Autistici/Inventati

And I often wonder if this is sort of where the, like the, let's call them the puritanicals.

And I don't want to group everybody together, but for lack of a better term and for lack of time, like the Amish, the Quakers, the Shakers, what you might consider kind of offbeat fundamentalist religious groups that sort of don't mix with the normal human population, maybe they have the right idea.

I've said this before.

And maybe it was whenever it was that these guys started doing what they were doing, maybe what they saw was something like this in their society.

And this we're talking, these groups were formed a hundred, you know, a hundred years ago, 200, 300, 400, but who knows some of them longer than others.

I'm just saying that it was probably these groups were around before electricity.

So it makes me wonder, was there something going on in general society where people Who would become the Amish said, nope, not going to do it.

I am not interested in anything that you dudes and dudettes have to offer.

Past contributor and a big help to the show, Ed Sutton, has what he calls a returning guest suggestion, Stefania Maurizi, who's been on This Is Hell twice in the past and has worked with Julian Assange and his organization, WikiLeaks, since two thousand and nine, teaming up with large groups of international media to cover and investigate all of WikiLeaks' secret dominant, uh, documents.

Ed says he has a new English, English language article out about Autistici Inventati at Il Fatto Quotidiano.

So that first word is like us-- autistic with an I, and then slash invent with an A-T-I.

Hope you're doing great.

It emerged twenty-five years ago from the utopian vision of the internet as a tool for liberation and the sharing of knowledge.

In this era of big tech, of social media, and its algorithms designed to keep users glued to their screens while siphoning off their personal data to resell for profit, this collective seems almost out of step with the times.

They call them Autistici Inventati, and they have just come under fire from the US government.

Specifically, the Trump administration has likened them to the digital arm of Al-Qaeda, and in an unprecedented move, just added them to the list of global terrorist organizations, accusing them of providing digital services used by, among others, violent far-left American activists like Antifa, Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

It started from the same autonomous, anarchistic culture, but with kinda different people doing kinda 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.

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.

In Italy, you're not short on ideologies that fit that framework, and I'm kinda jealous.

Um, and like things happened because of it.

So on August 26th, the U S department of state and the treasury designated a volunteer tech collective behind a popular activist blogging platform, a terrorist organization, uh, Autistici Inventati? I hope that's the Italian there.

Right? A slash I is what it's...

Autistici? Weird.

A category created by former President George W. Bush...

in an executive order weeks after the 9-11 attacks.

Shortly thereafter, autistici inventati lost their domain, autistici.org, and had their Italian bank account closed due to the threat of U.S. sanctions.

Noblogs was hacked on August 28th, two days after the terrorism designation.