Part Four: Autistici/Inventati and the Fight for the Autonomous Internet

0:02 Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that there's always good things and bad things happening, and they all work together, and the fight against them is the engine with which the world moves forward. I'm your host, Margaret Kildroy, and this is part four of a four-parter. about Autistici Inventati, the group that has so lately been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.

0:30 Government. But I think you can think for yourself about whether or not the people I'm going to describe meet the level of terrorist. But I can just also give you a spoiler that they don't. It is completely fucking absurd to call them that. In part one, we covered terrorist designations. In part two, I told you the early-ish history of Italy and of the years of lead, showing you just how tumultuous a country it was. You know, in America, I think there's like a conception of Italy just as like a pretty city where people drive around scooters and go ciao if you listen to old stand-up comedy, right?

1:12 And It's like similar how people are like, oh, the French, whatever. And then you're like, those people riot all the time and actually throw down really hard. And Italy is actually a really complicated and interesting place. In part three, we talked about the rise of hacker culture and autonomous spaces in Italy and the death of Carlo Giuliani in Genoa.

1:33 But there's still so much more to know about Italian hackers. In the 1990s, You had BBSs, bulletin board systems, which were little micro internets you had to get your computer dial into. This is immediately before my time. And there were some political ones in Italy. There was zero BBS with an exclamation mark that's part of the name. And it was based in Turin. And the server physically lived in the space of a people's radio station for a while.

2:01 And radical BBSs were joined in a network, the European Counter Network, that worked to unite the European people. antagonist movement, aka the rowdy left, I suppose you could call it. But ECN was actually, I believe, mostly in Italy. Then there were parallel networks that more focused on countercultural art and the cyberpunk movement. These movements are full of people who are like, fuck yeah, I'm a gay punk anarchist, piracy fucking rules. Both of these movements, the countercultural art one and the more political one, right? People weren't afraid of being pretty cool and willing to identify in various ways one manifesto of the antagonistic cyberpunks was called digital gorilla which came out in 1995 and i think whoever

2:49 wrote it it did a lot of good for the world because digital gorilla taught that the way to spread this movement this like you know cyberpunk movement was to provide access to hacking tools to people who didn't even own computers It taught that InfoShops should also be computer labs and that materials about all this stuff should be printed and distributed on paper to make it more accessible.

3:17 Another book that folks loved was called Kryptonite, which was about how to use cryptography to avoid the social control that the internet was capable of producing. And spoiler alert, is in the process of producing really intensely right now. And on these BBSs, they decided to meet up in person. throwing the first hack meeting at a social center in Florence in 1998. Everyone met one another in person, often for the first time. I actually wonder whether it was BBSs they met up at that point or whether it was IRC, Internet Relay Chat. I'm not actually sure. I think that it might have been networks that started off as BBSs that moved to a more regular Internet structure by then. Or maybe they held on to BBSs a

3:58 little bit longer than a lot of other people. Anyway, they met up in person... And I think this gets at what can be good about the internet and organizing over the internet. It can be a good way to get to know people for the purpose of doing shit in person. In-person organizing is key to the success of movements, especially now. But online is super useful when it supports rather than supplants in-person connections. And so they started meeting every year in different Italian cities. Florence, Milan, Rome, then Catania in Sicily. And I don't know if they still go on, but they certainly went on for at least a decade or so longer than this. And over the course of those meetings, some groups started forming. They started

4:45 finding shape. People getting together and talking about what they want to do is a good way to get together and find out what to do. They talked about how they needed hack labs. They needed to teach people this shit. And I just want to underline how radical this is. This wasn't like the usual kind of hacker attitude that one runs across as like, we are so elite. We're better than the sheeple. We're the gods in the machine.

5:12 It's not that kind of hacker. This is like, fuck yeah. We're going to liberate the masses. We're all going to learn how to do this together. We're going to put our energy into breaking down the barriers that keep people out of it. It was that kind of hacking, which is why I assume, perhaps rudely, that so many of them were women or people with other marginalized genders. I went to one of these hack meetings once, again, like a decade later, almost by accident. I was just on tour in Italy, and it was not a boys' club.

5:43 The hack labs were dedicated to the open, autonomous Internet. They all ran Linux, an open-source operating system that is still around, you can still use it, instead of Windows or, you know, macOS, which, yeah, late 90s, they could have been running macOS. And as a side note, and kind of a mea culpa, these folks were right the entire time.

6:04 And I always ignored them. Hacktivists have been saying forever that if you don't control the operating system, you don't control your computer. And I was always like, yeah, but Linux is kind of a pain in the ass. And Linux is still kind of a pain in the ass in a lot of ways, depending on what you want to do with your computer. But in 2026, we're watching the internet become dramatically less free. very quickly. Watching the internet become less free seems like a minor part in the Omni crisis. And it's a problem that both sides, at least of the American political system, are supporting. They're supporting making this worse, right? They are supporting locking down the internet. Democrats and Republicans agree on locking down the

6:49 internet with age verification and tying our identities to our computers. And both sides are enemies of a free society for doing so. It's easy to ignore this problem compared to some of the other problems. But I promise you, they are all tied together. When we give up ground in this one space, we are losing... I mean, if you're playing like Risk or some strategy game, right? When you control terrain, you have access to the things that that terrain gives you, right? You are in a stronger position.

7:21 And the free internet... is something that puts us in a stronger position to fight everything else. Fighting the omni-crisis, the poly-crisis, whatever we're calling it, it means finding the part of it that you care about the most and fighting there and remembering that it's all connected and not thinking that your issue is the single important issue. We are facing one big interwoven net of oppression. So just grab a knot in that net and start fucking pulling together.

7:51 Because we need all of us. Seriously and desperately, we need all of us right now. Sideline time, it's over. And so yeah, all the stuff that annoying hacker activists have been saying about technology, they were right all along. Sorry I didn't listen to you more. Meanwhile, in Milan, after the 1999 hack meeting, When everyone left committed to opening hack labs, again, organizing works, you get together with people and you all agree to pull in the same direction as each other, that's how things are accomplished. A new group started in Milan called LOA, L-O-A, all capitalized, but I suspect it's pronounced LOA because it's a reference to William Gibson's cyberpunk writing. And he, in his writings,

8:41 William Gibson, is referencing the voodoo spirits called LOA. And if you want to hear more about them, You can see the episodes we did with the amazing theological underpinnings of the Haitian Revolution and how basically people doing just awesome religious stuff was how they gave themselves the strength to overthrow a slave society. But this group, LOA, the Italian group, it was sort of a super group in that it had pieces of all kinds of the groups that came before it. A bunch of different collectives kind of came together to form LOA. And they got together, and they taught themselves computer shit. Hardware and software. Rebuilding computers has always been a big part of hacktivism. The night that the millennia ended, when the clock rolled over

9:28 from 1999 to 2000, and don't give me that it started in 2001, I don't care. The night that the big number changed. Loa helped squat a big ol' warehouse, and got two rooms in the tower of the new building. And suddenly... It had a physical space, which is always essential. And they just, like, people kind of moved in. People were teaching two classes a day out of this space.

9:53 They took the motto, Plus Chaos, which is the name of the book that I'll be referencing a lot. The plus sign. K-A-O-S. Enter chaos into any system in order to improve it. The beauty of the internet was its decentralization. And for all my emphasis on how they all met in person, they were all... weird. Like they would sit in a room silently and communicate by chat. They started calling themselves the autistics, the autistici. And so that wasn't the name of their group, but that's how they described themselves.

10:31 And so the autistici was born. But do you know what borned me? No, I got nothing. But here's where I have to cut to ads anyway. And we're back. So that was Milan, where you have the computer nerds who all sit in a room and text each other. But, you know, they're in the same room together, so that's kind of cool. Florence, meanwhile, gave birth to a very different hacktivist culture with a very different attitude about things.

11:06 Florence gave birth to the inventati. And it started from the same soil. It started from the same autonomous anarchistic culture, but with kind of different people doing kind of different stuff, which is honestly, Autistici Inventati is just, it's such a cool story. I'm really excited to get to tell it to you. In late 1998 and early 1999, the antagonists, the antagonist movement that I'm talking about, the people fighting for an autonomous culture, but distinct from the more formal autonomous Marxist culture in Italy because it's fucking hard to keep track of political currents throughout time and across the world.

11:43 These autonomists, they started putting up websites to coordinate protests against war and shit. And in March 1999, when the cops smashed up a student protest and just like beat the shit out of people and hospitalized people, all of these young protesters, a lot of them high school students, they're watching the news blame them The news blamed the protesters for their own assault at the hands of the cops, which is something that is very familiar to any activist probably anywhere in the world. So people realized they needed to report on the news themselves. And importantly, this predates indie media by half a year. We'll talk more about indie media in a little bit. And so the Sagamati were born. S-G-A-M-A-T-I. This Gamadi were born, and I had

12:34 to turn to a friend to figure out what this word means because the internet didn't help because it doesn't seem to be a word that wants to be translatable. I assume it's slang. My friend said, quote, it's difficult to translate, but it's canny. It's plural. It's the people who are canny. It's the people who can't be fooled.

12:55 Somewhere along the way, I stopped quoting my friend and started paraphrasing my friend. I think that they'll forgive me. These were the activist journalists who showed up with cameras and watchful eyes and reported often by text message what was actually happening at the big street protests. And they did computer stuff, too, but that was less the focus.

13:16 The focus of a computer was only for its access to, like, media and publishing. And they're, this Ghamadi, they're young as fuck. They're high school students. They're college students. And they had to work hard to build trust with protests. Showing up with cameras isn't always welcome at protests. See the Simpsons meme, wow, videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we've ever had.

13:39 But there was this like one moment early on, for example, where the cops were pretending to be journalists to get into space. And then as soon as they got into space, they like, the people realized what was happening. So they called their Schiamatti friends and the Schiamatti friends came over with their own cameras and were sort of able to, counter-surveil the police that were surveilling them. And it was actually very useful. And the Scamati, they struggled with access to resources and space until they helped squat a farmhouse outside the city that one time I, I think I went to a soccer game at it. When I was traveling around Italy, I had no idea what was happening.

14:13 I was on tour and with like an interpreter to help me present, but I don't speak any Italian. I got by with terrible Spanish. but I believe I went to a soccer game at this farmhouse once. And instead of a hack lab, they set up a media lab that they called the Bat Cave. Both of these groups, Milan and Florence, They're part of squatting a larger space, right?

14:39 Like they don't open their own building just for the purpose of making this media lab. They help alongside a lot of other people open up and defend a space. Multiple groups built these spaces together. And that's important. That keeps them interwoven into a broader net, to just keep using a net metaphor, but in an opposite sense. And the Skamati, they covered protest after protest. But their real trial by fire was the first big anti-globalization protest in Europe, when people from around the world went to Prague to protest the world leaders gathered together there at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank summit meeting. Hacktivists set up a media center in Prague, and some people were on

15:23 the front lines, you know, sending updates, and other people stayed behind at the center and posted those updates. And this is still a useful tactic, not necessarily like texting in webpages, But it is still a useful tactic to have people sort of running communications and news updates from off-site, right?

15:43 But it's also not a safe thing to do inherently. Later, we're going to talk about a media center being raided, but I also have friends in America who have been raided while doing media center work, you know? It feels safer, and it is a good role for different people, people who might be, like, less able to run around directly in the streets and deal with tear gas. And in Prague, the Skamati were a hit. They were incredibly useful and everyone loved them. And they decided to grow bigger and figure themselves out. They wanted to start really doing hack lab stuff too, because if you want to use the internet to do communications and media, you need people to have internet access, right? And in the meantime, they gave

16:26 themselves a new name, Inventati. And there's actually multiple ways to pronounce this word, depending on where the accent is. And I believe it's inventati or inventati. No, I don't speak Italian. I already owned up to that. Normally, this word would have an accent either over the E or the A. And that would distinguish the word as either invent yourself or the invented. But by taking out the accent, they made their name easier for Americans to type, which was not their goal, but it helped me. And they also made their name usefully and interestingly vague. Although it's funny because later they're going to graffiti that name everywhere.

17:05 And everyone's like, but which word is it? Like, how do I pronounce that? It's actually, it's kind of an internet-y thing to do to take off the accent and make that word unpronounceable. It's really interesting to me. But they were media people, not hackers really. And so they needed help from hackers around Italy in order to set up a server. And I've got a third piece of the puzzle. We have the autostici. We have the infantati.

17:33 But what about Indymedia, you might think? Well, you might not think that because it's not in the title. But Indymedia is an important third piece of this puzzle. In 1999, in the tear gas clouds in Seattle outside the World Trade Organization summit, well, in the lead up to it, some other people hit upon this Gamadi idea, but probably independently.

17:56 And they gave their own name to it, Indymedia. The concept of citizen journalism, it's important to understand this, the concept of citizen journalism, the thing that became social media, it was born to fight against global power structures, the ones that immiserate the world. Here was a network of websites where people could themselves post what they saw and what they knew, and a collective understanding of events could supplant official media narratives. It was also fast. Do you remember when you could go to Twitter to get updates about things faster than you could anywhere else? I miss that.

18:34 Indie media? Just as fast. Maybe even faster. And I think the first live streaming ever done was done by folks with a backpack-sized streaming setup in Seattle. And the newswire was how people could keep up to date about what was happening in very chaotic situations where, like, The study of war, like the ability to understand what's happening is how you win battles and wars, you know? And so this gave us this huge leg up in this decentralized way instead of having, you know, it wasn't about just giving one person information to all of access to the information about what's happening, but to give every participant information about what was happening down to the like, Oh, there's tear gas on such and such street, but the

19:25 following alley is open. Anyone who's in that area that the police are kettling, that's your way out. That's the kind of information that can be available. Indymedia started in Seattle, but everything cool in this world has deeper roots than we realize. It was called Indymedia in Seattle, but it was built on software from Australia that was built that summer in 1999 to protest the G8, the group of eight, the eight countries that think they run the world. That early software was called Active, and it was the oldest thing I'm aware of that encouraged open publishing on a webpage that was constantly updated. But do you know what the opposite of open publishing is? Do you know what you have to pay a lot of money to do

20:10 put ads on our show. And these are the people who did that. And we're back. And they haven't fired me for saying that stuff yet. So it's probably fine. As the ultra-globalization movement spread, so did indie media. It wasn't just websites. People-powered newspapers cropped up, some of which lasted decades. I joined an indie media video collective in 2002 and spent the next year filming protests and editing together the footage. There was no YouTube, so we held in-person screenings of all the videos produced by our collective.

20:49 And for a while, like, okay, so for every month, we'd go to sympathetic coffee shops and pizza parlors and the occasional movie theater and show all of the videos that we produced that month so that people could see video news that was independent, right? And... This was pre-YouTube and all of that. And for a while, I remember being like, oh, that was like silly. We had to do it like that. And I'm like, no, it was actually cooler. And it built a community in a way that YouTube doesn't. Anyway, there I was, an art school dropout.

21:22 And I had been about to change my major to film. And then less than a year after I dropped out, a film that I edited sold out a large movie theater in Portland. There was a line around the block. And I was giving presentations in universities of the, when I say my work, the work that I was producing collectively as part of this collective. It showed me that there's other ways to access media. And indie media was fucking rad. And as I keep saying, it's what gave birth to the internet as we know it. Social media was the cooptation of that model, and I am sorry for my part in that. Indie media Italy popped up in 2000. Within months of the project's start globally. And it grew out of that same fertile soil of hacktivists

22:06 and squats and anarchists and other folks. And one of the cool things indie media had going for it is that the hackers around the world had put together one of the first CMSs, content management systems, proto blogs, ways of handling data on the back end of a website to make it available on the front end. So you're not just hand coding every update. And when folks got together to talk about what should we do with this awesome new tool in Italy, when folks got together to do that, it meant that the Autistici and the Inventati, who weren't officially named, well, the Autistici weren't officially named that yet, they were in a room together for the first time. And they talked about what kind of digital

22:47 tools they needed. And they were like, you know what we need? You know what the social movement here in Italy needs? We need email servers and mailing lists. They needed services, autonomously controlled services, that weren't part of the capitalist or state infrastructure. They needed the tools of a free internet. So after the meeting in November 2000, the Inventati wrote LOA, they're not formally on to Stichy yet, and they're like, hey, we need your help. And all this was done by PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, which is like the old pain-in-the-ass version of Signal. It was a way to send encrypted emails that is genuinely really fucking confusing and was the best we had for decades. And so the two groups met up at a pizzeria in Milan,

23:36 and they were like, all right, we need another movement server. There was one server already. It was controlled by ECN, that old radical network that grew out of the BBSs. But they were like, we need more than one. because a snake can have its head cut off. And also, ECN didn't physically host its own server. They used a provider.

23:57 Inventati wanted a server to do media stuff. Autostici, still LOA, wanted it more for hackery stuff. But they both wanted the same thing. So the dinner was a massive success. And so a new project, a new collective, was born. The autistics and the self-invented got together. the Autistici, and the Inventati. And I will say, I love naming conventions of radical groups and how they're different in different places.

24:25 And I like this attitude that Italy seems to have where you name yourselves like we are the something and it's like a characteristic turned into a noun, you know? That's like, that's pretty sick. That's pretty self-mythologizing in a way that I think is really appealing and fun. And so indie media exploded in a positive way. It's going to explode in a negative way later, but not in a physical way. It doesn't actually physically blow up. They do get raided. Whatever. Anyway, indie media exploded, and it was an open structure. Anyone could use and join indie media.

24:59 Autistici and Inventati, now joined together, they decided they were a closed collective. Both of these structures are rad, both the big open structure and the closed structure, and they work well when they work in tandem, like they did here. They decided from the beginning to not formally align themselves with any one ideological tradition. You can't say Autistici Inventati is the following ideology, right? They're just people willing to commit to things like anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-authoritarianism, shit like that.

25:34 In Italy, you're not short on ideologies that fit that framework. And I'm kind of jealous. And so they decided to put together their first server. They bought an old bank server for $ 8, and someone pulled their hard drive out of their personal computer and slapped it into it. And on March 3, 2001, they announced that the group existed when they put the server online. And once again, they met up in person to do this. I think it was about a two-hour train ride between the cities. And everyone learned every part of it. So it took a long time. Rather than just letting the like most computer nerd people do the computer nerd task and leave it to them, they were like, no, we all want to know how we did this. They discussed technical things on

26:19 their main mailing list too, so that the non-technical people could get up to speed or at least have access to that information. And they talked about the political things on the same mailing list for the exact same reason. The people who were more interested in the politics got a chance to teach what they were involved in to the people who were kind of just there for the bits and bytes. And this didn't mean that everyone had to become a perfect hacker or perfectly keep up with everything happening in the social movements, but rather that everyone should have a general level of knowledge of all of the operations, and then some people would specialize beyond that.

26:55 And they talked a lot. They documented things. They had endless meetings. They built the infrastructure so that it would have staying power. And indeed, it lasted far, far longer than most internet services, radical or otherwise. It took a superpower with what I used to would have said the world's most powerful military, but I doubt that these days, but it took a superpower to shut them down. And they started setting up email addresses and mailing lists for just all the social movements around them. And they had to work to get people interested and using email and mailing lists to organize. They tabled at events, festivals, college parties, wherever.

27:34 They tagged Inventati everywhere, then Inventati.org. They passed out physical zines and floppy disks. They sold t-shirts and shit to cover the cost of printing those physical zines and floppy disks. The goal wasn't self-promotion. It was to get groups better organized, to get them set up with mailing lists, to leverage the internet to empower in-person activism. One member, Blancois, talks about the skepticism against computers that they found on the left at the time. Quote, It seems impossible, but at the beginning, many of us didn't even know how to switch on a computer. Yes, the computer, the enemy. That's how it was. I remember the work to create the Batcave and that Pilar, my dog I had just gotten

28:21 at the time, had decided to shit only in there. And in my heart, I thought she was right. What kind of room should only have computers in it? And so they have all this infrastructure and they start using it. There is a lot of militant protests around the world during this era, not just the big anti-globalization summits. Even when protesters decidedly lost and got their asses kicked, they learned a ton and they adapted. Although also the state adapted and whenever they lost, so it goes. These days, we all love dfloc.org, right? The open publishing website that tracks automated license plate readers, the flock cameras and the axon cameras of the world. And dfloc.org has a map that anyone can, it's open publishing, that you can put

29:09 up a map of all of the cameras around you. Well, Ottis Ticci and Ventati did this in Florence 25 years ago. They built an open publishing map of the city and all of its surveillance cameras there. And that idea they got from people doing a similar thing in San Francisco. Everything is older than you think it is. At one point, they would like go around. This is like just the most like hackers movie thing I can imagine. At one point, they disassembled an entire classroom of desktop computers, old flashcards. 486s, and 40 people took the train across the country with those computers in tow to bring them to a hack meeting in Catania. Catania? I don't know. I've never been there.

29:52 Because computers weren't nearly as portable in the year 2000. And then... Now it's the summer of 2001. Carlo Giuliani is a street punk and a history student, and probably most important to him, alive. His executioner is not yet the broken shell of a man he will become. There's a G8 protest coming up in Genoa, and the hackers of Italy set up a media center in two buildings with a hundred computers. There's print media on the first floor, radio on the second floor, indie media on the third floor.

30:26 The second building was across the street, and so they literally ran cables, probably Ethernet cables, across the street. There's like people climbing in trees to throw them to each other and do all this fun stuff. The entire city's police force was militarized to stop this protest. One participant of Autistici Inventati, or at least in this book, right, is named Pinke. And Pinke says about the protest, quote, Maybe it's this experience that united us and created a true collective. But also, quote, for all the force we could muster, it wasn't a fair fight. Knowledge and preparation aren't enough against a show of brute force. We lost.

31:08 We gave everything and achieved nothing. And Carlo Giuliani was killed. I'm sure the street dogs missed him, and I know that the entire movement around the world mourned him. And it was up to indie media to get the story out. They knew that that wasn't going to be covered properly by the news. Then the police raided the media center in the middle of the night. It's been a minute since I've seen the indie media documentary about this, but it was violent and it was terrifying and it was destructive and they beat the shit out of everybody and dozens or hundreds of media activists were sleeping in the building when it happened and, you know, were assaulted and carted off to jail. Just think yourself in this position, right?

31:55 You're a media activist. You're trying to get out the truth about what's happening. You're aware that that's a radical act. You probably have an ideological backing behind it. And the cops have just killed one of you. And now they're raiding the building, the building that you are holding in order to be able to tell the truth about the police killing one of you. It's hard to understand just how intense that would be. But most people survived it. Afterwards, cops raided social centers all around the country trying to find the headquarters of this evil organization, Indymedia Italy, whose slogan is, Be the Media. What a terrible, evil organization.

32:35 They didn't have a center. Indymedia Italy did not have anything approaching a center. The police were never able to find it because it didn't exist. And Ottastici and Ventati come out of Genoa stronger and more tightly connected, both with one another and also into the broader movement. Many people left the collective because the going was too tough.

32:55 Others joined because they saw how essential it was. If indie media was the movement's big shared blog and media platform, Autistici and Ventati became the movement's infrastructure and tech support. They weren't alone in this. Radical technology collectives, as they're sometimes known, started cropping up everywhere. This was a time of what sometimes gets called franchise activism. Food Not Bombs is the classic example. Anyone can set up a Food Not Bombs collective. There was also Critical Mass that organized mass bike ride protests to fight for car-free cities. I'm not talking about Italy. Actually, a lot of this is I'm going to talk about the U.S. because it's the main place I witnessed a lot of this, but I'm

33:37 just talking about franchise activism and the movement in general. There was Food Not Lawns that helped people turn their lawns into gardens. Homes Not Jails worked to squat buildings to turn into housing. And Radical Tech Collective's didn't have a franchise name, besides Indymedia for the media side of it.

33:54 But major cities around the world would, and often still do, have collectives of people who set up hack labs, or build computer recycleries, or maintain servers. Certainly, most everywhere had an Indymedia for a long time, until social media effectively supplanted it, for better or worse. Probably worse. And then, of course, a few months after the Genoa protests... September 11th happens. Some people from an entirely different movement, one I have a lot less sympathy for, hijack some planes and smash them into the World Trade Center in New York City. And the anti-globalization movement entered a much more fraught and terrifying chapter because a lot of the democratic freedoms that people ostensibly enjoy in Western society were suspended

34:41 and are still suspended to this day. Because The state as an institution is designed to limit freedom, not expand freedom. That is the nature of lawmaking. It is incentivized to lock down freedoms. It is not particularly incentivized to open them back up. And the movement eventually trickled down to nothing over the next few years, at least the anti-globalization movement.

35:05 You know, it went into different streams. It didn't go away. But it sure stopped being what it was. In Italy, real estate speculators started to gut the squatting movement and evictions became the norm. Many hack labs reliant on reclaimed real estate fell apart. Online, the web started to be controlled more from the top down than the bottom up.

35:29 Groups like Autostici and Ventati went from being on the offensive, shaping how the internet can work, to the defensive, protecting the terrain that they'd carved out. Indymedia Italy basically fell apart in fighting during this time. And I don't want to paint too bleak of a picture, one of only people losing. There were vibrant protests, new squats, new groups, new ideas in this time that is otherwise a downturn.

35:55 And it's strange for me whenever I read about this stuff, write about this stuff, because I joined this movement in 2002. I joined while we were in decline. I lived in New York City where I could see the World Trade Centers out my window, and then they were gone. And then I joined this movement. In the middle of repression and a downturn, Autostici Inventati kept doing shit. They went on tour. They launched NoBlogs.org, a blogging platform free from data mining and state control, kind of in response to the collapse of Indymedia Italy. It expanded over the decades to provide a platform to something like 10,000 different groups.

36:33 And during that time, they started doing one of the other main things the group eventually excelled at, being the sort of firewall between the movement and the courts. They hosted social movement webpages, and social movements regularly face repression. So Altastici Inventati has regularly been called to court to defend the free speech of various groups. It's actually why Altastici Inventati existed as a legal entity, with legal names, with legal bank accounts. The first time that they were called into court about this, there was a subpoena from a train company, Trinitalia, because there was a campaign against Trinitalia for moving war materiel. This is like, you know, in the global war on terror early days. And some

37:15 activists put up a satire website making fun of the company. Autistici was forced to take down the website, but immediately appealed and won their appeal, and the site went back up. It was clearly satire. And there's so much more that could be said about Autistici and Ventati, because frankly, I've only covered a few years of their existence. For decades, they quietly did the shit work of movement building. Tech support is like washing dishes. It isn't sexy, but it's necessary.

37:48 And frankly, you can judge an activist by their willingness to do the work that doesn't put you in the limelight, that doesn't make you a hero, that isn't the frontline protester or the fucking podcaster, you know? And as I understand it, the reason that the group disbanded after being called terrorists... wasn't for their own sake. There's no particular reason to believe that these people, who've survived so much, would give in to fear. They disbanded, I believe, to protect their users, to make it so that no one can be accused of associating with them because they don't exist to associate with. But the idea remains. We can build autonomous internet infrastructure. We can do the hard, thankless

38:33 work of keeping ourselves and everyone around us free. I'm sure they're not out of the news yet either. I'm sure there will be legal pushback. It's just hard to do legal pushback when a fascist state calls you terrorists. It makes legal avenues harder to come by. But we'll see. And in the meantime, let a thousand servers bloom. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. I have a book coming out that will be up for pre-order probably by Friday. It is a zine, actually. It's not a book. It's a zine.

39:06 It's called The Folk Tales of the Lowlands of Sakan. If you saw me on tour with The Sapling Cage, this is the stuff I read to you. And it's going to be an absolutely beautiful zine coming out from Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness at tangledwilderness.org, which is the anarchist publishing collective that I'm part of. And so if you're listening to this When it comes out, then in a couple days, that'll be up. And if you're listening to this later... it's probably up, either for pre-order or in general. And in the meantime, fuck ICE, free Palestine, take care of each other, be as well as you can. Bye.

39:47 Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.