<nettime> Lorenzo Tripodi: Attack to Autistici/Inventati Another step into digital fascism (Substack)

[Patrice Riemens via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Original to (with a nice tee shirt pic):

https://lorenzotripodi.substack.com/p/attack-to-autisticiinventati

Attack to Autistici/Inventati
Another step into digital fascism


Some months ago, I dedicated a post to a topic with a tone apparently different from the usual employed in this Substack, less descriptive or phenomenological, and more focused on advocating for action. Specifically, worried by the increasing concentration of power in the hands of a few tech billionaires and their platforms, I was calling for going back to develop technological alternatives and reclaim socially owned media. “We need a positive network effect. We need to build new non-centralised, non-cooptable, and non-controllable infrastructures to establish new counter-platforms” was one of the naive statements I wrote there. How gullible my proposition. More IT-skilled friends have since explained to me how unlikely my hope is and how close we are to losing our ability to counterbalance the hegemony of such a concentration of capital establishing a new techno-feudal order on the infosphere, both in the technological and algorithmic infrastructure. But we don’t just face an objective difficulty in establishing alternative infrastructures and platforms; we also see the criminalisation and disintegration of the few, fragile, and imperfect existing attempts to create and run such alternative infrastructures, such as the US’s recent designation of Autistici / Inventati as an international terrorist organisation. It is an experience limited and fragile, struggling for years to provide safe webspace and communication tools to activists and alternative media, whose value is more symbolic than concrete, facing the giant monopolising platforms and their immense audiences, but it still represents one of the few experiments that attempted to imagine alternative forms in such a crucial domain. What happened is well explained in a post by Sabot Media republished by A/I:

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( >snip<. cf the nettime post by Geert L)

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It is particularly shocking to me to learn what is happening as I have been, if not factually, somehow emotionally supporting A/I since the early 2000, I have many friends concretely involved in the development of the infrastructure, I have been part of the social movements envisioning, discussing, implementing, and finally using massively, such a platform, and I find now myself being literally associated with a terrorist organisation. And I am happy to fully claim my affiliation with such terrorists, actually. If imagining an independent, community driven informational infrastructure defending the privacy of activists and experimenting autonomous development of media environments is a crime, I am a criminal, or at the very least an accomplice .

It is time for everybody to speak out, to tell the history of A/I, to build a coalition to defend it, to preserve its legacy (and back ups its archives!). And it is time to talk again about how to defend , multiply and re-legitimise autonomous spaces of communication, creation and political agency out of their totalitarian system.

PS: While I am clicking to publish this post, I just got the news that the domain Autistici.org has been seized and it is not online anymore. What is worst, is that at stake here is not just the right to develop alternative media platform. It is the established fact that being antifascist (or Palestinian, for that matter) is equated to be a terrorist by default.

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