomes especially necessary and obvious, especially in cases of information that generates a lot of interest, like this file.