Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

eng
c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
already given. The Media Hotspots that are a spin-off of this action beacon a path to
the democratization of communications.
We are thus on the horizon of a new creation of rights that is, at the same time,
a new way of generating rights: seizing culture as a productive, multiple movement,
the Cultural Hotspots foster cultural manifestations respecting its singularities.
However, without sharing a common base, the singularities lose their relational
dimensions and get reduced to individual fragments, which may be easily captured by
the market. No project-fostering policy, as horizontal as it may intend to be, will be radically
democratic if it is not supported by the construction of the rights of the commons:
we are not talking about a distant horizon, but of something that is already in progress.
Bolsa Família 13 as the embryo of a universal basic income program, along with the
new forms of intellectual property public rights — Copyleft, Creative Commons etc.
— already constitute the horizon for a universal protection of the work done by a multitude
of singularities which cooperate among each other, though remaining singular.
Let’s get back to the aforementioned episode of the forged invoices for workers of
the cultural field. When an individual worker creates a legal entity in order to issue regular
invoices, shamming a company that in fact does not exist, this is far from being just
another example of the Brazilian dialectic trickery spirit. It puts us rather at the heart
of a mechanism that allowed the construction of the public right to private property,
and of clashes that have involved since the beginning the “sovereignty” of the artwork.
Indeed, the recourse to fiction, meaning the passage from the imitation of nature
to the creation from scratch (ex nihilo), was a key moment to the affirmation of a
new legal solution: a fictitious person (persona ficta) that unfolds from the individual.
This fictitious person created from scratch will be endowed with a truth and a
life of its own, as a corporation or a company. The problem with which the practices
of forged invoices and informal, autonomous self-employment intend to cope is the
impossible separation of the contemporary worker’s person — whose paradigm is
the cognitive worker in the cultural field or in scientific research — in two subjects:
the natural subject of the worker, and the fictional subject of the company’s work.
Fiction cannot find a regime of truth, because a living work cannot be broken
— as it happened within the frameworks of salary relations and craft or liberal
professions — without losing its communicational, linguistic, and affective dynam-
13. Translator’s note: Bolsa Família (“family grant”) is a Brazilian conditional cash-transfer program.
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