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free web services such as email, website hosting, mail lists, chat, video conferencing,
and most famously the no-bogs publishing platform. So they don't really organize events or actions
or demonstrations or protests or anything. They simply let people post about what they want to
post about on their website. I think the government's theory is that AI has supplied technological
architecture and services and tools used by organizations that it does identify as violent or
designated. Obviously AI has rejected the description and argues that they're collapsing the
distinction between providing communications infrastructure and actually directing what people
do with it. Great, thank you. And this instance in reference to, and we're going to talk a little bit
more about this, but the Department of State is one of the groups that they have pointed to as,
or one of the movements that they have pointed to as being the focus of this attention or the reason
for this attention is the anti-fascist movement in the United States and anarchist movement in the
United States and probably transnationaly or internationally. But so this falls under the general
auspices in some ways of anti-antifa repression. Yeah, so I would be really interested in hearing
what's your understanding of the expected impact for at least for out-of-stichy and ventati related
to the designation and the related department of the treasuries, OFAC financial sanctions or other
elements. So the legal core of the designation and fallout is economic isolation, property
involving AI that comes within US jurisdiction is blocked. US persons are generally prohibited from
providing funds, goods or services in support of AI or receiving them from the collective unless
OFAC authorizes the transaction. So that gets a little interesting because there are no financial
transactions between users of AI services because they're all free. But OFAC issued what's called
a general license 36 which permits transactions ordinarily necessary to wind down existing relationships
until September 25th. It's not a general permission to begin new relationships or treat the
designation as suspended. It's more of a limited wind down period for institutions and organizations
that do have a current relationship with AI to decide to basically sever those relationships.
The OFAC entry also carries a secondary sanctions warning that gives foreign banks and companies
a powerful reason to cut ties. Even when they're outside of the United States, even when their
own government has not designated AI as a terrorist group, it's called de-risking. Just because AI
was put on this list, they are now a higher risk category for banks and major payment processors
and companies like that. So whether or not any of this has been proven in the court of law or any of
this has any evidence behind it whatsoever, simply because the statement was made by the executive
branch and put into that listing, these companies are going to look at AI as a higher risk and move
to drop them just because of that. We're already seeing consequences. PayPal terminated their account,
the artistiqi.org domain disappeared from ordinary DNS resolutions. The people who handled that,
the public interest registry did confirm to us that it suspended the domain because the domain
itself appeared on the list. Although they said as a US-based registry, it considers the suspension
legally mandatory, which we're not sure about, we're trying to verify that with legal people,
but they claimed that they had to sever the ties. But it is our understanding that it's not a
formal or legal mandate that this be done, it's much more of a pressure campaign or what's called
overcompliance. Also, the bank that AI uses has confirmed that they have temporarily suspended
operations on their account, although they did come out with a firm statement, basically in
support of AI and the work that they do and the idea of a free internet. So they are working with
European institutions to try and figure out a way to not have to cut ties with AI, which is pretty
encouraging to see. So, you know, there's a mixed bag. We have the US registry saying it's legally
mandated that we cut ties and we have this bank in Italy saying we don't want to cut ties and
we're going to figure out a way to not have to do that. I'd like to speak more broadly to the
impact of the designation. According to the US State Department itself, this collective hosts
something like 16,000 mailboxes, 1,500 websites, 5,500 mailing lists, 10,000 blogs on its platform,
and those are blogs for like a free school for anarchist book fairs all across the country
for a radio program, like the final straw. So this is a wide-reaching crackdown that in a single
blow is intended to take a large number of cultural and political projects offline. That's
the way to understand the immediate impact of this is not just as an action targeting a web
provider, but as a way of silencing at least thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people and making
it more difficult for them to communicate with each other and with the public in general.
The way that we described this when we're trying to explain to the public, it's like if a military
is going to carry out an attack on a village, the first thing they try to do is cut off the lines
of communication from the village so that nobody sees what happens there. And this is part of the
process of the US government targeting elements of US society as well as an Italian tech collective.
This is meant to cut off the communications and the access to the general public of a sector of
US society, a cultural and political sector of society in order to be able to intensify crackdowns
on the basis of targeting opposition to fascism. I can say that in our reporting, we have seen a lot
of the fallout that B is talking about, not just fallout to AI themselves, but fallout to their users
of not being able to publish portbacks, not being able to host or talk about their book fair.
I mean the vast majority of no blogs, sites are just updating a community on events, you know,
something simple like that. So it's a real blow to radical, not infrastructure, but the actual
movement itself. It's a real blow to like our ability to freely communicate with each other
and to actually literally organize in our communities. The thing that I'd really like to emphasize
about this designation is that according to the Italian collective themselves, they don't monitor
everything that they publish, you know, everything that they provide a platform for. In an interview,
they recently said that if you have an email address registered with them, you automatically
have the opportunity to set up a blog. And the US government state department is alleging that
that some things appeared on these blogs that the US government doesn't approve of, but that's
probably true of Reddit, of a number of different platforms on the internet where school shooters
or other people post statements or manifestos and those get circulated. So in terms of what's
going on here legally, this is an unprecedented effort to hold a provider responsible for what
appears on a platform and that distinguishes it from other recent designations. The goal is to
cut off communications, but the practice and the legal theory that's taking place here is intended
to set a new precedent specifically rendering anti-fascist speech a target for legal repression.
Yeah, exactly. Like Beja said, AI hands out emails to people that they feel
align with them politically, but once you have that email, anyone can make a blog. So they do not
monitor that. And I think we'll get a bit more into the section 230 aspect of things later, but
another interesting thing that I wanted to bring up is, you know, thinking about this all as a
quote-on-quote legal maneuver has since the beginning of this struck me as very interesting, since
there has been no due process. There has been no evidence presented in a court. There has been no
court proceedings whatsoever. It was just a statement that was published by the State Department,
and it has sort of just been taken as true. And companies are running with the fact that this is
a true thing that AI is a dangerous terrorist group, and they need to sever ties with them
based off of what I would not consider a legal process. The US government now under Trump functions
mostly by executive declaration and by fiat. So that's his representative of the way that the
Trump administration likes to make decisions and to make moves. But the fact that the State Department
can do this using the existing state infrastructure, state power shows the extent to which so many
of the things that the US government does don't depend on a legal process or anything that can be
subject to the checks represented by a court of law such as they might be.
Yeah, that's very well put. And I think that, yeah, I'm going to ask about, and we can explore a
little bit more about section 230 in a bit. I wonder though in the meantime, so both of your
platforms have published responses in the wake of the designation of out-of-stichy in Vintatti.
Would you talk a bit about the technology collective and what they offer in context of the
alter globalization era build out of movement tech and the infrastructure, like some of the
project you've mentioned, like emails and blogs, but talk a little bit about how it fits into a wider
autonomous anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist social ecology. Sure, yeah, I can talk more directly
about AI and what they do and maybe be can jump in on the ecology side of things. So AI came out of
a period when movements understood clearly because of repression that they had just received,
that communication infrastructure was political infrastructure. They were founded again in 2001
in Italy by people coming from the hack labs occupied social centers, autonomous movement spaces,
indie media, the European counter network, the hack meeting scene in Italy. These were spaces
where people were learning Linux, assembling machines from discarded parts, building pirate
networks, and trying their best to share the technical knowledge that they were learning as
opposed to hoarding or sell it. So kind of a funny founding story is that they had the least
technically experienced person deliberately put at the keyboard when they were first installing the
server. And they did that so that they could get the server online in a way that everyone could
understand. Since the beginning the point of AI has been to not just to be themselves a
infrastructure provider, but to inform and educate and teach and show people that not only is this
movement infrastructure necessary, but you can do it yourself too with just a little bit of learning.
And so in our most recent interview with them, their solution to this problem was let's have
a thousand networks, let's have a thousand no blogs, let's have this sort of model of an autonomous
infrastructure web service provider that provides free services to people that they are politically
aligned with. Let's replicate that globally and see what happens. It's not just
commercial infrastructure with nicer politics. It's an entirely different relationship.
As B mentioned, they do all they can to minimize identifying information and the logs that they
keep. They use free software, they finance themselves through volunteer donations and stuff like
that. They don't do any advertising or sale of user data. They operate through political affinity
and collective responsibility rather than pretending that infrastructure exists outside of politics.
So in terms of what they offer, like I said, they offer their main thing as email, but they offer
video conferencing, they offer mailing lists, they offer the no blogs platform once you get an email,
and their services are also always expanding. They have some privacy tools that they offer,
they do streaming, they do whatever they can, and they always offer it for free.
So that relationship that you develop with the service provider is really important because
right now with big tech and the moves that they're making are again not politically neutral.
And so to have an autonomous movement infrastructure is incredibly valuable.
And we as have a media would love to see other people take impetus from this situation to
perhaps learn how to start their own server and learn how to start doing this stuff on their own
because we can't just centralize it out to AI and no blogs. There are tons of other providers
out there, but really this one is the biggest and so this one is the one that's at the top of the
pack getting picked on. And so it's just another signal to me that decentralization and federation is
the way to go and not centralization. I just want to emphasize that this is happening in the context
of a steady clamp down on internet freedoms over the past quarter of a century.
The internet 1.0 that Edwards Noden spoke so eloquently about appreciating gave way to an
internet where corporate providers control and shape the platforms on which we encounter each other
and that algorithms that determine what we can see or what we can think as a consequence.
And the Italian tech collective here was has been holding out another model for what human
relations could be, not profit driven, not controlled by a tech elite but controlled by the
participants in a bottom up in a bottom up way based in self-determination. So this shift that
has happened over the last 25 years is part of power becoming concentrated in a few people's
hands that everybody else is expense. And now that people who use the internet depend largely
on corporate platforms, it's much easier for a state government to carry out censorship of
dissenting views just by pressuring a couple companies to take users off their platforms,
which is something that we saw starting in the late 2000s with a bunch of people being
de-platformed from Facebook and then when Elon Musk bought Twitter, the whole thing sort of went
into overdrive. So another way to understand what's happening here is that now that many of the
platforms through which people communicate are corporate owned and as a consequence,
impose the ideology of a financial elite on the rest of society, the state is trying to get rid
of any other models for how we might relate. Yeah, and I think that that also, that plays out
in an ideological way where that operates according to how the modern capitalist state
envisions people's relationship communication with each other, relationships to each other is that
these should be monetized interactions, but also because the people that are licensed to do the
privatized profit driven interactions are subservient in a lot of ways. They have to be responsive
to the demands of the state for collecting information about users for handing that over if they're
not like either for free so that they continue getting licensed from the state to operate in the ways
that they have or maybe considering the state to be a client as well to whom they can sell user
information or access to their platforms that undermine social movement that would provide
alternatives or show opposition to government policies. Is that an okay way of also adding on there?
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I think just a funny anecdote. One thing that AI said in our discussions was
you know they just can't imagine that someone would like basically open their door to the whole
world and say hey come and build whatever tools you want to build and just let people have
at it for free. They can't conceive of that so they're trying to attack them through means that
they didn't really have a plan for because they haven't faced this exact type of repression before
but it's also interesting to see the right-wing conception of what is going on between AI and its users
versus the reality at hand. Yeah, just a sort of point to that in one of the pieces that
the cyber media put out in the longer piece the server called paranoia. The author does a really
great job of using I think what's available publicly in probably conversation without a
Stichy and Vintatti as well as their book Chaos Plus talks about the way that innovation within
the collective was often driven in response to repression that they faced. They synthesizing
knowledge that they were able to attain from how the state was able to take their infrastructure
and threaten it and then develop an alternative moving forward with those lessons learned with
I think it was like Project R, is that what it was called? Yeah, R and then they throw their
little asterix on there because that's their little logo basically but yeah that came out of
not the first slew of repression that they faced but kind of the second. So in 2004 Italian police
accessed their servers at the commercial hosting company that they were using called a Rupa.
They copied their discs and obtained cryptographic materials. The hosting company concealed what
had happened and AI only discovered the intervention much later through court documents.
So the answer to that was the plan R. They chose to distribute their services across multiple
servers all over the world in different jurisdictions and with different providers so that taking one
machine could not take down the whole project. The plan was to minimize logs and crypt sensitive
data, replicate what needs to remain available and make notes replaceable. This architecture helped
them recover quickly when Norwegian police copied another server in 2010 but as much as they have
been excellent at responding to the repression they've received like I said they have not received
this type of repression before and when you go after the financials and when you go after
I don't know I guess reputation that the collective has and place them on this list calling
the materialist that's that's really hard to like technically defend against. There's nothing
that they can do about the domain the DNS level the domain registry. They can't be their own domain
register you know what I mean there's always so far you can go in being in doing it all yourself
and they have done as much of that as they can but there's only so much technical defense that
they can provide against like the sort of move. If you want to support the final straw radio you can
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thanks for listening thanks to willow whisper for the intro and outro music check our show notes for
a link to their soundcloud. Yeah so I guess going back to the targeting Trump's second administration
is escalated its threats and attacks against anarchist anti-fascist leftist secularist pro bodily
autonomy and abortion pro lgbtqIA groups notably with telegrafting the the national security
presidential memo seven nspm seven which was published in the wake of the gacking of charlie
Kirk could you speak to some of the focuses of nspm seven and how it's how it's been applied into
whom like just to caveat with the de risking that was mentioned this reminds me of a conversation
that I had with members of or with a member of dressed in anarchist black cross talking about how
wrote to hilfa and dressed in abc and other groups that do prisoner support in germany have been
having to deal with debanking because of pressure and designation of prisoners they're doing anti-repression
work for yeah and I can imagine that we're going to see a lot more of it because of the power of
the us globally and if we start taking those actions other countries will follow suit so but in
terms of the s nspm seven that's a separate mechanism from the foreign sanctions imposed on the
AI the political logic overlaps the memorandum directs the joint terrorism task force to investigate
what it describes as organized political violence as a network phenomenon it tells investigators to
look beyond an alleged act to organizations employees funders nonprofits financial relationships
and foreign ties the treasury department has been instructed to trace financial networks the IRS
has been directed to scrutinize tax exempt organizations investigators themselves are told to question
people about organizers and financial sponsorship the memo explicitly places anti capitalism self
described anti-fascism positions on migration race and gender and hostility towards what it
calls traditional views inside its account of the supposed threat and now I think it's important
to be precise it does this memorandum doesn't literally make anti-capitalism or anti-fascism a crime
the United States also does not have a normal statutory domestic terrorist organization designation
system equivalent to the FTO or a foreign terrorist organization list I think more of the danger
in this situation is that political ideology becomes an investigative indicator so instead of
beginning with evidence of a specific offense and working outwards as the legal system usually
operates the state can begin with a political ecosystem and search through its funders
organize organizations relationships publications and communications for a prosecutable theory
so it's fishing critics of the memorandum argue that this framework risks treating affinity as
conspiracy solidarity as financing publishing as radicalization and infrastructure as operational
support whether particular investigations actually do that has to be established case by case
but it is certainly another incredible precedent that's been set
the fact that the United States has a FTO a foreign terrorism designation but doesn't designate
domestic terrorist organizations is central to what's happening here the Trump administration has
been doing the best they can with the laws and policies that they inherited from previous
presidential administrations that haven't been in a situation to pass a lot of new
legislation so mostly they've been working with executive policy and and so since they don't have
the means to designate domestic terror organizations or designate an entire category of human
behavior and activity like resisting fascism as terrorism they've had to do their best with
what exists if there were a domestic terrorism designation they would probably be they would
probably be starting elsewhere but in the absence of that they've been making do as best they can
by targeting a tech collective from outside the United States the publishing projects cultural
projects book fair organizers free schools and others depend on around the United States that's
that's the way to understand what's happening here they they're starting in Europe specifically
and it's no coincidence really that the designations of anti-fascist groups overseas as being
terrorist organizations have targeted specifically anti-fascist groups in Italy and Germany the
historic centers of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s you know that's not lost on the administration
and it should not be lost on us but the fact is that they're trying to do what they can with the
tools that are at their disposal with the intention of hopefully getting control of the legislative
process eventually in order to pass new legislation via which they can target everyone that's
the way to understand how this is simply a step in a much larger plan aimed at suppressing
all kinds of dissent and it's it's been noteworthy that corporate media platforms
liberals and leftists have largely not even noticed or or not acknowledged not understood
the targeting of no blogs and the other infrastructure when this is a step towards setting
precedence that will be used across the political spectrum to target entities that the
administration regards as as opposition service provider vourses user of a service for instance
you know whether it be a web host or I mean an updated version of a web host being a social media
provider for micro blogging or related services like Facebook or X or whatever truth social the
rules are being applied as the technologies are although like updated they're really similar and the
the standards up until this point have not been to punish a service provider for the content that's
published on their platforms without some sort of recourse of pressure at least to depending on
the nature of that the usually the state has gone after the individual posters and oftentimes been
gotten support from the host of that information in the capitalist framework that's pretty normal
people operate under license from the state but I wouldn't wonder if you could talk a little bit about
that provision of the section 230 how it's been understood in terms of web traffic in terms of
freedom of speech by the US government and how this precedent that's being set in this instance
isn't just going to be against the anti-fussites that are like hosting docs information posting docs
information about the Nazis that live next door to you but proponents of the Trumpist agenda
yeah and well yeah eventually anyone so section 230 says that any interactive computer service
generally cannot be treated as the publisher or speaker of information supplied by somebody else
the basic principle is that the person who creates third-party content is ordinarily responsible for
it not the infrastructure that carries it and now you've heard a lot about 230 probably in regards
to big tech companies because they have definitely used it to shield themselves from liability
from some of the stuff that they have allowed on their platforms but section 230 technically applies
to every service provider bigger small so it would apply to AI but it's not necessarily a shield
against OFAC sanctions it expressly does not prevent enforcement of federal criminal law so they're
technically not ignoring or violating section 230 in order to sanction AI they're using a different
legal system there but the spirit of the law being that clearly we can all recognize that just
because I go on Facebook and post some racist screed before going off and committing a mass shooting
does not mean that Facebook should be held responsible for mine and every other
individuals post who might get Facebook in trouble and so we've accepted that to the point of
passing it in law and yet now the exact opposite standard is being applied in that AI is being seen
as the same as publishing the stuff themselves so American law recognizes in ordinary publisher
liability cases the platforms and users are not the same actor a large commercial platforms benefit
enormously from this but when the provider is autonomous or politically committed or privacy
preserving serving radical movements they change legal lanes and they can invoke national security
and sanctions power and just go around section 230 so you know the section 230 is in spirit supposed
to protect all platforms including AI but it's a lot harder to get that protection when you're a
small provider and as AI themselves has said in our reporting they're coming for us first but we hope
that all the big tech companies are paying attention to this because they are setting a precedent
to come for Facebook and master on and blue sky and whatever else you can think of that they don't
like the stuff that's being posted there so it's not just a matter of the administration had some
bug out for this small Italian tech collective it's a strategy towards a larger plan
to be able to put this sort of pressure on any company of any size so what do you all see as the
likely intended outcomes for the end user in movement that relies on services offered from
no blogs the encrypted mail or other things provided by out of steachie and ventati it feels
hard to know since like a lawyer guest on the recent episode of Outlaw podcast was talking about
how the Clinton administration had intentionally constructed vagueness around the SDGT
category like this category that's being applied when it was first applied against supporters of
Palestinian movement but they did use the provocative description to designate projects as being
like legally radioactive so looking at out of steachie and ventati in this case is being like
considered to be radioactive sprout had mentioned a September 25th and like end date which the
legal consequences of interacting with them change but yeah I guess if you could say a few words
of how you see this playing out or what experience you've heard from activist groups that are
using this infrastructure having to consider new implications yeah so the radioactive thing is
not a legal category it was a lawyers metaphor for what the designation does socially and institutional
everyone is encouraged to back away before anyone understands exactly what the law requires
so in terms of the laws themselves you know we're dealing with a Clinton era law the SDGT
category itself comes from executive order 13 to 24 which was issued by Bush in September 2001
section 2339A was enacted in 1994 and the 1996 anti-terrorism and effective death penalty act
expanded the material support framework and created its prohibition on knowingly providing
support to a designated foreign terrorist organization so AI is being designated as an SDGT not an
FTO under section 2339B those categories should not be treated as interchangeable as cost as they
may be so for ordinary users the first effects are obviously a practical so far people using the
email that they have provided have had to change server addresses or create aliases
mailing lists have been moved to other domains one domain controlled at the registry level can
disappear even while the underlying server still function payment systems and bank accounts can
become unstable we're seeing all of this right now no blogs was not taken down by the OFAC action
itself AI has reported a separate compromise affecting that platform I think you know what's uncertain
is what's going to happen kind of after September 25th as you said because that's when the wind down
period ends and you really everyone is supposed to have cut cut contact with AI bedding is the idea
so like you said the legal implications of interacting with them even for us is going to change
comes September 25th and the really hard part is that no one really knows how it's kind of
legally up in the air as to what's going to go what's going to happen I think it also has a chilling
effect on people too you know us user is going to wonder whether continuing to use an email account
is even allowed legally a journalist might hesitate to request an interview with AI a host may
terminate services rather than pay a lawyer to determine what's actually prohibited the bank even
despite their statement in support of AI might need to protect their other users by discontinuing
their account and so these quieter effects just ripple out in ways that are hard to really understand
or predict but I think that independent reporting criticism discussion promotion of demonstrations
report backs on actions book fairs cultural events and all alike are going to take a real hit
we're going to have to either replace AI as an infrastructure service or you know go back to
doing things in a different way that doesn't involve the internet or or online communications because
if we can't establish free or low cost open source autonomous movement infrastructure
than the online space becomes incredibly dangerous force I just want to add that how this plays out
will be determined in part by how people respond to it by whether other collectives take up the
project of providing free infrastructure for online communication by whether we mobilize around
this and bring the issue to other people put it in front of other people so that there can be a
collective response it's it's not just a misfortune that is occurring to us but it's also an
opportunity for us to act as these always are one of the interesting things in communication
patterns is that already over the last 10 years as there has been a top down clamp down on public
social media platforms we've seen people shift shifting already towards a more person-to-person
media use whether that means using signal loops or other forms of technology that connect people
more directly and in a way that offers more privacy to the participants I think that we'll continue
to see that really quite apart from this particular designation that's the the general trajectory
that human relationships are on a lot of people for a lot of different reasons have become
disillusioned in the sort of interaction with relationships narcissism that are fostered by the
social media formats that are provided by corporate control and and people are looking for other
ways to relate to each other and their collective potential and so we can foreground those kind of
connections and those ways of forming relationships and and shared projects as we go forward in response
to this yeah thanks I think that leads well into the last question that was going to ask you all
which was about a positive note with possible steps forward so if there are any other thoughts that
you have concerning alternatives that we could be working towards as technologists or as members of
movement and community who need alternatives to the models of tech tools available under authoritarian
capitalism if you have any ideas on how we can help comrades shift their messages off of this
platform and if there are any thoughts that you have on where they might go and yeah just to sort
of like harken back to the plan our asterisk reference and sort of in line I think with what
be just said like we are innovative if nothing else in our ideals and in the visions of the world
that we not only want to see but are willing to build and so I'd love to hear any inspirations towards
taking this as a challenge to build something better stronger and that serves our needs better than
what's available now if you have any thoughts absolutely so basically a new plan R which would have
to defend more than servers this time because this attack moved up the stack the original plan R
was built to survive the loss of a machine or a hostile hosting company this designation reached
across to the domain registry level payment processor banking relationship and institutional
collections around the machines so some options under discussion include portable accounts and data
and interoperable services multiple domains and jurisdictions reproducible deployments wider administrative
knowledge diversified funding arrangements and legal and journalistic response capacity every option
that I've seen anyone talk about has technical legal labor and sanctions implications that would
need to be evaluated like I said there are immediate alternatives that people can find to AI and
no blocks as services I don't know that I want to necessarily shout those out by name at this
particular time because a lot of these projects run on very limited money and volunteer labor
and a wave of no-blogs users could honestly overwhelm them and so I'm not sure if that's what I
want to do I could reach out to some folks and maybe in the show notes we could publish some of those
names if they're okay with that but yeah I think the idea is absolutely to learn from this and
not only beef up what AI has been doing but replicate replicate replicate it everywhere and don't
just be like let's get AI backup AI backup and running and call it a day we need to take the queue
from AI themselves that the solution here is to have a thousand a million servers as many servers
and providers doing different things and hosting in different ways for different people in different
groups and you know with the Fediverse it's all interoperable and so we can still talk to each
other and cross-pollinate but you know we've learned that the server can be in Europe and the
off switch can still be in Washington or Virginia the bank can be in Italy and its cards can still
depend on American companies so jurisdiction is a big issue in any thoughts moving forward I think
it can't just be reduced to where server recsits we have to ask where the organization is incorporated
where the administrators live who owns the hardware who provides the bandwidth which register
sells the domain which registry controls the top level domain which DNS operators make it
resolvable who processes payments for donations everything because of the network way in which
they're approaching this from the right we need to be looking at the same sort of networks that we
have and making them resilient to these attacks I think I can I can also speak a little bit to if
users are out there on the hunt looking for an alternative I could think of some relevant questions
you might want to ask can you export stuff can you export content your website the mail subscribers
domains what logs do they take how long are those logs retained try learning if the provider owns
its own hardware or rents cloud capacity or how they handle that you know look what look into what
happens if a domain register bank payment processor or whatever disappears and also how the project
itself is governed I think you need to take that into account and capacity technically secure service
may still be fragile if it lacks sufficient labor or documentation or funding or admins so you know
I think we had it real sweet with AI they had a lot figured out over the last 25 years but the beautiful
thing is that even if AI were and I don't think this is going to happen but if AI were to disappear
their knowledge does not and the those collective members are going to be out there every day
spreading that knowledge and making it accessible to other people who want to replicate what they've
done I want to emphasize that this is not the end of an era it's not the end of the era when
there were horizontal not-for-profit volunteer run providers for internet access it's not the end
of the era when people use the internet to communicate freely or to oppose autocracy it's rather
an indication of how important it is to do those things and we're in a situation in which more
and more people will need to be able to have unfettered access to communication and people will be
looking for ways to do that this should inspire more people to get active to to look for new ways to
establish infrastructure to facilitate contact and collaboration between people and and this is
we're in a historical era that is propelling more and more people into asking those questions so
we can learn from the admirable legacy of programmers who for the last quarter of a century or more
have put effort into establishing a egalitarian and accessible options but we should we should be
thinking about how to meet the demands of the moment to put the designation of this Italian tech
collective in a contemporary historical context the far right currently holds power over the
government of the United States but it hasn't been able to establish to consolidate power on the
level of the society so the Trump administration is increasingly unpopular they're scrambling to
shore up their control as more and more people become fed up with them and with the consequences of
their attempt to establish a tyrannical autocracy and the crackdown on people who use no blogs
is just a one small aspect of that Trump administration is going to continue to do things like this
and it's not it's not because of anything that you know that demonstrators or protesters or
dissidents did it's it's not because Charlie Kirk was killed it's not because of any of these things
it's because the roadmap that the Trump administration has is to establish an autocracy by pursuing
this sort of all a garter call authoritarian model you know like we've seen in Hungary and Russia
in other places where they consolidate power in their hands and suppress all criticism they're
doing something that has happened in other parts of the world and they have a have a roadmap they're
proceeding along the roadmap as quickly as they can and they will do that whether
because we give them the opportunity to do so by not resisting or if it looks like they're going
to lose control they'll go through their checklists as fast as they possibly can the way the the
Trump administration did in 2020 when it was was becoming clear that he was going to be forced out
of power so we're going to see more elements of this crackdown in the future but those are not an
indication that we're doomed or that we can't win this fight they're just the you know the inevitable
period of suffering that we have to go through right now as a as a consequence of some people
toying with the idea that maybe living under an autocratic government would be a good thing
I think even many of those people are are learning that that's not the case in the long run
how to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again that will really depend on
whatever power structure comes after the Trump administration we can imagine
just as Joe Biden succeeded Trump the first time around and kept many of the repressive
instruments that Trump had introduced in place we can imagine that happening again and if that does
happen we will continue to experience this this thing where the political context just ratchets
further and further to the right as you know right wing and proponents of autocracy introduce
additional repressive mechanisms and then centriots legitimize those repressive mechanisms
and then pass the government back to the far right the alternative is for us to build up
enough grassroots momentum to have leverage on whatever political formation
succeeds the Trump administration and be able to exert that leverage to compel them to push back
the repressive mechanisms and maneuvers of the Trump administration introduced that's what we
need to aim for as a as a political minimum program is to make sure that if anything is radioactive
it is to continue the repressive policies of the Trump administration so that whoever succeeds
the Trump administration whatever political formation succeeds the Trump administration cannot by
any means continue to crack down on free speech on volunteer based grassroots organizing cannot
continue to crack down on dissidents itself that's that's our long-term horizon that they can
get us out of this situation I'm really grateful for the opportunity to speak with you all today
on this radio program and and to everybody out there who is listening I want to emphasize the
importance of the things that you can do to make a world in which people can communicate and
cooperate freely thank you very much thank you both so much for this conversation I really
appreciate the time and the effort and the thoughtfulness that you've put into it and I'll be
sure to put links in the show notes to the numerous articles in the public letter that are published
on sebot.media as well as the crime think response and I'm sure there will be more to what's been
going on with in ventaria out is teaching and tadi so thanks again for both of you participating in
this chat yeah thanks for the opportunity I think if anyone really wants to show support to AI
the safest way to do that right now is to just stay up to date almost going on and not let this
become something that gets swept under the rug we just posted a campaign hub that kind of centralizes
all sorts of reporting on this issue including ours so you go to our website to check that out and
just don't let AI get forgotten the fan star radios that proud member of the channel zero network
of anarchist podcasts and here's a jingle from another member of czn now on the channel zero anarchist
podcast network tune into the beautiful idea a project from a collective of several anarchist and
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