It Could Happen Here Weekly 250

Robert Evans (0:03)

Hey, everybody.

Kaveh Oda (0:04)

Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Garrison Davis (0:29)

Hello, and welcome to the show, it's It Could Happen Here today. I am James and I'm very lucky to be joined by Margaret Killjoy. Hi, Margaret.

Margaret Killjoy (0:37)

Hello.

What a good day to talk about good stuff. It's good stuff, right?

Garrison Davis (0:43)

Unfortunately, Margaret, I hate to break it to you. It's the government declaring left groups terrorists again.

Margaret Killjoy (0:50)

Oh, that seems bad.

Garrison Davis (0:52)

Yeah, it does seem bad.

Especially in this case, like it's an attempt to drive autonomous left organizing off the internet. And so if people are not familiar, we are talking today about Autisticci Inventati. There's a forward slash in between those two groups because on the 26th of August, the Office of Foreign Assets Control added them to a list of specially designated global terrorist groups because it alleged that A-I services were designed to facilitate violent attacks. I think I'm going to refer to them as A-I just for brevity, and also because I don't want to use A-I because sadly, that's already taken.

Margaret Killjoy (1:34)

That's what I was thinking too, is I'm either going to call them Autisticci or A-I.

Garrison Davis (1:39)

Yeah. So we can go through a little bit of blow-by-blow of what's happened since then in a minute. But I first thought, Margaret, perhaps you could explain a little bit about the role this organization played. Why does it have a forward slash in its name? When did it come about and where's it from?

Margaret Killjoy (1:54)

Yeah. So there is a group that is made up of two groups. And the name of the single group is Autisticci slash Inventati. And you might be able to guess that the two groups that make it up are Autisticci and Inventati.

They've been around since 2001 I want to say March 2001 If I was at the right place in my own script, I would be able to tell you that for certain.

And they came about during the Altra Globalization Movement, which is something that I've talked about a bit on my show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. And it is one of the things that, I mean, if you were there, you know what I'm talking about. But basically, there was a massive movement against the stripping of resources from the developing world by the developed world. There was basically a massive attempt by people all over the world, kind of spurred on by the Zapatistas and Chiapas, to get everyone together to say stop using free trade agreements to take all of the wealth of the global south and give it to the global north. It's a really important idea to wrap your head around, but complicated right now in this era where tariffs are the bad thing and free trade is the lesser evil. Right? We weren't fighting against... This is the movement that I came up in. We weren't fighting specifically against free trade, although we were fighting against the free trade agreements, so much as specifically that we were fighting for fair trade and we were fighting for people getting paid decently and stopping the economic extraction of the world.

Garrison Davis (3:24)

Fair trade is a proper noun, right? But it's also a concept and they differ, and that's all I think I need to say about it.

Margaret Killjoy (3:30)

Yeah.

So during this period, activists from all over the world created all of these massive protests, bringing people all together and creating horizontal decision-making structures and doing all this important work. And one of the things that came of that, for better and for worse, is the concept of social media. We can trace it directly back to the hacking groups of this era. Community journalists, citizen journalists would go out and work with especially something called Indy Media.

Garrison Davis (3:59)

Yeah.

Margaret Killjoy (3:59)

And they would go out and they would film what was happening. And so there was this international network of people who created a structure called Indy Media where Indy has like INDY media, right? And be able to report on what was happening in their regions, but have it all network together. And it kind of created microblogging, which is what created Twitter. And there's actually like direct lineages with some of the people. So sorry about that, that we did that. I was a part of Indy Media for a long time.