PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil -- On the opening night of the World Social Forum (WSF) last month, Gilberto Gil, musician-turned-Brazilian-cultural-minister, stood backstage, waiting patiently for his turn to play to the crowded exposition field.
It was very much in the democratic and chaotic spirit of the occasion, which ran from January 26-31 (the fifth edition of the world's largest social gathering of academics, environmentalists, union leaders, economists, and all forms of activists), that he had to wait an hour and a half, long after the sun set, while a group of Indian performance artists stayed on stage well past their allotted time.
When Gil finally stood in the spotlight, alone with his acoustic guitar, it seemed to me that his performance echoed the mood of the forum. He sang intensely optimistic songs, but his delivery was nuanced; never had I heard such a bittersweet version of “Imagine,” and his phrasing of Bob Marley's “Don't Worry, Be Happy” was so qualified that it seemed as if, mentally, the musician was crossing his fingers: “Everything is going to be alright … .”
Two years earlier, euphoria reigned. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva -- the populist (some say merely popular) metalworker candidate from the Workers Party -- had just been elected president of Brazil, and anti-war activists, gathered from around the world, were sure they could stop the war in Iraq. But now, in 2005, Lula's popularity has fallen, and each day the war in Iraq resembles more and more a Vietnam-like quagmire.
Lula showed up, as he did in 2003, to address, unofficially, the WSF (it is forum policy not to allow or invite politicians). Tens of thousands greeted him, wearing “100-percent Lula” T-shirts. But Lula is no longer the untarnished hero, the star of the progressive universe. Instead, he defended his policies, and some opponents booed when he promised to take the forum's message to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the annual meeting of the world's elite politicians and corporate leaders, taking place simultaneously in Davos, Switzerland. That message: The world cannot, must not, be judged and run only in terms of economics, and that -- as the forum's motto goes -- “Another World Is Possible.”
The WSF, which started as a rebuttal to the WEF, is today an intellectual's Woodstock, a marketplace of ideas (or, according to detractors, a “market of ideology,”) where French and Italian sociologists rub shoulders with Brazilian landless peasants, and Washington economists compare notes with Latin American environmentalists on ways to stop the steady march of soy fields in the Amazon and the Pantanal, the world's largest wetland system.
In five years the forum has grown from a hastily put together event, attended by several thousand activists, to an international gathering, attracting 155,000 participants from 135 countries, who attended more than 2,500 workshops and scheduled meetings. While the forum's “elite” -- including representatives from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, here for the first time -- stayed at the Plaza Hotel in the city center, students, landless farmers, and others roughed it in the sprawling “Youth Camp,” a tent city housing 35,000
The forum has also grown in stature. The international press routinely covers it, and front-page stories appear in China, India, and Latin America. It is a measure of the WSF's impact that some of the demands made for the inclusion of social and human capital have been addressed at the WEF, and some Western countries are seriously talking about debt forgiveness, a perennial topic in Porto Alegre. And just as the WSF announced that its next major site (in 2007) would be Africa, the WEF declared that Africa had to be the next major topic for consideration.
Organizers attempted to shape the chaos by dividing programming into 11 “terrains,” such as diversity, social justice, and human rights (the largest of all). Some workshops were on heady topics, such as “Atomtech: Technologies Converging at the Nano-scale.” Some were more topical, such as one on tsunamis and tourism. Others, meanwhile, were earthy: The Brazilian Center for the Studies of Prostitution sponsored a workshop, as did a soccer team, an event I came to know about thanks to close encounters with some of the team members, wearing bright red shorts and team shirts, who used our hotel's hallway to practice goal kicks.
Jeff Furman of the Ben & Jerry's Foundation said he “appreciates the chaos.” “I just take the fliers people are passing out,” he explained. “That way I know that the workshops will happen.” Of consequence, Furman met two women who'd ridden 60 hours on a bus to discuss day care, and he attended one workshop on water-rights disputes in Bolivia (“Who knows from our newspapers what's happening there?”).
In fact, there was a flood of talk about water -- the government of Uruguay, in fact, declared water a human right. At a press conference with Brazilian Minister of Environment Marina Silva, one reporter said: “It's clear that after the oil wars in Iraq, the water wars will be next. What are your plans? Are you worried?”
Luminaries and would-be luminaries flock to the WSF to broaden their base and push their agenda. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was the year's rock star, thanks in part to his program of rededicating his nation's oil profits to the poor.
John Perkins, author of the best-selling Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, was also in the lineup. In khakis and polo shirt, he looked like a relaxed chief economist -- exactly what he was when he worked, first for the National Security Agency and later for the consulting firm Charles T. Main in Boston. At a forum titled “What Next in Economics?” Perkins gave insights into the workings of “corporatocracy.” "Out of the 100 largest economies, 52 are corporations," he said. As for “What Next?” he suggested that the world is in the “time of prophecies, when we should open ourselves to new levels of consciousness.” Later, I read on Perkins' Web site that the man -- who in his book admits to having acted as a “pimp” by obtaining blondes to keep the interest of a Saudi prince/client -- will be giving talks in the United States on “shape shifting.”
One of the most coherent and dedicated stars in the six-day search for “another world” was Gil, who is challenging Bill Gates and the media giants with a progressive agenda that directly challenges corporate dominance in various areas of culture, including music, film, and, perhaps most important, digital technology.
Over a cup of coffee, Claudio Prado, the culture minister's digital-policy coordinator, told me that Gil works 15 hours a day. “He hasn't had time to record one song since he became minister,” said Prado, who first met Gil in London in the '60s during the singer's political exile. Prado is overseeing Brazil's switch to open-source software. The Brazilian government is, in fact, the first to use open-source software (as opposed to Microsoft), a move followed by China, India, Japan, and France. Brazil is also in the course of creating 1,000 free digital centers, where citizens will be able to learn about and access the Internet, an important step in bridging the digital divide. And Gil, like other artists, is donating some songs to be downloaded, free of charge, to a Web site called Cantolivre.
Free software and digital access, Prado contends, is “the most subversive alternative to the consumer world.” Gil told me that he thinks it marks a “change in the concept of civilization from what we have today -- in how things are produced and broadcast, disseminated. In the long term, it will be about equality.”
The effects of the movement are not lost on digital mogul Gates, who made an appointment to meet directly with Lula in Davos. (Earlier, Gates had sued a Brazilian government official who'd compared Microsoft's marketing of [MISSING WORD] to the drug industry's dependence strategy -- a suit he dropped after Internet bloggers posted speeches made by Gates using that very analogy.)
Nor are they lost on digital gurus like Lawrence Lessig, creator of Creative Commons and a law professor at Stanford University, and John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of Electronic Frontiers Foundation, who braved a blizzard to fly down to speak on a panel with Gil and others about the importance of the free-software movement. (Meantime, at the WEF, Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab made news, showing a mock-up of a $100 laptop, which would go a long way toward bridging the digital divide and ending the corporate stranglehold.)
Over lunch, Lessig, Barlow, and Prado made it clear that they see open-source software and the digitalization of knowledge as the most revolutionary movement in the world. “It offers the chance to eliminate the intermediaries,” said Prado. Lessig added, “Digital economy is one of verbs, not nouns” -- one in which services and expertise generate more wealth than hard goods. (In fact, software sales account for less than 10 percent of Microsoft's profit; the rest comes from service to companies and individuals using that software -- something that Gates doesn't mention when he states that by using Linux and other free, open-source software, consumers ultimately spend more in service.)
On the last day of the forum, Gil joined a panel with Lessig, Barlow, the Mexican sociologist Manuel Costells, and others, and delivered a written speech with simple grace and passion, underscoring the need for digital inclusion. “I am making a positive attempt to understand complexity,” he said. “I'm a minister; I'm a musician; I'm a hacker, in spirit and in my heart.” The battle in technology, and economic and social life (along with the battle for cultural diversity), he added, “is the most important battle of our time.” The standing-room-only crowd of programmers cheered. “It is my first action as minister of culture to expand the space for invention and creation.”
Suzanne Charlé is TK.
