The Server Called Paranoia: Defend Autistici/Inventati

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.”

Sabot on Montreal Counter-information

The Server Called Paranoia: Defend Autistici/Inventati