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

Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening in the world, there's people trying to do good things. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this is part three of a probably four-parter about Autostici Inventati, the Italian group of hacktivists who set up infrastructure like email lists and websites that has suddenly, after 25 years, caught the ire of the fascist United States and been declared a terrorist organization.

In part one, we talked about what terrorism means. In part two, we talked about Italy up until the 1970s, 1980s. And now we are going to talk about Italy in the ultra-globalization movement from which Autostici Inventati was born.

So, Italy.

Laboratory Italy. I really like that way of phrasing things, understanding things. In the early 90s, there was a prime minister named Giulio Andriotti, who was on his seventh term.

That's a lot of terms, right?

The Christian Democrat Party in Italy was more centrist, I believe, as far as I can tell. It was a little bit more centrist than elsewhere.

In Europe, because.

In general, when I hear Christian Democrat Party, I assume that that is a center-right party. And this is being presented as a centrist party that had both center-right and center-left components. And I think the difference here might be that I believe, and I could be wrong about this, in other Northern European countries, it was more of a Protestant party, the Christian Democrats, and it is the Catholic social teachings in Italy, which lends itself not to the center, but to the extremes.

That is Catholicism for you.

And the Christian Democrat Party, they are just one part of the pentapartito, the five-party coalition of mostly leftist groups, right? And they're ruling together because they don't want the communists to come to power because the Communist Party is the second most powerful party in the country. And so basically the most powerful party teams up with all of the other lefty parties in order to not have the communists win.

That's my inference there.

But this period, we're talking about the 70s and 80s, this is what gets called the First Republic. So Italy is ruled mostly center-leftish. And in April 1992, in the elections, the Christian Democrats come in first, the Communists come in second, and the Socialists.

Came in third. And in the late 80s, there's also social movements going on. One of them, I think, is just kind of funny.

In the late 80s, they had a Black Panther movement, but not the way that you would imagine if you're an American or anyone who hears more about American history than kind of niche Italian social movement history, which I presume is most of my audience. There was a student movement against the introduction of private financing to the university system and for student organizing power. Basically, students had decent organizing power, and then they were like, no, what if you all don't actually have any actual say in how things are run? What if it's all symbolic? And they were like, we don't want that. So they had a big movement about it. And at the time, there was like some news thing where someone had seen a black cat,

a really big one, and mistook it for a panther. And so there was this big kind of scare where the cops were running around being like, where's the panther that's loose in the city? And they couldn't find it, but they like confirmed sightings of it, which was not actually true. But, you know, the cops have never been really good at discerning reality from anything else.

And so.

The student movement was like, sick, we are that panther. We are the imaginary thing that the cops are trying to hunt down. And that movement, I only read.

Several paragraphs about it.

That's all I was able to find because it wasn't the main subject of my episode.

But one day I want to know more about it. That movement didn't succeed at its goals.

The universities, ostensibly in the center-left government era, were getting more and more capitalist and less and less democratic. And then, in 1992, Italian society had a reckoning that tore its political system completely apart, that ended the First Republic.

It gets translated to bribesville.

Basically, the realization that half of their fucking politicians were corrupt. Thousands of politicians at every level of society had been accepting bribes. This killed the Socialist Party outright. The socialist former prime minister went into exile in Tunisia. The Christian Democrats were decimated. I believe never again to return to power, but the article I read was from a while ago, so I don't know what they're up to now. Politicians were killing themselves in shit, and half of parliament was under indictment.

And I think this was mafia shit.

The Sicilian mob, Cosa Nostra, was murdering magistrates with car bombs at this point. One time I was in Naples, several decades after this, and I was giving a talk, and then after the talk I I went to go hang out with a friend at.

Her apartment, and it was this big, beautiful apartment. And she was this broke college student, and I was like, how can you afford this? I asked her.

So she went to the window, and it looked down onto this beautiful public square. And I'm like, yeah, this makes it look even more rich and fancy, right? And she was like, that's where the mob does public executions. No one wants to live here, so the rent is really cheap. I don't know if back in 1992... if it was just mafia folks bribing the politicians or not.

Some examples I found of some of the bribery were like, all right, you want to build an apartment building in a landslide area? Well, give me some money and you can build an apartment building wherever you want. Oh, you want to sell contaminated blood to hospitals? Well, just give me some money and you can do that evil shit.

You know, you could buy judges off the whole shitty corrupt nine yards, right? And the only political party that came through this unscathed were the communists.

So a guy named Berlusconi, he is not a good man.

He's a Trump. He's a corrupt rich businessman and former entertainer. And he was afraid of– he might actually be smarter than Trump, unfortunately. Whatever.

Well, he's dead.

So he has that going for him or we have that going for him. He was afraid of going to jail himself and he realized that basically like running for prime minister was his only chance to not go to jail. And he was the protege of the socialist who had to flee. So he ran with his center-right party, Forza Italia.

And it started off, this party, started off with the scraps of the dying Christian Democrats and the socialists. Because again, as I've talked about a lot in this show, words have no meaning. And when you're describing, when you say socialist, that can mean a million things. And it depends on where you're saying it when, you know? Like, eventually, you dig back far enough in history and you start hearing about The Communist Party, like the Bolsheviks, the fucking communists, complaining about left communists because they were right-wing communists. They were like openly right-wing communists because they didn't believe in democracy.

And the left communists were those communists who believed in democracy. So when you hear about a center-right party starting because of the Christian Democrats and the socialists, you're like, does that even make any sense? And the answer is it doesn't need to because it's politics, baby. Berlusconi won. And it was basically a like, how do we make sure the communists don't come to power after everyone else is gutted by a corruption scandal? And he formed a coalition government of the right-wing parties, including a bunch of brand new ones that were just like, what if we're really racist? Like, what if that's like a whole thing? This is just like really fucking racist. And this is called the Second Republic.

And he became a rich billionaire strongman leader. And for a while, he was the richest man in Italy. And Western newspapers had to be like, Well, he does have more personal power than usually an elected leader has in a democracy. Later, he was convicted of tax fraud, but they gave him community service because he was too old to go to jail.

But he wasn't too old to then end up in government again.

And Berlusconi oversaw the neoliberalization of the country. Speaking of words having no meaning, the word liberal means a lot of different things in different contexts. So when we say neoliberal, I think people often use it to be like someone's like really liberal.

They're neoliberal.

That is a incorrect use of the word neoliberal. Neoliberal doesn't mean like liberal but new either. It doesn't mean a politically center left person. Neoliberalism is instead a reference to development from classical liberalism, which is about capitalism and unrestricted markets. Neoliberals are essentially like basically what if capitalism and international corporations ruled the world? And so during the Second Republic of Italy, Italy lost a lot of its manufacturing as jobs went overseas. So a lot of Italian hacker kids in the 90s grew up in neighborhoods right next to really neat abandoned industrial areas. I don't know how directly that ties into it, but I feel like it aesthetically helps you understand these cyberpunks who are going

to give birth to this really cool movement. Italy had a vibrant social movement of leftists of various stripes. And specifically, it had a fuckton of squatted social centers. I've covered political squatting on this show before a couple times. There are episodes about the Dutch squatting scene, and also about anarcho-punk in England, and also about the black bloc, especially in Germany. But basically, Europe had, and still has to some degree, a lot of spaces where these big buildings that were not being put to other use, people just take them over and run them as social centers. It was harder to replicate in America and the United States where property rights trump everything else. But I've lived in

squatted social centers in the U.S. too.

They just, they tend to be shorter-lived.

And these squatted social centers had been common in Italy since the 1970s. An average social center has a show space for events, especially for music, and it has a meeting space for activists to get together. And they're self-managed democratically by their participants. And they're usually tied into youth subcultures and punk rock and hip-hop and raves. I believe that's generationally, actually. First punk, then hip-hop, then raves.

They're also... generally illegal.

And generally, they're in conflict with the police, even if they're also sort of socially accepted. And that gives it an anti-establishment character. And it gives its community practice fighting the power structures of society.

And when I say fight, I mean that literally, with rocks and molotovs, generally not with firearms.

And so, sometimes the squads would put up a good fight and the state eventually would be like, fine, take this other building instead.

Because there's this thing that it was always hard.

For me as an American to understand where the government sees itself on some level as responsible to the people who are part of the society. And so if enough people are like mad about a thing, the government sometimes is like, eh, okay, fine. I know it's like not what was supposed to be happening, but I guess we'll let you get away with it. And you're often able to prove that if something's in the social interest, that property rights don't win at the end of the day.

And this is, again, completely alien to the American understanding of the world. But do you know what's not completely alien to the American understanding of the world? Do you know what makes so much sense in the American mind? Having a radical podcast that's sponsored by products and services like our advertisers.

And we're back.

So in Italy, perhaps uniquely in Europe, the squatters started getting really into cyberpunk in the late 1990s and tying it into their radical left anti-authoritarian politics. And there are these huge raves getting busted up by police, which is true everywhere. But they have a more political character there than they do elsewhere.

Which is cool, actually. As far as I understand, raves are starting.

To become more political in the United States again for the past five years or so. And that's exciting to me as someone who likes beep-boopy electronic music and also being political. So this squad at Social Spaces started adding hack labs to their list of services that they offered to the community. Places to learn and come together and figure out how things work and build technology and reappropriate technology for liberation. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first time I saw a 3D printer was in a squatted apartment in amsterdam 15 plus years ago you know people are just like interested in taking control of technology and figuring out what we can do with it milan was one of the centers for this by the

late 90s there were at least 11 squatted social centers in the city florence the other important city in our story this week they had two large squatted social centers one in the south one in the north plus at least eight others scattered throughout the city Many of these were opened up in the late 90s specifically to provide housing for migrants. The first hack meeting in Italy, the first big gathering of radical hackers, was in Florence. The second was in Milan, in a space that had been occupied maybe for the first time. The first time it was occupied was for a massive rave. Any given Italian squat by the turn of the millennia would have an info shop, like pamphlets and books and shit. It would

have a free shop, like a thrift store, but infinitely cheaper. It would have a soup kitchen. It would have a concert hall. It would have a meeting space. And it would have a hack lab. In Hamburg in Germany in 1984, the first Chaos Communications Congress was held. And many of its founders, the Chaos Communications Club, I believe, is who put on the Chaos Communication Congress. I could have that detail wrong. Many of its founders were radical leftists. It wasn't a radical left organization. That's how it worked out.

Europe's hacker scene has always been a bit more radical than America's. But Northern Europe's scene was still not as radical. It was more tied into sort of normal internet infrastructure and ways of life overall.

But Italy wasn't going to fuck with that.

Southern Europe, which I infer to mean Italy and Spain, got its hacker scene later in the late 1990s. The way I read it was that it kind of started in Italy and then immediately went over to Spain because there's more social connection between the radical scenes. in those two countries than there sometimes is like with those countries in further north even though you know obviously Germany and Berlin are often the center of this or that anyway whatever but I will say when I say that the hacker scene got started in the late 90s in southern Europe Milan actually had a punk rock squad or hacker scene going back as far as 1986 at least but thanks to the fact that they had all this squatted real estate, they didn't have to rent buildings or anything.

One of the reasons that people like squatting, one of the reasons I did it for so long, is you do it instead of having a job, right?

You do it so that.

You can live off of very little and do activist work and try and make the world a better place because your housing needs are met by aggressively stealing houses from rich people.

Which is kind of cool. It's like cool when people.

tax the rich it's like extra cool when people take their big fucking city houses that aren't doing anything anyway but also some of the squats were in like people's second homes or whatever but usually not actually usually squats were well i can mostly only speak to the dutch context but it's usually buildings that were being left empty in order to real estate prospect if basically people being like buildings in downtown amsterdam they'd be like well i'm I don't really want to deal with like renting it out right now or selling it when like the market's really bad.

So I'm just going to let no one live.

In it until the market gets better and the house becomes worth something again, which left huge swaths of the city homeless. And so that's why people started squatting. And that's why eventually the Netherlands legalized squatting for several decades. And the squatted social centers that I've been to in Italy, I don't actually entirely know their provenance, where they came from.

But a lot of them feel like they were abandoned infrastructure rather than like, I might be exaggerating when I say.

Stolen from the rich.

Anyway, the hackers in these hack labs, they built software and hardware. They taught people, especially immigrants and fellow activists, how to use computers and hack things. So Northern Europe hacking was politically conscious. But in Italy and Spain, it was directly tied into existing powerful social movements like the anarchists, and the anti-authoritarian left more broadly. And the hackers and cyberpunks at the end of the 20th century in Italy were intentionally into chaos. It's like one of the things they liked about the internet was its decentralized nature and how it was organized, but in a kind of chaotic fashion.

And they were interested in chaos not as a strategy of tension, not as a way to keep society on its toes so it's desperate for order, but as a way to resist control, right? Being chaotic as a way to Just be anti-authoritarian. The very organized movements of the 70s and 80s had failed, and people grew interested in things like the temporary autonomous zone, which is a political theory that has some history that's messier than I want to tangle with right now. But the temporary autonomous zone, or TAZ, is the idea that we can have these liberated zones to experiment with new social models, even if they don't last forever.

And when I say it has a complicated.

History, I will just say that, like, we should be aware of why people want autonomous zones. And basically, it's just like, I don't fuck with Hakeem Bay is the guy who coined that word for reasons that at some point I will get into a greater length. And bad stuff can always come out of good stuff. History shows us this again and again. It's the TAZ, it's the TAZ, it's the temporary autonomous zone that gives us Burning Man, for example. And I've never been to Burning Man. I have a lot of friends who care deeply about it.

I overall see it as a project that started off substantially more radical than it became and eventually became a rich person's playground because I don't believe it had enough structurally in place to prevent that from happening. Anyway, the internet, cyberspace, was a very, very promising autonomous zone in the late 90s.

As the writer Max Agass puts it, quote, following the burst of the dot-com bubble, It took capital a decade more to recuperate cyberspace as a medium of capital accumulation and workers' exploitation. When states finally colonized networks yet another decade later, the other foot came down. The internet solidified as a cutting-edge instrument of surveillance and repression. Thus, radical technology collectives such as Autistici and Ventati grew out of a historical moment when users' appropriation of technologies outpaced the integration of those technologies into systemic requirements. So cyberpunk felt promising.

It felt like a way that people could take back control.

Over this decentralized technology.

And like right now, we could use that kind of energy more than maybe ever because the internet is getting more and more locked down and we are accepting more and more control. The attack on Ostastichi and Ventati is an attack on our ability to make use of the most powerful communication tool ever developed. And it's a tool that should by rights be democratic and organic and anti-authoritarian. Instead, we let apps scan our IDs and even our faces.

That's what's at stake when we let the fascists, or the fucking Democrats who do it in the name of protecting the children, come for the free and open internet. Anyway, in Florence, students had just opened up a squat. We're talking about the late 90s again. The Seco Rivolta, and it might be Checo Rivolta. I actually don't know how to pronounce this Italian word. And they were going hard.

They started fighting for urban gardens. They helped students squat all over the city. They made a weekly paper. I love this idea, and people should do this. They made a weekly paper that was a one-sided broadsheet. It was designed to be wheat-pasted all over the city. You know, you just print out the news, you print out your newsletter, and you just wheat-paste it so that people can see it in person. But do you know what you can see in person?

Do you know what is available to you?

Ads.

They're everywhere. They're just everywhere. Here they are! And we're back.

Okay. One more final piece of the puzzle. One more piece of context for you. I know that you listen to this show for the context.

I know you. It's like eating the cupcake for the icing. Only I hate the icing. It's like eating the cupcake for the cupcake.

I don't know.

Okay, my metaphor doesn't work.

The final piece of the puzzle, the final bit of the soil that Ontistichi and Ventati grows out of, is the anti-globalization movement, or the alter-globalization movement, as it gets called. All over the world, people were beginning to revolt against the neoliberal world order, the one that was trying to strip the global south for resources. the one that was systematically taking power away from the governments and putting them in the hands of corporations. And it's not that the people who ran this movement specifically liked governments all that much, but we sure didn't like corporate control. And I know I keep hitting on the same point, but it's really important.

The reason Trump is a fascist is because his party, the modern Republican Party. Okay, so the ultra-globalization movement was specifically like one of the things we fought against was free trade agreements. We fought for there to be trade limitations between states. And we wanted that because free trade was developed in order to strip mine the global south in order to provide resources for the global north, right?

And the modern Republican Party under Trump is a co-optation of the anti-neoliberal revolt. It represents the turning of some of those basic demands towards right-wing conservative nationalist supremacist and authoritarian goals. This is like why Maha, Make America Healthy Again, is so dangerous and fascistic. Because it takes genuine and valid populist complaints like, oh, there's too many chemicals in the food and no one's tracking all the nonsense that goes into our food. And it funnels it into a nightmare machine, right? And that's what Trump is doing. He's taking these ideas and turning them on their head. He's taking the idea of like free trade is bad.

We wanted fair trade. We wanted.

Basically systems put in place so that people in the global south were like paid a decent wage for the resources that were being taken and the products and stuff that were being taken. And he just wants it as this like implement of control and nationalism. and is doing the opposite. And so it's just like lots of different things can be bad. I think about this a lot because I cut my teeth on the anti-globalization movement and it just looks so complicated, looks so strange as a series of demands right now because of the fascism that we're dealing with.

The ultra-globalization movement, or.

The anti-globalization movement as we tended to call it at the time, it was this vital leftist anti-authoritarian revolt that was truly worldwide. It grew out of the jungles of Chiapas, and it grew out of squats in Italy, and just everywhere all at once. And one of its goals was to replace free trade with fair trade, and this wasn't economic protectionism. It wasn't trade wars and high tariffs coming from the global north. It was the attempt to allow developing nations to protect their resources by limiting the metaphorical and literal strip mining that international corporations were doing. And so the current anti-free trade movement from the right wing is the inverse of that. So the ultra-globalization movement kicked

off hard in 1999 in Seattle in protests that we've covered before. I did a whole series, long series about the anti-globalization era. When people gathered from around North America and to some degree from around the world to shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle in 1999 that was discussing how to.

Strip mine the planet.

So the plan at the time, and this is the movement that swept me off my feet and got me to drop out of art school a few years later in 2002. The plan was basically every time the world leaders got together to plan all their evil shit, we just didn't fucking let them do it. Whatever city their summits were in, people would revolt. We would summit hop from one city to another and shut that shit down if we could, or just make such a big fucking spectacle of it that they couldn't have behind closed doors meetings without the whole world knowing it. because the city outside was sometimes literally burning. We didn't like mass arson cities, but things got real spicy. The police, of course, sure tried to stop us. The video footage of this era

is still surreal to see.

Just huge crowds of people on both sides.

Diverse and strange activists, and then seas of riot police pushing and shoving, and everyone's fighting. Sometimes groups would get silly with it, and This era is as much the era of giant strange puppets as it is of people wearing all black, throwing rocks. We had a very diverse movement. We were fighting for a world in which many worlds were possible, and we were doing it with a movement in which many movements were possible. And we were at our strongest when we accepted that. We were at our weakest when we all fought each other instead. This is going to be completely unrelatable to people today, where everything is so unified. Some people, for example, developed padded block, which is a block of people all wearing just obscene

amounts of padding and armor, as silly looking as possible, like wearing inner tubes and like kids floaties or covering yourself in pillows and duct tape.

It makes you immune to.

Batons and shield charges and the less lethal munitions that the police love to shoot us with.

And it makes the.

Footage of it all look very surreal. And there's a strange innocence to it, honestly, comparing it to, say, footage from 2020 in America. The protesters tended to be much more organized in the anti-globalization era, for better and worse. But as high as we saw the stakes at the time, they do look much higher now in retrospect. But still, this isn't to say that the movement was frivolous or silly. Like, people were dying because of the things that we were fighting against, and people were dying in the fight. People got hurt seriously doing all of this. It wasn't a fun game. Arrestees were routinely tortured by police. Buildings were raided and hundreds of people at a time were systematically injured by cops.

I have.

Basically PTSD from this era. And then any semblance of innocence was gone on July 20th, 2001 in Genoa in Italy. A 23-year-old protester named Carlo Giuliani was shot and killed by the Italian police, who.

I believe, then ran him over.

At the time, Carlo was chasing a police car down the street with a fire extinguisher. The cop who shot him was found not guilty by way of self-defense. And I want to linger here. I want to talk about Carlo. Carlo Giuliani was a street punk. The Italian word is punca bestia. Like, a street kid who was a punk and presumably an anarchist, but not specifically an organizer or a diehard activist.

And we don't know, or I.

Don't know, no one I've read knows exactly how Carlo Giuliani identified politically. Carlo spent his days in Genoa hanging out in the public square with punks and dogs asking for change. I believe he was still in school for history and he was living with his parents at the time. His father was a trade unionist, you know, worked for the union. I want to quote two things about him.

His best friend Danielle wrote about him right after he died, that he was, quote, someone who had that evil inside, the one that is here in the air that we all have. He didn't fit in the society, in the system. He suffered a lot, and since he was more sensitive than us, more generous and kinder, he was also more fragile.

And that's a messy translation, right? Because it starts with like someone who had that evil in him, And I don't believe that that means that there was something evil about him, but rather there was something he was suffering with. There was something eating away at him. That same evil that is in all of us because it's in the air, right?

It's getting into us. And then there's a piece published by Crime Think about him. It was written 25 years after his passing. It's a letter to him, and it's by an anarchist author named Thomas Rothaus. who has written several books about the anti-globalization era, including a book specifically about Genoa called From Riot to Insurrection. Here's the quote.

They froze you in time. You will forever be a young street punk, if that's indeed what you were, robbed of the opportunity to do whatever it is that brought you joy and made you feel whole as a person in the years and decades that should have still been left in your life. Maybe your youthful rebellion would have eventually faded you would have finished your university studies, gotten a degree, moved on, and looked back with disdain at your days on the streets.

As a rebel and an outcast.

Or maybe you would have looked at them with wistful nostalgia as a healthy chapter you went through in your life before assimilating, getting a good union job thanks to your dad's connections, starting a family, and throwing a coin toward the next generation of punkabestia as you passed them on the streets that used to be yours.

Or, Who knows?

Maybe you would have become an old punk, grain but still free, dog at your side, panhandling on the streets of Genoa to this very day. But you were robbed of a future, so you will never be any of those things. You won't betray us. You won't move on. You won't walk among us. It took me several times to read that without just choking up, you know, and I don't know whether that's going to hit you all the same way. But that is a really, like I was a street punk, right? I hung out with punks and dogs in the street and panhandled and went to these protests and fought cops and just like, and now I'm, I like to imagine myself grain, but still free. But maybe I'm actually more of that second thing. You know,

I have a good union job. I literally have a good union job. I heard radio is unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. But my dog's at my side. I like to think I'm grain, but still free. I've heard it over and over again. The movement lost its innocence when Carlo Giuliani died. He became a martyr. But exactly what kind of martyr he was became hotly contested in the movement. And this is something you still see in our movements today, about the martyrs that we have today.

You know, do we want them to be innocent? Do we want them to have been... who they were.

I appreciate Thomas Rothaus' take on it, just to keep quoting from that letter.

Quote, You died precisely because on that day and in that moment, we were succeeding. I don't know if you ever knew it, but it wasn't just there on the Piazza Alamanda. They were on the run throughout the entire area. I know this will be controversial, but given the circumstances, I'm not even sure that it's correct to say that they murdered you. The soldier who shot you was eventually found to have acted in self-defense and acquitted of any wrongdoing.

I'm also not so sure that it matters, honestly, aside from the need of many comrades, even anarchist comrades, to seek out the role of victim of police brutality, as if positioning ourselves in the role of perpetual victim in the face of the big bad state would lend us some moral high ground in the eyes of broader society.

It's defeatist, and I hate it, as I assume you would too. The justice we were looking for was never that of the state and its courts. And I like this framing. I like this framing because it's important to understand that you don't have to be innocent to be a martyr. Do I think it's a fucked up overreaction on the part of the cops to shoot someone with a gun for threatening them with a fire extinguisher? I do.

I absolutely do.

But Most of the martyrs I know about in this world are the people who died fighting against ISIS or Turkey in Rojava.

People who died fighting.

And I want to remember Carlo, the street punk I never met, because I was a street punk too as part of the same movement. I want to remember him as someone who died fighting, not who died innocent. But as the old adage goes, we support all of our prisoners and all of our martyrs, even the innocent ones.

So it doesn't matter too much either way. The cop who killed him was 20 years old, and he'd been told that the protesters were going to be throwing bags of infected blood at the police. He'd been told, the police were told, that they were basically going to war and that they might die. So it's easy to believe that that cop was genuinely afraid for his life. Mario Placonica is the cop's name.

Ex-cop, I should say.

He was let go four years later for psychological problems and He has been fighting depression ever since he killed a man. He is unemployed, and he called himself recently a destroyed, lonely, and consumed man. He never recovered from being an executioner of the state. And, fuck it, I woke up at like four in the morning to finish this script in time for you all, and I kept crying while reading Thomas Rothaus' writing about this situation that happened right before I joined the movement about someone I've never met And so I'm going to close off by reading you one more piece of that. And you should read the whole thing. It's linked in the show notes.

It's at crimethink.com. Quote, It sounds like demagogy to say you miss a person who you've never met and who you probably wouldn't even have gotten along with well. But I do. I miss you like I miss Dax and Carlos taken by fascist knives in Milan and Madrid. I miss Clement who fell fighting fascists in Paris. I miss Pocha La Prada in Buenos Aires, Alexis in Athens, and Tortuguita in Atlanta, all taken by the bullets of the police.

Or like I miss that kid in Göttingen who came into our info shop one day, whose name I can't even remember, who I'm ashamed to say I never took seriously, who went on to lay down his life fighting against Islamic fascism and for revolution in Rojava, like so many other international volunteers. I miss them and every other comrade gone, because those bullets and knives were aimed at all of us.

I miss them because they were all part of the struggle for a common idea. I miss them as I miss you, because while I may not know the person, I know the kind.

End quote.

And I think, dear listener, I want you to understand the emotional weight of this, the best that I can convey, because I... I think it helps you understand the deeply caring, brave, and complicated social struggle that existed in Italy at the turn of the millennium. Even if you don't agree with it, you probably don't listen this far into the show if you absolutely despise my politics. But even if you don't necessarily agree with this or that specific position of this or that person that I talk about, I think that you can better understand what's happening when you understand politics how deeply emotional this movement is. And I think it helps you understand the kind of people who sat down together to do this thing, I swear this ties into

Autistici Inventati, to do this thing that seems so mundane. They set up web servers and email infrastructure and blogs for activists and rebels. Like, they did the shit work. They washed the dishes, the metaphorical dishes, but I like to imagine that they probably also washed the regular dishes too.

Because while I think what the U.S. government is doing right now is illegal, unethical, and petty, to declare Ottastici and Ventati to be a bunch of terrorists or whatever, I don't want to say that Ottastici and Ventati are just milquetoast liberals who want the world to be slightly better. They want the world to be free. I don't have to know them personally to know this. That is the beautiful thing about being part of an ideologically committed movement.

You know, the same way that Rothaus, who I also don't know, can write about missing these people and mean it, and it can resonate so deeply with me on another con in a different year, is because we chose to be part of something together. And it's something that you can choose to be part of. And so I can tell you that I know that Autistici and Ventati, without knowing them, I can say, I can say that they want, as the Zapatistas say, a world in which many worlds are possible. They want all of us to live beautiful, self-determined lives. And they're being punished for that desire and for fighting for that because of the actions that they have taken, providing infrastructure for us, whether or not you

or I use their infrastructure. The existence of free infrastructure makes us more free. providing infrastructure, this is a meaningful action. Even if those actions are, and should be, completely legal, that doesn't mean that they pose no threat to fascism. It's the threat that they posed that made the U.S.

Intervene to shut them down.

And that's the soil from which they grew. And I think I've got one more part of this story about them actually getting together and doing the thing.

Which I'll tell you... on Wednesday.

In the meantime, take care of each other. Part of having an intergenerational movement means making room for the excesses of youth and for old people who want to tell too many stories and get some stuff wrong. We got to do both those things. We have to Have an intergenerational movement or it's meaningless. And free Palestine and see you all on Wednesday.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on

The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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