Toilet Duties
Ginox
I was raised with computers from an early age, like many of those born midway through the 1970s. The VIC-20 and Commodore 64 were released when I was around eight. Like many of that generation I was brought up on TV movies, cartoons and computers. I remember being fascinated by the imagery of awful TV series like Whiz Kids or Riptide, and recall an episode of Simon & Simon in which a young hacker, like the one in War Games, broke into a bank. Out of all this American trash I remember this rubbish specifically, and I believe this to be indicative of the fact that it affected my imagination.
In addition I was also a huge fan of the Edison Twins. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but it’s a fact. I’ve always been fascinated by laboratories, those enclosed gardens, hortus conclusus, where you focus yourself and shut everything else out. That must have been what it was like in the alchemist’s closet. My interest has not been consistent over time: around fourteen or fifteen I was certainly maladjusted but not a PC nerd – computers had ceased to be of interest. Instead I had gotten into music, the punk and hardcore scene, and was fascinated by the mechanics of the self-managed spaces mainly because of their experimental nature, and whether this took social or technological form was a secondary consideration for me. If one really wants to draw a parallel the attitude is broadly similar: curiosity, the desire to take apart and reassemble the world, to make one’s own decisions. And that, in my view, should be the purpose of every educational and pedagogical process, and is the only way to develop. I went to a Liceo Classico, a high school for humanities, and then studied History in University without completing it. Afterwards I returned to hacking for a series of reasons which could be described as political or existential.
In 1998, like many others, I was shaken by the affair involving Sole, Baleno, Silvano and Enrico(1). Personally I came to a series of realizations. I sensed that the thread around which my life was spun – people, collectives, groups and projects – was extremely fragile. Not because suicide must necessarily express fragility, quite the opposite: as far as I was concerned the problem was that our structures were so weak that individuals were forced into gestures both momentous and desperate. The unwilling protagonists of that affair were lynched in the media because we were incapable of countering the version propagated with a story of our own. Although we meant well our resources and structures were completely inadequate, not just for a revolution but even for basic survival within a social context where you will be crushed as soon as there’s money at stake.
The high speed train corridor in the Susa Valley, and the whole story of the TAV in Italy, are symptomatic of this modus operandi and an interesting example of the paradigm of technology in the service of money. I won’t repeat here the arguments of those in Italy who have criticized the TAV, but I became interested again in technology and technics (2) during that period because our world was being built around it, and we were being crushed by it. Meaning was redefined solely to their benefit. Technics and technology needed first of all to be understood in their totality, as an ideology – because they are never neutral – but also had to be investigated practically. The last exams I sat in my History degree were those related to social anthropology, history of political doctrines, and moral philosophy. Then I transferred department and enrolled in computer science (which once again I didn’t finish!). Not coming from an especially wealthy family, I had worked from twenty-one onwards and this, in addition to causing me much annoyance, provided me with firsthand experience and the stimulus to examine technology within productive and financial processes. My encounter with the Hackmeeting community took place in ’98 at the first HackIT – the Italian Hackmeeting – in Florence, even if I didn’t know any of those present. I knew no-one really until after HackIT in Rome in 2000, although I had hung around with all of them. Due to both shyness and a certain laziness I’m slow to become part of a group, moreover my 1980s side left me with a love for “plans which come together”. Thus I usually end up looking after logistical and technical matters. This element involves very little sociality; it’s enough that everything functions correctly. I am a great fan of bathroom cleanliness; the people who I respect the most I have gotten to know cleaning the toilets. No one ever wants to clean the bogs because it’s not a gratifying activity, but nonetheless they must be cleaned. Whoever cleans the bog thus confronts one of self-management’s main problems. During that time I wondered to myself how I could contribute to the growth of a collective subject despite being someone who is quite solitary, bashful, not too accustomed to group work, and rather shaped by the philosophy of toilet duty.
To understand the meaning of the question you must consider that since adolescence I have been a lover of martial arts and combat sports. I have nurtured a deep fascination with some aspects of traditional Japanese culture, tripping out on that luxurious and vital artistic period which was Ukiyoe(3), and the first time I saw the archival images of Zengakuren(4) occupying Shinjuku station I went through a wave of emotion, and indeed some sexual excitement, at their ability to move together, as one.
Now that the personality has been placed in context, let me try and illustrate my mental cogitations, which must be taken with a grain of salt. Or rather they should be taken as the words of a 35 year old who has half his body tattooed with tacky Japanese emblems and likes to roll about on the ground fighting, covering himself with cuts and scratches.
Judo has a motto which sounds positivistic, like something from days gone by, not at all postmodern and a touch simplistic. But this, I believe, is so that even kids can grasp it: Going Forward, Shining Together.
It sounds like a slogan for a secular scout group, but in fact within judo instruction it has a pretty basic meaning. The capacity for growth as a group comes from the whole: not through the celebration of individuals in competition, nor from any vanguard, but indeed from everyone together.
And it’s only in this way that we grow individually; but at the same time every individual has their importance, because without them an experience would be missing, and it is through experience of practice that the group evolves. In Judo all this has been distorted by competitiveness, which increases the ego and destroys the group to glorify the champion – but that’s another story. To put it in anthropological terms it would be like saying that man is a symbolic animal determined by sociality. Not just a banal social animal, but one who processes symbols and lives inserted in a context. The nature of this context influences our capacity to develop within it. In a world where two thirds of humanity struggles for, or just doesn’t get, the minimum to survive, the context is repellent and progress impossible. Analyzed through the pedagogical criteria of Judo, we suck.
So that was more or less my idea when I got involved with A/I. A place like a Dojo, a gym, in which one can get the skills to combine experience. But also something more, a place in which sharing of knowledge takes place almost by osmosis, even if the subject is never posed directly, by virtue of the fact that there are others around you who use the same tools.
Starting from a structure dedicated ultimately to logistical and strategic tasks in the field of communication, and achieving something which enables cultural change and collective growth. Without loading meanings on it from on high, but rather allowing that meaning to emerge from the whole. I can’t really put it any better than that, but I hope I’ve made myself clear.
I got to know A/I by hanging around those spaces in which the collective was founded: the hacklabs, Hackmeeting, and the self-managed spaces, around the year 2000. From my point of view the project had a relatively brief period of gestation; I joined the mailing list discussing its creation in September 2000 and by June 2001 it had already been publicly presented at the Hackmeeting in Catania.
A few weeks later we were in Genoa to set up the media center, and for me this exemplified the purpose of the project. Give energy to a movement, even if ridden with failings, strife and unceasing rows, because inside there were also people who were really worth it, and who drew from that humus the strength to live and grow, and in them there was the hope that the group could change and become stronger.
For me that’s what some Judo teachers called higher level Judo. The basic level is physical training, and even if it gets you to the Olympics it will always be limited. The higher level is the application of judo to life. Genoa was a huge defeat foretold, even if none of us expected to finish in a trap where the level of violence on the part of the security forces would be so high.
From a human point of view it was an extremely powerful experience, and for some a sort of pact sealed with tears, CS gas, blood and wounds. But the movement didn’t survive, individuals denied the group their strength exactly in the moment, perhaps, in which it was most needed, and after the parade of the Social Forum through Florence there was no longer the sensation that there existed something bigger, a whole.
This experience reinforced my conviction that the movement had been weak, and that it was necessary to create situations capable of providing at least a rock to which one could hold on so as not to be washed away by the waves. Realistically, A/I was not in a position to do more than that. That was the climax for me and has remained the character/gist of the project: grow when the movement grows, resist and be the rock when the movement explodes or implodes in on itself. So far it’s worked, I think. In Aikido you fall continuously, in Judo as well – the first thing you are taught is to fall and get back up.
Fall and get back up. Fall and get back up.
Regarding the subsequent controversies and various crackdowns I don’t know what to add which hasn’t already been written in some communique. It’s just the usual repression, which usually works out ok, we’ve never had really big problems. We perform a role which is not so easy to attack morally or ethically, and we are relatively old, don’t panic on hearing the first bark, and have good lawyers.
Likewise as regards more recent history I don’t have that much to say because I don’t do that much in A/I any more. Because I can’t stand spending so much time in front of the computer and am very focused on the age-old problem of cleaning the bog.
1. Sole and Baleno were two anarchists who committed suicide whilst under investigation for a series of attacks on the high speed train system (TAV), for which they would be posthumously exonerated. Baleno killed himself in prison, as did Sole some months later in a community where she was placed whilst awaiting trial. Silvano is the only one of those accused still alive. Enrico, president of the community and a friend of Sole, killed himself some months after her.
2. Technics here refers to the broad range of useful arts. Technology is understood as technique developed in the framework of industrialization.
3. A Japanese artistic movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Usually it is presented as “pictures of the floating world”. I really like an artist named Kuniyoshi who appears to have been somewhat flash and had a tattooed back. During this period, the Japanese tattoo as we imagine it today spread as a minor and somewhat extreme artistic form of Ukiyo-e. It was not tightly linked with the Yakuza, the Japanese Mafia, something which would happen only later after the second world war.
4. The Zengakuren were the student movement in Japan around 1968. In October ’68, in cooperation with some workers, they occupied Shinjuku station, a sort of symbol of westernized post-war Japan. Three days of street-fights followed, then 1968 ended, 1969 began, and with it that void which is contemporary Japan.
