On September 6, 2026, the historic Autistici/Inventati (A/I) collective was forced to announce its permanent shutdown. This is the officially state-organized destruction of one of the longest-running and most trusted digital self-defense infrastructures the European libertarian movement has known.

For 25 years, A/I operated as a non-profit, self-managed infrastructure providing email, hosting, blogs, mailing lists, etc. Their principle was “socializzare saperi senza fondare poteri” (“sharing knowledge without establishing power”). It supported anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, feminist and queer projects, independent media, and thousands of activists who had nowhere else to entrust their communications. It was not yet another startup with a questionable “privacy policy” buried in the fine print, but an infrastructure created by comrades, for the needs of the movement.

The events of the past few weeks are indicative of the authoritarianism that is turning the digital world—and not only the digital world—into a dystopia. On August 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on A/I, designating it as a “global terrorist organization”, based on allegations that the collective itself has thoroughly refuted. A few days later, Banca Etica—a bank that markets itself as “ethical” and friendly to the social economy—suspended and subsequently unilaterally closed A/I’s account, while holding funds that had been raised through donations from thousands of people and collectives. Without access to its funds, unable to pay its providers, and with the autistici.org domain having already become inaccessible without warning, A/I ultimately decided to shut down in order to protect its members and users from further exposure to state repression.

This story is not just about an organization in Italy. It exposes, in the starkest possible way, how the internet operates today: as an infrastructure of control, rather than liberation. The accusation of “terrorism” is now being used openly to criminalize the very idea of digital privacy and anonymity. The financial system—banks, payment processors, and even banks that present themselves as “alternative”—acts as an extension of state repression, capable of economically strangling any project deemed troublesome, without trial, without evidence, and without even a warning. The infrastructure of the internet itself—domains, DNS, hosting—remains concentrated in a few hands, always ready to carry out the next blocking order.

This precedent is dangerous for all of us. If a project like A/I—transparent, non-profit, with 25 years of history—can disappear within two weeks with the signature of a state official, then no autonomous solidarity infrastructure is safe. The right to encrypted, anonymous communication is not a luxury for “paranoids”; it is a prerequisite for the survival of movements, collectives, and individuals who find themselves in the crosshairs of states and the fascist international that has been assembled by the Trump regime and billionaires and tech bros such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. It is also everyone’s right to choose not to have all of their communications monitored by corporations or the state. The attack on A/I is an attack on precisely that right.

That is why we insist: we need an internet free from state and capital. Decentralized, self-managed infrastructures; free software; solidarity networks among hacklabs and collectives that share knowledge, expertise, and resources instead of depending on corporate or state server farms; digital self-defense tools built by people who are trusted by the people who use them, rather than by platforms that sell data or comply with every government request. Surveillance, repression, and control are all components of the power we seek to abolish.

We send our solidarity to Autistici/Inventati, to its members, and to all the communities it supported for 25 years. The “Stay human” you left behind will continue to inspire us. Your shutdown is not a defeat for the movement, but a reminder that we must build more infrastructures, more distributed and harder to attack, here in Thessaloniki and everywhere. The struggle continues.

gizmo_lab