In a world where the digital environment is ubiquitous, the interaction between technology and social, economic, and political dynamics reveals complexities that go well beyond everyday use. Although technologies such as mobile phones and the Internet connect us through a shared sense of global citizenship, their impact on our coexistence is still poorly understood.

The “Paquete Semanal” embodies that very complexity: an informal network that each week moves close to a terabyte of films, series, music, software, and apps across Cuba on hard drives and USB sticks, sidestepping the country’s official Internet restrictions. Orchestrated by casas matrices and paqueteros who download, catalogue, and deliver the content door-to-door, the system turns infrastructural scarcity into a choreography of popular cooperation. In doing so, it shows how cultural sovereignty can be sustained from below, displacing the hegemony of global platforms and re-imagining the relationship between technology and community.

Local cultural dynamics and networks of solidarity create meeting points with technologies that answer more to communal values than to market logic. In these spaces, informal circulation of digital content and creative use of offline resources coexist with practices of mutual care, knowledge exchange, and open experimentation; together they shape how technology is used and understood. At the same time, the democratisation of hardware and software—open code, free licences, low-cost kits—opens cracks through which “alternative” solutions emerge that are often more relevant than the hegemonic devices and platforms produced in Silicon Valley. Scarcity thus ceases to be merely a lack of resources and becomes an opportunity to test technological models rooted in cultural diversity—models that privilege accessibility, social justice, and community resilience over profitability and global scale.

In this body of work I investigate local phenomena and their dynamics, analysing how they reconfigure the material and symbolic conditions that shape contemporary technology as an agent of cultural transformation and resilience. By intertwining the symbolic and material facets of the digital era, these practices question hegemonic narratives of technological development and foster a critical gaze at the tension between technology and society.