The New MTL Counter-info

I Know Who Smashed the Mila Institute. And I think you do too. Just before quarter to midnight, Tuesday September 15, the Mila Institute in Montreal is smashed. An office that boasts “Ethical” AI, that tells us its mission is to develop safe artificial intelligence for public interest, to work on health and the environment and climate change, to promote open science and collaboration.

I am writing this as someone living in the landlords’ Gabriel Paré and Annick-Patricia Carrière’s buildings. I’m writing this anonymously because my neighbors are currently being sued by our landlords. They are being sued because they attended or hosted tenant meetings and signed a petition for lower rent increases, and because SLAM then carried out a campaign of pressure supporting demands that came from our buildings. It was suggested by a friend that I post this here, so here it goes. ...

The day we discovered we had been designated a global terrorist organization, we promised that we would try to resist as long as this was possible, that we would not back down as long as we could see options to stand our ground. For years, we have proudly maintained and defended a free, privacy-friendly, autonomous and politically committed infrastructure. “Stay human” is not an empty phrase to us. It means, above all, that we have a responsibility to protect our users, those who build the human networks we rely, and for the communities who flooded us with messages of support and solidarity. ...

Letters of Insurgents is an 800-page semi-autobiographical epistolary novel by Fredy Perlman (1975). It follows the life-transforming correspondence of Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan Vochek, two characters created by Fredy to narrate the greatest questions of a revolutionary life. Bring this powerful work to life by receiving in your mailbox two chapters every month, a letter from each Sophia and Yarostan– from September 2026 to June 2027. Each letter is formatted and printed in a separate zine, for a total of 20 zines! ...

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.” ...

If, for a fleeting moment, we were to pry our attention away from the glow of our screens, we could set out on a path, eyes wide open, through the city—a path that would shatter any illusion of social cohesion. Every day, the powerful lock us up a bit more into their world of concrete, borders, mono-cultures, monitors, and algorithms. To the fate they have in store for us, we oppose a dangerous dream of limitless freedom. We want to fight against this prison-city and the techno-industrial dystopia it belongs to, here and now! ...

A few of us noticed Bixi has begun installing cameras with motion light sensors at some of their bike stations. We won’t watch idly as more technology and surveillance enter our lives and neighborhoods. We took it upon ourselves to go after one of the cameras, with simple tools, and with the aim of destroying it. The camera was a little higher and tougher than we thought, so we only managed to damage and not destroy it. We are wishing our comrades more success on their first tries!

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info On the night of Wednesday, August 5, the windows and door of a residence were broken, and a Microsoft office was targeted with Molotov cocktails. This action targeted the official residence of the founder and the headquarters of Munera Intelligence. Munera develops AI-powered drones that will watch over our streets with AI technology following an agreement with the City of Montreal announced in June. The windows and door of Dominic MacDuff-Auger were destroyed. ...

2026 We’re Back! The Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence is a yearly gathering on the intersection of anarchism and technology. You zoom towards the edges of the sprawling machine that farms our attention, past the conveyor belts of neatly packaged preferences in glittering boxes. From this distance the network of twisting cables takes on a sinister shape. The outward uniqueness of content belies the conditioned experiences they contain. Upon reaching the fringe of augmented reality, you find that behind every blinking cursor and LCD glow sits an individual with dreams and desires. ...

Five years ago on this day in Cuba, small groups of protesters took to the streets to demand better living conditions. In the days that followed, thousands of Cubans from dozens of other cities spontaneously joined the protest movement. July 11, 2021 was not just a cry against hunger or shortages; it was the moment when thousands of people realized that, faced with a state turned into an oppressive overseer, the only way out is to stop looking at the power. The protests in Cuba left us with anarchism’s oldest and most forgotten lesson: that all authority, however much it disguises itself as ideology, can only sustain itself through obedience and repression. ...