Keep the Internet free!
“The structure of power behaves like a spider that weaves its web to catch and immobilize insects; but those very insects, moving along the threads of the same web, can use it from below as a tool to connect with one another, to communicate and to organize their liberation.”
- Aldo Braibanti
There was a dream, in the beginning. The net as a horizontal space, as a fabric of non-hierarchical connections, where knowledge circulated freely and voices did not need permission to be heard. The dream became reality, and then something broke. From two sides, simultaneously.
On one side, political power realized that the net could be a formidable instrument of control: mass surveillance, algorithmic disinformation, manipulation of consent. No longer to connect, but to divide. No longer to emancipate, but to domesticate. Western democracies learned the lesson early, and authoritarian regimes perfected it.
On the other side, the market made its triumphant entry. A few platforms have turned the global public square into a surveilled shopping mall. Where every click is a commodity, every relationship a data point to be extracted, every thought an algorithm to be optimized for profit. They took the net and turned most of it into a trap for predators who ride attention and turn it into value.
Autistici/Inventati stands on the exact opposite side.
We are a collective of digital activists, antifascists and anticapitalists. We believe in a technology that is not a shackle but a tool of liberation. Where emails remain sealed letters, not open dossiers. Where hosting is not a cage but a refuge for uncomfortable ideas, for debates that the market does not buy and the State does not harness.
We do not ask for unnecessary data. We do not censor content a priori. When the law asks us to remove something, we do — and then we fight so that it may live again. Our boundary is legality, our compass is freedom.
The State Department has unjustly designated us as terrorists. It would like to freeze our servers and our accounts with a stroke of a pen from Washington. It is trying to erase us with a unilateral decree. Arbitrary. But the administrative act of a predatory state does not extinguish a horizon: our code continues to chart paths of autonomy.
Today we are David against Goliath. But it is not our survival that is at stake: it is the future of the internet.
Enough.
The internet that does not exist yet we can build together. Server after server, relationship after relationship. It will not be a paradise: it will be an open construction site, ours, free — not mediated by profit, not domesticated by power.
Let’s take back the net.