The Server Called Paranoia: Defend Autistici/Inventati Before September 25
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For twenty-five years, an Italian hacker collective has built communications infrastructure designed to survive censorship, surveillance and police raids. On August 26, the United States designated it a terrorist organization. On September 25, the wind-down period ends.It should have been a dark and stormy night in an Italian hacklab.It was, annoyingly, a beautiful sunny Sunday.On March 3, 2001, roughly ten people gathered at the LOA hacklab in Milan around a computer assembled from discarded machinery. A bank had sold them an old server for the symbolic price of 15,000 lire, about eight dollars.
They expanded it with scavenged components, including a hard drive pulled from someone’s home computer. Nobody arrived with a formal blueprint. Software packages were considered one at a time. Every decision was discussed until everyone agreed. Deliberately, the least technically experienced person was placed at the keyboard. The process took far longer than necessary because efficiency was not the only objective. Everyone was supposed to understand what they were building.
That day, one participant later recalled, was when they declared: “A/I now exists.”They named the machine Paranoia. The following month it went online, carrying two domains and two intertwined histories: Autistici.org and Inventati.org.
Twenty-five years later, on August 26, 2026, the United States designated Autistici/Inventati a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and placed it on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list.The distance between those two events—from a recycled machine in a Milan hacklab to the machinery of the American national-security state—is the history of a collective that has spent a quarter century insisting upon one dangerous proposition:People should be able to communicate without first surrendering themselves to corporations or governments.The immediate threat now has a date. On September 25, the temporary U.S. authorization for institutions to wind down their relationships with A/I expires. Banks, technology companies, hosting providers and other institutions are being instructed to sever what remains. A/I built its infrastructure to survive the disappearance of a server. The United States is now attempting to make the collective economically and technologically untouchable.
Join us as we explore what A/I is, its history, and what this newest attack might mean for the autonomous tech collective and the wider radical community. Before A/I: Italy’s underground internetAutistici/Inventati did not appear from nowhere.