Nhandeflix, a Guarani platform to fight against the colonization of global digital applications

When satellite internet arrived in 2021 in the Tenondé Porã Indigenous Territory, comprised of seven Guarani villages south of São Paulo, unforeseen side effects arose. Young people began to disengage from community activities. They stopped going to the prayer house (sanctuary) and participating in mutirões (collective actions). Instead, they spent their nights on their cell phones watching TikTok videos, compulsively playing Free Fire, or consuming pornography. While the internet facilitated the political organization of the Inter-Village Committee, which includes twenty-three villages from five indigenous reserves in southern São Paulo, it created more problems than it solved .

The village elders decided to disconnect the internet: they ripped out the cables. “The internet is a tool of abduction for Indigenous peoples, who are not used to it. They stop learning their cultural practices and fall prey to content that trivializes women, incites violence, and promotes alcohol. They start laughing at the misery of others in funny videos that circulate rapidly,” Jerá Guaraní, one of the leaders of the Tenondé Porã Indigenous Territory, told América Futura.

However, disconnecting the internet didn't solve the problems. Given the region's proximity to the São Paulo metropolitan area, the younger people would escape to find Wi-Fi connections . Sometimes, they would disappear for several days. “We started a series of conversations to find a collective way to deal with it. We made the older people understand that there was no going back, that the internet is like television, that it's here to stay. The younger people also understood that they couldn't immerse themselves in the networks like that, because it was going to destroy the Guarani way of life,” says Pedro Ekman, from the Intervozes collective, which collaborates on technological processes with the Inter-Village Committee.

Jerá Guaraní acknowledges that the internet has exacerbated the problems caused by cell phones. “Those who have cell phones stop understanding what others are saying, they waste a lot of time, and they even stop paying attention to their children, grandchildren, husband, or wife,” he explains. This is how the Nhandeflix platform was born: to strengthen their own culture and value what is happening in their territory.

The idea didn't come about automatically. Beforehand, Intervozes and Coolab designed a kind of partial internet block. With the help of a Raspberry Pi mini-computer and the Pi-hole blocking software, it became impossible to access pornographic or gambling sites from the villages. At the same time, platforms like YouTube and TikTok were blocked at night. “The main rule was to block everything, leaving messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram working. The problem is that young people circumvented this domain blocking with VPN (Virtual Private Network) services, which allow access from other IP addresses,” says Pedro Ekman.

In 2022, after several failed attempts, the idea arose to launch a Guarani content platform. “Nhandé” in Guarani means “we” or “ours.” It refers to “Nhanderekó,” the Guarani way of life. “To avoid being confined to a restrictive agenda, we proposed a kind of local content server. Each village has a mini-computer with a memory card containing movies, videos, audio, and even podcasts, all of which are accessible. In this way, we offer an alternative, a Guarani internet ,” explains Lucas Kesse of the Comitê Interaldeias (Inter-Village Committee) in the mini-documentary Nhandeflix.

Nhandeflix operates on a local intranet. It uses familiar protocols, but is barely accessible locally. Although the domain nhandeflix.com doesn't exist, it functions within the 23 villages that share access to the community website. It uses the Jellyfin program, whose interface is similar to Netflix, also on mobile phones. The initial content curation was done by the Inter-Village Committee. "Most of the content is already online, but nobody accesses it; the algorithm takes you to other sites, even if you're interested in those things," explains Pedro Ekman.

Thus, users find Guaraní cultural productions, such as Roda Cutia (a children's song in Guaraní), Bicicletas de Nhanderú (a documentary about a Guarani-Mbya village in southern Brazil), At the same time, it includes material from other ethnic groups, such as A Arca dos Zo'é (1993), about the historical encounter between the Waiãpi indigenous people and the Zo'é, in the Amazon. “In addition to documentaries and films about the lives of indigenous peoples and more healthy and educational things, we wanted to highlight content made in our own land,” says Jerá Guaraní. On Nhandeflix there is also content filmed in the villages of the region.

In the documentary Nhandeflix, the young Karai Tiago emphasizes during the platform's launch in a village that the main focus is "videos to raise awareness among young people," because "maintaining the Guarani way of life is a challenge." According to Lucas Kesse, the challenge lies not only in "the struggle for land and space, but also for control of time." Since Nhandeflix's launch, problems have arisen. For example, some families opted for fiber optic internet instead of the community satellite access. The accelerated pace and endless scrolling of global platforms are already seeping into many villages. Furthermore, storing content on memory cards proved cumbersome: they required frequent updates.

Therefore, the Inter-Village Committee is going to relaunch the service. They are also in talks with Intervozes to build their own site and even a data center. “The Guarani are thinking of putting everything they have in a community data center that they themselves manage. In general, all of this is a Guarani appropriation of technology. They say, we are not going to let technology destroy our world. We are going to appropriate it so that we can maintain our way of life,” says Pedro Ekman.

Nhandeflix isn't an entertainment project meant to compete with Netflix . It's about autonomy. And what Jerá Guaraní and Lucas Keese call Technologies of Sufficiency. Technologies that establish a different value system, one that transcends "excess that makes you sick," unchecked accumulation, and the consumerist spectacle: "We don't want to live like social media showcases. We want to live like roots in the earth."

Bernardo Gutiérrez, El Pais, Spain