The Foundation
The next months were key to this story, but shedding light on them and establishing the facts does not prove easy – nor perhaps even useful. The historical account (#memoria) of Autistici is continuously undermined by the stories of Inventati, and our interviews often finish with such phrases as:
Cojote: It was 2000, no, no, no, it was 2001, wait let’s see… ah yes (sigh). It was May.
Mille: …it’s possible that someone else remembers it better than me.
Blicero: …Alright I’m probably wrong, maybe the Florentines weren’t at this meeting and instead came to the presentation in September.
Anyway, the legend goes that immediately after the Indymedia meeting (which maybe they didn’t even attend!) and encouraged by comrades from the hacklab, the Florentines got in touch with the Milanese once again. By now it was obvious that they had to ask these young Geeks of Good Hope# for help.
Cojote: At the Thursday night hacklab meetings, I’d made friends with Zeist from Piacenza[fn], and he’d already said good things about LOA. Then all of us, Ferry Byte, Sansa, TheWalrus, Leandro, and the others from the hacklab talked it over again and it seemed like the best solution. In the end, they mentioned us to the Milanese hackers as well.
And so, in November of 2000, LOA received a mysterious email from Inventati. Communication proceeded solely by encrypted email and this explains the speed with which a meeting was organized in Milan in December.
Blicero: I remember that Cojote or Mille asked for my PGP key to send me mail, claiming that they needed to tell me something top secret. It was: “when can we meet?” So we organize this meeting super secret agent style… such a place, such a time, you will recognize me because I’m like so… then they arrive directly at LOA two hours late, in the General Lee – which was Cojote’s rust bucket, it was legendary! – honking in via Niccolini while the pigs who were monitoring the squat watched us come down from LOA flabbergasted. It was absolutely ridiculous…
And so LOA and Sgamati, or Autistici and Inventati, if you prefer, had a date at the new Bulk. They were joined by Void from Bologna. During the mythical dinner at the “La Balena” pizzeria – the only factual element agreed on by all – the Florentines unveiled their seditious plan to the Milanese.
Blicero: In practice what they proposed was to create a server like ECN. The idea at the time was that it wasn’t right that a single server provided services for the whole movement. The initial goal was to duplicate the experience of ECN and encourage others to do likewise. If there were 10 thousand machines it would make it impossible to seize one and thereby block everyone’s communications. Essentially the goal was to start a process of server multiplication. As we talked, it developed greater specificity, but that was the objective at the outset.
Inventati needed not only technical help but also a collaborator who shared their motivations. And maybe because they didn’t know how to set a server up but did know what to do with it, they wanted to offer the same opportunity to every politically active group in their region.
It would enable sites, mailing lists, mailboxes with an ease almost equal to the speed which new activists multiplied themselves, fragments of participation that urgently needed new means of coordination and interaction if they were to continue to exist.#
Blicero: For Inventati, the Florentine element had a more communications based approach to the web. Their main need was a space to host their publishing projects, from Sgamati to Copydown[fn], from Stampa Clandestina[fn] — a newspaper meant to be pasted on the city’s walls — to Spia la Spia[fn] – a project to map security cameras in public spaces. But the proliferation of nodes was a fundamental strategic point for them too.
The computer activists of the greater Milan area not only had the skills, they had the same ideas in the pipeline. Beyond the desire to experiment and put their skills into practice, the young hackers of LOA felt the need for a project of their own outside of ECN. Despite their contribution and some of them having being part of the original Milanese ECN collective, trivial generational issues made them guests – rather than protagonists – of that adventure.
Blicero: For Autistici, they mostly focused on technological relationships and for the Milanese nerds, the big attraction was the opportunity to do something of our own. There was the desire to harvest and multiply the ECN experience and also to pay homage to it in some way, in synergy and not in opposition – indeed people from ECN were involved in the early stages of A/I.
Autistici and Inventati immediately got along well and were in agreement on everything. During dinner, a lot of details were hashed out. Retracing Isole nella Rete’s model, they decided to found a cultural association to manage the server and to give themselves a single name as an association – with each collective remaining separate.
Cojote: They came from hacker circles and had autism as a practice – from there came the name Autistici. We brought with us the content of the Inventati project. From this union of two names we immediately baptized the associative project “Investici,”[fn] but our signature has always been A/I, from the idea of continuing to value both experiences.
The double name is also due to the fact that the Florentines, not believing they would find good, resourceful people and with the desire to solidify their project, had already started a cultural organization and registered the domain Inventati.org.
Cojote: In that period, we scoured Italy in search of tech support, but we also worked to become a real project regardless of what we had found.
At the end of the meeting, they decided to put online a server that would be assembled in LOA. The Milanese willingly accepted to deal with the technological questions, which were their jurisdiction, while the Florentines brought the lists and sublists they managed, like the legendary A-TEAM, which hosted communication projects and followed the Anti-Globalization demonstrations before Indymedia.
On returning home, they had decided not only to construct the server and put it online, but also to meet again in Bologna at the next Indymedia Italy meeting.
Footnotes:
Piacenza:
PGP
Copydown:
Stampa Clandestina:
Spia la Spia:
Investici:
