Nineteen days before the U.S. sanctions deadline, Autistici/Inventati is shutting down.
For twenty-five years, A/I built infrastructure for people who understood that privacy, autonomy and resistance require more than good intentions. Now a government order has made keeping that infrastructure alive untenable.
There is grief in this. There should also be fury.
Because fascism does not arrive only as boots in the street. Sometimes it arrives as a designation, a compliance deadline, a terrified service provider, a bank account that suddenly stops working. Bureaucracy has always been one of authoritarianism’s favorite costumes. The paperwork looks terribly respectable while the walls close in.
And this cannot remain a problem for “the nerds.” People organizing in every sphere need to understand what autonomous infrastructure means, why it matters, and what happens when we leave it to a tiny number of exhausted technical collectives to keep the lights on for everyone else.
We need to become the thousand servers. Now.
If one autonomous project can be isolated, there should be ten more behind it. A hundred. A thousand. This should be the moment radical hosting, federated services, community servers, privacy infrastructure and collectively controlled networks begin flourishing, not retreating. Build them in basements, social centers, infoshops, collectives, cooperatives and wherever else people can keep a machine humming and a cable plugged into the wall.
The lesson cannot be that autonomous infrastructure was too dangerous to maintain.
The lesson has to be that we did not have nearly enough of it.
We ❤️ A/I. We are heartbroken to see it end this way. And we refuse to treat its shutdown as the end of the idea it spent twenty-five years proving was possible.
Use the logo and banner provided by @subvertising to keep their memory alive. Let's not forget this by next week!
Goodbye, A/I. Not farewell.
Read our full report:
https://sabot.media/post/ai-shuts-down
campaign page: https://sabot.media/campaigns/autistici-inventati
#AutisticiInventati #Antifa #DigitalRights #Privacy #MutualAid #AutonomousInfrastructure #Fediverse #SelfHosting #RadicalTech #NoBlogs #SabotMedia
