Words are not only signs but tools for shaping the world: they let us name what we feel, articulate what we see, imagine what does not yet exist. In the technical universe, many words also name processes of everyday life — and it is in this encounter between technical and political language that this invitation is born.
Take the old familiar word resistance. To resist capital, colonization, erasure, extraction: to resist is a verb of survival. But in electronics, resistance sits between currents and voltages. While it is true that resisting saves lives, the resistor — the component that resists — deteriorates under the sheer effort of turning current into heat. The Joule effect does not forgive: the more intense the passage of energy, the more the resistor wears down until it breaks.
From the resistor to the transistor: a cognitive turn
A thought experiment with another electronic component, the transistor, leads us to the idea of transistence. Unlike resistance, which is a quantity of the resistor, transistence is not a quantity of the transistor: it is a critical appropriation of a technical concept, capable of inspiring a more elaborate collective behavior — a form of existence that does not merely oppose what oppresses, but also modulates, transforms and redirects the forces that cross us.
Invented in 1947, the transistor replaced bulky vacuum tubes and sits at the heart of every computer, phone and network. While the resistor resists the current, the transistor shapes it: it amplifies a weak signal, acts as a switch, controls large flows of energy with minimal input. And more than that, it does not burn out as current passes through — it transfers resistance, amplifies and redirects energy. The transistor behaves as an intelligent gate, a node of transformation: it allows a weak signal to command a powerful flow.
For a long time, our struggles have been thought of as resistance. But if we return to this encounter between languages — the technical and the political, the electronic and the everyday — staying only in resistance mode no longer seems viable. Hence transistence: no longer a posture of pure opposition, but active transresistance. Not a fixed “no”, but a “how?” and a “toward where?”, in unavoidable movement. Not a body that opposes until it exhausts itself, but a body that lets itself be crossed in order to reconfigure the field.
Transisting the machine that crosses us
Our bodies, minds and relations are already technical-biological hybrids. The machine is no longer “out there”: it already inhabits our cognition. Faced with the inevitable, there are two paths: using the machine as a nebulizer of our thought and perception — reactive, scattered, available at all times in the messaging app — or using it as a lens, once again, like Galileo, to make the world sharper.
The transistor has a base that needs a resistor polarizing it: as if that polarization directed it in its mission within the circuit. Just as in an electronic circuit, movements of transistence need to be polarized by movements of resistance in order to shape the machine that crosses us.
Transistence manifests in the digital quilombos weaving their own communication infrastructures; in community networks building their own infrastructure; in feminist technology collectives reprogramming desire outside the logic of extraction; in indigenous movements developing their own local servers for the demarcation of screens; in agroforests healing soil and spirit at the same time.
The urgency this dialogue reveals is learning to read the sciences that cross us — not to become engineers of the system, but technicians of transformation. The better we understand the principles governing the machines that inhabit our everyday life, the more we can dismantle their oppressive logics and reprogram their meanings. Transistence is born from this encounter: between technical knowledge and collective desire, between the physics of semiconductors and the poetics of organizing.
Where transistence already happens
This turn is not merely theoretical: it already happens in territories where technology stops being imposed and becomes co-created. In the SEMEA-TEC extension project, with family farming communities, we develop low-consumption communication devices running on solar batteries or energy harvested from the environment: sensors that warn, over LoRa radio, when an electric fence has been broken by wild boars, or when an irrigation tank level is critical. These devices do not need the cloud, do not collect data to sell, do not demand monthly updates. They are built with accessible components, assembled together with farmers, in workshops that mix technical and popular knowledge.
It is in this gesture of designing technologies that serve life, not profit, that transistence becomes concrete. While the commercial model extracts energy, data and attention to feed global value chains, these practices relocalize innovation, making it energetically frugal, socially useful and cognitively clear. This is not about refusing science, but reorienting it: instead of a science that serves capital, a science that serves territories.
And in this movement, the transistor stops being merely a component and becomes a symbol of what is possible when technology is made with, not for.
This text is a version of the essay Um Convite à Transistência (An Invitation to Transistence), published in TOCAIA magazine #1, and gives its name to Transistir Social Tech.