Another sketchy, and somewhat hastily assembled, audio essay. It is now a year since I returned to Europe in the midst of the lockdown in Berlin. To mark my ‘corona aniversário’ I dig into some of the issues surrounding the stalled development of the patent-free ‘Linux Vaccine’ by a co-hort of university-based researchers in Helsinki and as discussed in this thought-provoking article by Ilari Kaila and Joona-Hermanni Mäkinen published in Jacobin in February. The ‘Great Vaccine Race’ provides an entry point to think about some of the issues raised by sociologist and design theorist Benjamin H. Bratton, in his recent call ‘For Planetary Governance’, taking into account anticolonial perspectives…which leads us to the Zapatistas who are sailing to Europe this summer! Also Schools for Chiapas are collecting funds to support the Zapatista’s mobile plant medicine initiative, El Vivero Muy Otro– Medicine for our Bodies; Medicine for the Earth.

Links to music, media and resources used in the program are below.
GNU mascot illustration by Etienne Suvasa circa 1996.