Go forth and multiply! May 10 - 100 - 1000 servers spark up
In these days of rabid, ideological and groundless repression you have often asked us: “How can we support you?”
The first answer that has come to our minds is: if you want to help, create new spaces online. There are way too few autonomous servers around there, whether for email and web hosting or for any other useful communication tools.
This idea is by no means new. We have been repeating it since March 2001, when A/I began its adventure. Already back then we had started calling for the creation of countless self-managed servers, and with this hope in mind we coined the pseudo-biblical phrase: “Go forth and multiply, the grasshoppers said!”
As much as these words may have sounded like a paranoid cyberpunk prophecy at the time, today they turn out to be an urgent necessity.
Go forth and multiply, then. Copy us. Copy what we’ve done. Copy the code we’ve used. Copy the idea we’ve tried to give shape to. Or just take what you need from us and remix it. If there’s something our adversaries fear and loathe - now, in the past and forever - is our ability to spread the virus of self-management and self-determination, to fractally replicate infrastructures of dissent.
Autistici/Inventati is not only us. Autistici/Inventati may die, but thousands have already been born and thousand more will arise.
And that’s not all. What’s unfolding all around us is a coordinated strategy to escalate repression with the goal of fundamentally changing not only the rules of the game, but its very terrain. This means that what is happening does not concern just a handful of people, but needs to be shared and faced collectively and as widely as possible - by individuals, autonomous projects, organizations and by the whole society.
What’s at stake is freedom of speech, information and association, as well as the sheer existence of infrastructure capable of resisting authoritarianism (not only in the United States). What’s at stake is the possibility to keep fighting everywhere to defend fundamental commons - like communication infrastructures - from someone’s imperialism.
It’s something well beyond ourselves. It concerns anybody who wants to live without feeling commodified and strives to self-determine their lives and relationships. If we want to resist this advancing techno-fascism, we need a wide international solidarity effort to build frameworks protecting autonomous infrastructure and spaces that are free from any authoritarian intent.
So, let’s get back to the question we started with: we are thankful to all of you who have been telling the story of what’s happened to us. We are grateful for the wide solidarity that you’ve shown to us and for your ability to understand that what’s happened to us is but one small step in the cascade of events that will probably unfold, certainly for worse, but perhaps also for better.
This vision fills our hearts. But now it’s time to take a step further, to push our imagination beyond the shrinking horizons of possibility these dark times force on us. Our hope is that this attack on the freedom of networks unleashes powerful and creative collective resistance. May a thousand platforms bloom, may a thousand hacktivist collectives be born, may a thousand servers spark up! May the end of A/I produce a myriad instrastructures of dissent as we could never imagine before.
Go forth and multiply, the grasshoppers said! And while you’re at it, try and imagine a world of struggle, resistance and self-management the likes of which you have never seen.
AUTISTICI/INVENTATI COLLECTIVE