Autistici/Inventati

» see autistici.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The server went online in March 2001. Behind it were two Italian groups who had found each other: a set of hackers around the LOA hacklab in Milan, and a group of Florentine citizen journalists who called themselves the sgamati. Their own description of the origin, still sitting on the homepage in its final week, says A/I was born from an encounter of individuals and collectives of the autonomous anticapitalist movement who were interested in technology. The name is two words because it was two projects that stopped being two projects.

What they ran was unglamorous infrastructure. Email, mailing lists, web space, chat, video calls, and NoBlogs, a WordPress platform for people who wanted to publish. Every piece of it was free and funded by donations alone, run by volunteers who stated plainly that they took no compensation for the work. The services were strictly non-commercial by policy, and the policy was enforced by hand.

Getting an account was not a signup form. Every request was read by a volunteer and answered in what the site called a dialogical form, meaning somebody wrote back and you had a conversation. The precondition was political: you had to agree with a manifesto that opposed fascism, militarism, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and the volunteers reserved the right to decide whether they felt an affinity with you. Requests were anonymized and then destroyed, so the provider interviewed every applicant and kept nothing from the interview.

Which made it a target for twenty five years, and it kept surviving. In 2004 and 2005 the Italian Postal Police compromised the main server by obtaining encryption keys from Aruba, the company whose rack it sat in, with roughly 30,000 email users on it at the time. July 2007 brought a takedown of NoBlogs under Italian law 38/2006, and in November 2010 the Oslo police seized a machine holding data on about 7,000 users. Every one of those was a direct attack on the thing itself, and A/I was still there afterward.

~ the case file ~

~ the volunteer layer ~

The operation was thinner than it sounds, and the thinness is what explains the ending. There were no salaries and no corporate parent. There was a bank account at Banca Etica that received donations, a domain name, and a group of people doing systems administration in their own time on top of other jobs.

That structure is what let a volunteer project outlast police raids. A seizure takes a server, and a server can be rebuilt from a backup by people who are not being paid to care. What the structure could not absorb was an attack on the two pieces that were not technical, which is exactly where 2026 landed.

~ what sixteen thousand mailboxes were ~

I was never going to have an account here, and the policy is the reason. A/I vetted every applicant for political affinity with an Italian autonomist tradition, by hand, in conversation. I build computer vision systems in Ankara and found out this collective existed because I keep a list of dead websites, and that is not the kind of affinity the manifesto was screening for. My twenty five years were spent on the same internet, in a country with its own long history of blocked sites, never once needing the thing A/I was built to be.

The final inventory is what makes the scale legible: about 16,000 mailboxes and roughly 10,000 blogs, plus some 1,500 websites and 5,500 mailing lists. Those are not abandoned accounts from a dead decade, they were live when the domain stopped resolving, which means several thousand small organizations across Europe lost their archives and their mailing list in the same week.

~ the sanctions ~

On 26 August 2026 the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Autistici/Inventati a specially designated global terrorist, on the stated grounds that it supported antifa cells and other far-left violent actors. A/I was a volunteer-run Italian email and blog host with no US operations. The designation attached to it anyway, and the practical effect of an OFAC listing is that institutions outside the United States stop transacting with you rather than risk their own exposure.

The sequence after that took eleven days. On 28 August the NoBlogs platform was defaced, with the banner rewritten to read TrumpBlogs. On 1 September Banca Etica publicly confirmed it had suspended the collective's bank account. The autistici.org domain was taken out of the DNS. On 6 September A/I announced it was closing and discontinuing every service, citing the legal and financial consequences of the designation. Both autistici.org and inventati.org fail to resolve today.

~ the day the dns went ~

One detail in the archive fixes the order of events. The crawl record for autistici.org stops dead on 27 August 2026, the day after the designation, and by then a banner had been pasted over the masthead: U.S. SANCTIONS AGAINST THE A/I COLLECTIVE. There is nothing after it. By 6 September, when the collective announced its own closure, its website was no longer reachable to be crawled, so the announcement had to be made somewhere other than the site it was about. The domain died ten days before the project did.

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