Keep the Internet free!
“The structure of power behaves like a spider weaving its web to capture insects and immobilize them; but those same insects, moving along the threads of that very web, can use it from below as a tool to connect with one another, communicate, and organize their own liberation.”
- Aldo Braibanti
There was a dream, in the beginning. The web as a horizontal space, as a fabric of non-hierarchical connections, where knowledge circulated freely and voices needed no permission to be heard. The dream became reality, and then something broke. From two sides, simultaneously.
On one hand, political power realized that the internet could be a formidable tool of control: mass surveillance, algorithmic disinformation, manipulation of public opinion. No longer connecting, but dividing. No longer emancipating, but taming. Western democracies learned the lesson quickly, and authoritarian regimes perfected it.
On the other hand, the market made its triumphant entrance. A handful of platforms have transformed the global public square into a monitored 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 internet and turned most of it into a trap for predators who ride on attention and turn it into value.
Autistici/Inventati stands exactly on the opposite side.
We are a collective of digital activists, anti-fascists, and anti-capitalists. We believe in technology that is not a shackle but a tool for liberation. Where emails remain sealed letters, not open files. Where hosting is not a cage but a refuge for uncomfortable ideas, for debates that the market won’t buy and the state won’t rein in.
We don’t ask for unnecessary data. We don’t censor content in advance. If the law requires us to remove something, we do so—and then we fight to bring it back to life. Our boundary is the law; our compass is freedom. The State Department has unjustly designated us as terrorists. It would like to freeze our servers and our accounts with the stroke of a pen from Washington. They’re trying to wipe us out with a unilateral decree—an arbitrary one. But the administrative act of a predatory nation cannot extinguish a horizon: our code continues to chart paths of autonomy.
Today we are David against Goliath. But it’s not our survival that’s at stake—it’s the future of the internet.
That’s enough.
We can build the internet that doesn’t yet exist together. Server by server, connection by connection. It won’t be easy: it will be an open worksite—ours, free, unmediated by profit, and untamed by power.
Let’s reclaim the web. Let’s design and expand the alternative. We are the sign that the web can become a better place—not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary.