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

Margaret Killjoy (0:01)

Cool Zone Media 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 Killjoy, 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 US 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 chow if you listen to old stand-up comedy, right? 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 it on 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. But there's still so much more to know about Italian hackers.

In the 1990s, you had BBS bulletin board systems, which were little microinternets you had to get your computer dial in to. 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. And radical BBS were joined in a network, the European Counter Network, that worked to unite the European 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 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.

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 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 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. 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.