Supporting Autistici/Inventati: An act of R*esistance¹ and a call to relaunch the struggle

A Statement by Anarchists for Palestine in Support of Autistici/Inventati

“We stand in solidarity with our comrades at Autistici/Inventati, attacked by the fascist monster that is the Trump regime precisely because A/I have digitally empowered many of us in our anti-fascism and strengthened our solidarity networks.
There are so many of us. Let’s make it count. R*esist.1“

– A4P comrades, September 2026

It was 2001 and — even though some of us were still young — many were already active and experiencing firsthand how the world was changing, and how digital technology was going to make distance shrink drastically: In this new reality, we could connect with anyone anywhere in the world, without barriers, without borders, and anonymously. We could call each other, write each other, exchange ideas, and find out in real time what was happening around the world.
Saying it like this may sound ridiculous, but the Internet was going to change our lives forever.

For many of us, things like hackmeetings and hacker groups like the Chaos Computer Club were probably difficult things to understand — something for specialists, so to speak — but there was already a strong awareness that we all had an urgent need to understand what was happening.
So we learned how to set up a blog, encrypt our communications, and use words full of technical jargon without having any real training or understanding of how things actually worked.
We did all of this in response to a single need: to communicate and get to know one another while remaining free, and to BE YOUR OWN MEDIA — words that have become one of our core principles ever since.

Organizing a solidarity dinner, having a mailing list, putting together an anti-repression benefit, building the collective’s blog, attending an assembly… Our “old” militant life was being updated with a “new” one based on sharing these new practices that gave us global visibility.
Of course, that visibility would come at a price. Many of us soon became well aware of this. It became clear with the first raids on Indymedia spaces in 2002, followed by countless shutdowns of accounts and blogs, and the criminalization of collectives simply for their presence online.

And where did Autistici/Inventati fit into all of this?

For our generation, the history of Autistici is almost as old as the Internet itself.
It is a history of discovery: of understanding from the very beginning why and how the Internet was becoming an important part of our lives and of our political organizing.
At the time, a small group of people in our circles — like so many other small groups of people — was developing a new concept: imagining the digital age as a space in which to R*esist and create spaces of autonomy, asserting that digital space could be a bottom-up communication tool, giving everyone the possibility to express themselves freely, outside market logic, outside the restrictions imposed by authorities, in a fluid and non-identitarian form.
That small group were the comrades of the digital collective Autistici/Inventati (aka A/I). Since 2001, A/I were providing free secure digital infrastructure, based on shared anticapitalist, antiracist and antifascist principles.

Without going into the details of how the collective was born and what they did (we’ll leave them to tell this theselves) for all of us who had been involved in political organizing “the old way,” these new concepts of Digital R*esistance represented a new form of radical politics.
As of August 2026, when the Trump regime declared to be “global terrorists” there were around 16,000 email accounts, 10,000 blogs, 5,500 mailing lists, and 1,500 websites set up and used via the A/I system. For 25 years, these have been part of the infrastructure of social movements, as tools of the antifascist movement, archives of collective memory, and resources used by generations of activists, including BIPoC, LGBTQ+ activists, transfeminists, antispeciesists, workers, and many others.

The privacy and anonymity provided by these networks were not simply technical features. They were also forms of protection, allowing people and groups to communicate and organize without constantly exposing themselves to surveillance, harassment, or repression.
The question was clear: How could we avoid being crushed by the new media, by an Internet that was growing inside the belly of the beast?
The key words were R*esistance and Autonomy.
But how could this be done within a system that power itself had created?
This obviously required deep exploration of the digital environment — not only through encryption and legally secure technical solutions, but also through political reflection on the intentions behind them.

Why was digital resistance important?
Why was visibility important while preserving anonymity?

Let us not forget that the digital world does not forgive. It is built on constant innovation and speed, on keeping pace with a society whose needs are perpetually changing.
This was also the challenge of digital resistance that the comrades of A/I were addressing: how do we keep up? How do we preserve content outside market logic and outside the new imaginaries brought about by the rise of social media?

The name on a list

On August 26, 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Autistici/Inventati as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” under Executive Order 13224.
A declaration by the terrorist regime of the “USA”, decision made by a government on a different continent, deciding the fate of an entire generation’s collective work, built by thousands of activists around the world.
This inevitably forces us to reflect on how the system we operate within can possess tools powerful enough to annihilate any will to resist.

Beyond the fact that we will never surrender, it is worth reflecting on how a name on a government list in the “USA” can target a collective of a few dozen people running a communication infrastructure that provides services to a vast number of people — who, when measured against the complexity of the system itself, represent only a tiny fraction.
Perhaps the problem is not that the service was provided to this person or that group. Perhaps the problem lies in the way the service was provided, in the clear and deliberate policy behind every service offered by A/I — namely, that anyone using A/I’s services recognizes themselves in the values of antifascism, antisexism, and antiracism.

And it is certainly worth reflecting on the fact that this system saw a danger in A/I’s activities.
Are we dangerous? Perhaps that means we hit the mark — that we struck so close to the heart of power that A/I’s name ended up on that list. To be dangerous within a logic that sees danger in voices that refuse to conform, in the search for freedom and new languages, means having chosen the path that needed to be followed.

Is all of this really shit? Absolutely.
Is everything lost? Absolutely not.

Twenty-five years of history cannot be erased.

The fact that this entire infrastructure has been shut down following a decision by US authorities is a devastating blow to social movements: to their capacity to communicate, coordinate, organize, preserve their histories, and maintain connections across struggles and generations. It is an immeasurable loss of collective memory and of the networks that made political organizing possible. And perhaps the scale of this loss is not yet fully understood.
What is visible now is the loss of websites, archives, mailing lists, and spaces of expression. What is much harder to see is the operational capacity that disappeared with them: the coordination, communication, relationships, and infrastructure that sustained movements for decades.

The servers may be shut down, but the history they contain, the knowledge they generated, and the relationships built through them do not disappear with them.
But, as always, we will not let ourselves be silenced.

We respond. And we relaunch.

We will make good use of what has been built: by building and supporting more collectives like A/I, by expanding networks of solidarity and resistance, and by strengthening the spaces through which movements can organize, communicate, and resist attempts by states and other authorities to repress, isolate, and silence them.
That history is ours to carry forward. And we should do so by building more collective infrastructures, more autonomous networks, and more spaces for resistance.

We stand in solidarity with our comrades at Autistici/Inventati, attacked by the fascist monster that is the Trump regime precisely because A/I have digitally empowered many of us in our anti-fascism and strengthened our solidarity networks.

There are so many of us. Let’s make it count. R*esist.

_____________
¹ See “The R* Plan: a network of resistant communication“, by Autistici/Inventati, 2005:
“Unwillingly thrown into this scenery, and basing on our experience, we have tried to make out a different way to arrange our services, to re-assert our will to R*esist.”