We translate and republish this text from Connessioni Precarie on the Trump administration’s attack on Autistici/Inventati. Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italy-based group that provided a platform, internet support, and communication tools to collectives and grassroots organizations, among which is also the TSS Platform.
The Trump administration’s attack on Autistici/Inventati is not simply an attack on an organization that, for twenty-five years, has provided independent digital services. It is an attack on the infrastructures that make it possible to organize, communicate, and build conflict against the misery of a present marked by war, racism, patriarchy, and climate crisis. And therefore it concerns all of us.
Thousands of associations and movement organizations – in Italy and around the world – have used A/I’s services over the years. Among them is also the Transnational Social Strike Platform, of which we are part.
Despite this, we are seeing a difficulty in building a collective response, that has not yet materialized.
Over the twenty-five years of its existence, Autistici/Inventati has built essential tools for autonomy: email, hosting, and communication spaces for a plurality of social, associative, and movement networks. One might think its contribution was merely “technical”: A/I’s activities did not consist in directly intervening in the substance of the issues that, from Genoa’s G8 in 2001 onward, have animated political and movement debates, but in creating the conditions for that discourse to be produced and circulated.
Precisely in this sense, A/I’s contribution was something more, because making communication possible without being entirely dependent on large proprietary platforms and the logics underlying them, and making its knowledge and expertise available to those who, all over the world, are fighting for the radical transformation of the existing order, is itself a political practice. It is exactly this autonomy that has been targeted.
The U.S. designation as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” activated a sanctions mechanism capable of producing immediate consequences far beyond the borders of the United States. In Italy, it also led to the closure of A/I’s account at Banca Etica, which faced the possibility of being excluded from international payment networks and therefore of seeing its own operations compromised. An administrative decision taken in the United States was sufficient to interrupt economic relationships and essential infrastructures thousands of kilometers away.
This episode shows the transnational scale on which political and economic power is exercised today. Through financial, technological, and commercial infrastructures, a decision made in the United States can produce immediate consequences far beyond its borders. While forms of political and institutional mediation are weakened, sanctions, financial networks, digital platforms, and administrative mechanisms become instruments through which global power relations directly affect the material possibilities of communicating, organizing, and acting. In this case, the power of the Trump administration to carry its ideological battle against the “antifa” movement (whatever that movement may be) through to the end has prevailed.
The closure of A/I confronts us with an urgency that is not technical but political. The urgency of building not only other ways of inhabiting the digital space while, as far as possible, freeing ourselves from control, algorithmic surveillance, and the mechanisms of the market, but also of building forms of transnational political organization and communication against capitalist command.
