WEBVTT - Sanctions, Terror, and the Internet 0:00:06.950 --> 0:00:10.750 Hello, and welcome to the show. It's It Could Happen Here. Today, 0:00:11.070 --> 0:00:13.230 I am James, and I'm very lucky to be joined 0:00:13.289 --> 0:00:14.520 by Margaret Kiljoy. 0:00:14.540 --> 0:00:18.340 Hi, Margaret. Hello. What a good day to talk about 0:00:18.860 --> 0:00:20.860 good stuff. It's good stuff, right? 0:00:21.239 --> 0:00:24.540 Unfortunately, Margaret, I hate to break it to you. It's 0:00:25.260 --> 0:00:28.520 the government declaring left groups terrorists again. Oh. 0:00:29.550 --> 0:00:30.210 That seems bad. 0:00:30.750 --> 0:00:33.470 Yeah, it does seem bad. Especially in this case, like 0:00:33.530 --> 0:00:38.409 it's an attempt to drive autonomous left organizing off the internet. 0:00:38.790 --> 0:00:42.030 And so if people are not familiar, we are talking 0:00:42.070 --> 0:00:49.030 today about Autistici Inventati. There's a forward slash in between 0:00:49.090 --> 0:00:53.010 those two groups because on the 26th of August, the 0:00:53.070 --> 0:00:55.770 Office of Foreign Assets Control added them to a list 0:00:55.980 --> 0:01:01.520 of specially designated global terrorist groups because it alleged that 0:01:01.620 --> 0:01:05.780 A-slash-I services were designed to facilitate violent attacks. I think 0:01:05.800 --> 0:01:07.910 I'm going to refer to them as A-slash-I just for 0:01:07.970 --> 0:01:10.309 brevity and also because I don't want to use AI 0:01:10.370 --> 0:01:11.970 because sadly that's already taken. 0:01:12.470 --> 0:01:14.089 That's what I was thinking too, is I'm either going 0:01:14.110 --> 0:01:16.930 to call them Autostiti or A-slash-I. 0:01:16.950 --> 0:01:17.990 Yeah. 0:01:18.310 --> 0:01:20.310 So we can go through a little bit of blow 0:01:20.330 --> 0:01:22.240 by blow of what's happened since then in a minute. 0:01:22.260 --> 0:01:24.600 But I first thought, Margaret, perhaps you could explain a 0:01:24.600 --> 0:01:27.610 little bit about the role this organization played? Why does 0:01:27.670 --> 0:01:29.990 it have a forward slash in its name? When did 0:01:30.030 --> 0:01:32.710 it come about and where's it from? Yeah. 0:01:33.290 --> 0:01:35.690 So there is a group that is made up of 0:01:35.750 --> 0:01:38.720 two groups and the name of the single group is 0:01:38.740 --> 0:01:42.780 Autistici slash Inventati. And you might be able to guess 0:01:43.260 --> 0:01:46.660 that the two groups that make it up are Autistici 0:01:47.200 --> 0:01:51.500 and Inventati. They've been around since 2001. I want to 0:01:51.540 --> 0:01:54.120 say March 2001. If I was at the right place 0:01:54.140 --> 0:01:55.380 in my own script, I would be able to tell 0:01:55.400 --> 0:01:59.000 you that for certain. And they came about during the 0:01:59.100 --> 0:02:01.640 alter globalization movement, which is something that I've talked about 0:02:01.660 --> 0:02:04.520 a bit on my show, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. 0:02:04.920 --> 0:02:07.040 And it is one of the things that, I mean, 0:02:07.080 --> 0:02:08.639 if you were there, you know what I'm talking about. 0:02:09.139 --> 0:02:14.180 But basically, there was a massive movement against the stripping 0:02:14.200 --> 0:02:17.940 of resources from the developing world by the developed world. 0:02:18.160 --> 0:02:21.320 There was basically a massive attempt by people all over 0:02:21.360 --> 0:02:24.320 the world, kind of spurred on by the Zapatistas and Chiapas, 0:02:24.880 --> 0:02:29.090 to get everyone together to say, stop using free trade 0:02:29.120 --> 0:02:32.450 agreements to take all of the wealth of the global 0:02:32.490 --> 0:02:34.410 South and give it to the global North. It's a 0:02:34.490 --> 0:02:36.970 really important idea to wrap your head around, but complicated 0:02:37.010 --> 0:02:39.030 right now in this era where tariffs are the bad 0:02:39.070 --> 0:02:42.530 thing and free trade is the the lesser evil, right? 0:02:43.050 --> 0:02:46.250 We weren't fighting against, this is the movement that I 0:02:46.290 --> 0:02:50.400 came up in. We weren't fighting specifically against free trade, 0:02:50.419 --> 0:02:52.700 although we were fighting against the free trade agreements so 0:02:52.740 --> 0:02:55.980 much as specifically that we were fighting for fair trade 0:02:56.080 --> 0:03:00.160 and we were fighting for people getting paid decently and yeah, 0:03:00.250 --> 0:03:01.870 stopping the economic extraction of the world. 0:03:02.389 --> 0:03:05.049 Fair trade's a proper noun, right? But it's also a 0:03:05.090 --> 0:03:07.630 concept and they differ and that's all I think I 0:03:07.650 --> 0:03:09.049 need to say about it. Yeah. 0:03:09.070 --> 0:03:09.190 Yeah. 0:03:10.190 --> 0:03:12.710 And so during this period, activists from all over the 0:03:12.750 --> 0:03:16.209 world created all of these massive protests, bringing people all 0:03:16.270 --> 0:03:19.750 together and creating horizontal decision-making structures and doing all this 0:03:19.790 --> 0:03:22.310 important work. And one of the things that came of that, 0:03:22.710 --> 0:03:26.300 for better and for worse, is the concept of social media. 0:03:26.320 --> 0:03:29.600 We can trace it directly back to the hacking groups 0:03:30.180 --> 0:03:34.700 of this era. Community journalists, citizen journalists would go out 0:03:34.840 --> 0:03:38.130 and work with, especially something called indie media. And they 0:03:38.150 --> 0:03:41.240 would go out and they would film what was happening. 0:03:41.580 --> 0:03:44.360 And so there was this international network of people who 0:03:44.420 --> 0:03:47.000 created a structure called Indy Media, where Indy has like 0:03:47.150 --> 0:03:52.350 I-N-D-Y media, right? And be able to report on what 0:03:52.390 --> 0:03:55.250 was happening in their regions, but have it all networked together. 0:03:55.670 --> 0:03:59.930 And it kind of created microblogging, which is what created Twitter. 0:04:00.030 --> 0:04:02.850 And there's actually like direct lineages with some of the people. 0:04:03.530 --> 0:04:06.390 So sorry about that, that we did that. I was 0:04:06.450 --> 0:04:09.390 a part of Indy Media for a long time. And 0:04:10.040 --> 0:04:13.820 A group in Italy, two groups in Italy, among many others, 0:04:14.080 --> 0:04:17.140 came together to do indie media work in Italy. Italy 0:04:17.180 --> 0:04:20.409 was an important part of the ultra-globalization movement. Unfortunately, it's 0:04:20.430 --> 0:04:25.090 where we first saw police kill a protester, RIP Carlo Giuliani. 0:04:26.050 --> 0:04:27.490 I was like, oh, I'm going to really quick read 0:04:27.529 --> 0:04:30.420 their own history that they set. But what they did 0:04:30.540 --> 0:04:31.880 is that 10 years, like 2011 or so, they put 0:04:31.920 --> 0:04:36.250 out a 140-page book. that describes the oral history of 0:04:36.290 --> 0:04:38.610 the creation of their project. And so I have not 0:04:38.670 --> 0:04:41.969 fully read everything in this yet. But in general, Autostici 0:04:42.270 --> 0:04:45.490 is from Milan. And it was started by basically cyberpunks, 0:04:45.529 --> 0:04:48.130 although one of the people was like, I'm not a cyberpunk. 0:04:48.570 --> 0:04:51.270 Of course. But literally, it was coming out of groups 0:04:51.290 --> 0:04:54.930 that would use concepts from William Gibson's books intentionally. It 0:04:54.950 --> 0:04:59.310 was a consciously cyberpunk movement. And then you also had 0:04:59.589 --> 0:05:03.599 in Florence, or in Firenze, if you're wanting to pretend 0:05:03.640 --> 0:05:08.760 like you've been there, you have a group called Inventati. Now, Autistici, 0:05:09.000 --> 0:05:11.680 you're like, that sounds like the word autistic. It means autistic. 0:05:11.779 --> 0:05:15.320 It's the autistics, right? And what their concept was, I 0:05:15.360 --> 0:05:18.320 don't know, I'm not holding this up to today's lens 0:05:18.370 --> 0:05:20.990 of how we want to talk about this neurodivergence. What 0:05:21.010 --> 0:05:23.969 they were saying is we're all interacting with computers instead 0:05:23.990 --> 0:05:26.090 of each other. So that's what we're going to call 0:05:26.130 --> 0:05:32.450 ourselves are the autistics. Inventati was the self-invented And these 0:05:32.529 --> 0:05:36.450 were the citizen journalists. And they came out of a 0:05:36.529 --> 0:05:43.250 group of basically protest journalists that were mostly students in Fidenze, 0:05:43.490 --> 0:05:46.570 in Florence. So they came together and they formed a thing. 0:05:46.850 --> 0:05:50.740 Why does this matter 25 years later? Well, on some level, 0:05:51.200 --> 0:05:54.460 that's a good question. It kind of shouldn't. The thing 0:05:54.540 --> 0:05:58.220 is that these groups, when we call them hackers and hacktivists, 0:05:58.620 --> 0:06:00.360 actually one of the things that they talk about is 0:06:00.380 --> 0:06:05.200 that they basically do... The reproductive labor of social movements. 0:06:05.540 --> 0:06:09.880 They're not out there hacking places. They are creating infrastructure 0:06:09.940 --> 0:06:13.510 for people to talk to each other in non-corporate ways. 0:06:14.190 --> 0:06:16.950 Because the corporate environment owns so much of the internet. 0:06:17.330 --> 0:06:19.370 And they have from the beginning, they are so much 0:06:19.470 --> 0:06:22.849 older than all of their enemies, right? 2001 is ancient 0:06:23.070 --> 0:06:27.790 in internet terms. And they created ways to have websites 0:06:27.850 --> 0:06:31.790 called NoBlogs, which is a WordPress platform. They created email 0:06:31.850 --> 0:06:35.520 servers and they created listservs, right? And they kept doing it. 0:06:35.589 --> 0:06:38.370 And every now and then, the government would fight them. 0:06:38.410 --> 0:06:41.290 They'd say, someone that you are giving a blog to 0:06:41.310 --> 0:06:44.270 has done something bad. And every single time, they would 0:06:44.300 --> 0:06:48.480 take it to court. They're not underground people. This isn't 0:06:48.520 --> 0:06:52.560 a shadowy organization. They have names and legal, like this 0:06:52.600 --> 0:06:56.180 is a legal thing that they pay for internet services 0:06:56.260 --> 0:06:59.839 and host website servers. So they are trying to have... 0:07:00.190 --> 0:07:02.530 A free internet. And that is what the government is 0:07:02.589 --> 0:07:05.700 coming for. So when they are being designated this way, 0:07:05.839 --> 0:07:10.440 they hosted approximately 10,000 blogs on the no blogs platform. 0:07:10.820 --> 0:07:13.180 And that is from people all over the world. So 0:07:13.220 --> 0:07:17.230 they are basically stripping away the platform by which 10,000 0:07:17.230 --> 0:07:22.830 people or groups do their communication and do their publication. 0:07:23.450 --> 0:07:25.790 That's what I got. Yeah, I think that's a really good, 0:07:26.250 --> 0:07:28.320 I'll just give some example. There were groups in Myanmar 0:07:28.340 --> 0:07:30.220 who used no blogs, for instance, right? Like it's very 0:07:30.320 --> 0:07:34.430 easy to see this from an American lens, right? Because 0:07:34.460 --> 0:07:36.650 it's the American government doing it, or the United States government, 0:07:36.690 --> 0:07:40.130 I should say, right? America, two continents, United States, one country. Yeah. 0:07:40.470 --> 0:07:44.470 Lake America, not a thing. But let's look at it 0:07:44.490 --> 0:07:46.750 a bit more broadly, right? Because you and I can 0:07:46.790 --> 0:07:49.050 remember this era of the internet because we're old now, 0:07:49.690 --> 0:07:52.450 the free internet, when the internet was cool and we 0:07:52.490 --> 0:07:54.590 were really hoping that it would be a liberatory force 0:07:54.690 --> 0:07:57.920 for humanity, right? Yeah. We gave it a good shot. 0:07:58.390 --> 0:08:01.060 We gave it a fucking try. People may not remember 0:08:01.070 --> 0:08:04.340 the Arab Spring, right? But there was this idea that Twitter, 0:08:04.820 --> 0:08:07.380 I think it's rather myopic to say that Twitter gave 0:08:07.420 --> 0:08:10.980 us the Arab Spring, right? Decades of oppression and people 0:08:11.020 --> 0:08:13.730 wanting to live free and bravely standing up against state 0:08:13.750 --> 0:08:16.330 violence gave us the Arab Spring. But Twitter played a 0:08:16.350 --> 0:08:20.630 part in people communicating. But before we had that, we 0:08:20.670 --> 0:08:25.560 had things like Hushmail is another example, right? There was 0:08:25.780 --> 0:08:32.040 an independent internet structure that wasn't always explicitly anything politically 0:08:32.140 --> 0:08:36.040 apart from anti-corporate. Yeah. Let's take a break here and 0:08:36.120 --> 0:08:48.950 come back after we've heard some advertisers. All right, we 0:08:48.990 --> 0:08:53.200 are back. The internet is dead. Let's talk about what 0:08:53.500 --> 0:09:01.309 an SDGTO is, Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization. These come 0:09:01.470 --> 0:09:05.809 from an executive order, I think it's 13324, I've written 0:09:05.830 --> 0:09:08.900 down here, that was signed by George W. Bush in 0:09:08.940 --> 0:09:12.020 the wake of September the 11th, right? September the 11th, 2001. 0:09:12.000 --> 0:09:16.700 If you're wondering if I'm talking about the Catalan National Day. No, 0:09:16.720 --> 0:09:19.359 I'm not. I'm talking about the attacks on the World 0:09:19.380 --> 0:09:20.260 Trade Center. Yeah. 0:09:20.620 --> 0:09:21.320 Oh, interesting. 0:09:21.580 --> 0:09:22.700 Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. 0:09:23.000 --> 0:09:24.800 Have you heard that Trump is claiming that he was 0:09:24.830 --> 0:09:26.970 at ground zero and got dragged away by firemen? 0:09:27.210 --> 0:09:28.690 No, that's a new one for me. 0:09:29.050 --> 0:09:31.589 It's a complete lie. He was further away from ground 0:09:31.610 --> 0:09:32.370 zero than I was. 0:09:32.750 --> 0:09:32.890 Yeah. 0:09:33.470 --> 0:09:35.610 I looked it up before we started recording. I was 0:09:35.650 --> 0:09:37.270 much closer to ground zero than he was. 0:09:37.550 --> 0:09:42.210 Perfect. Anyway, whatever. Great. Okay. Yeah. Well, what a guy. 0:09:42.429 --> 0:09:42.599 Yeah. 0:09:43.080 --> 0:09:46.349 Yeah. Again, I don't want to harp on being old 0:09:46.370 --> 0:09:49.809 or whatever, but the world changed after September 11, 2001 0:09:49.809 --> 0:09:53.830 in so many ways. One of them was the United States' 0:09:54.429 --> 0:10:00.870 pursuit of these new anti-terrorism laws and these new anti-terrorism sanctions. 0:10:01.610 --> 0:10:04.809 An SDGTO is a sanction. There were a series of 0:10:04.870 --> 0:10:08.820 executive orders from between 2001 and 2003, which kind of 0:10:08.840 --> 0:10:13.020 amended how they did this. I guess the first example 0:10:13.640 --> 0:10:17.740 of how the SDGTO sanction was supposed to work would 0:10:17.760 --> 0:10:19.080 be the Holy Land Foundation, right? 0:10:19.480 --> 0:10:21.980 Yeah, it's the largest Muslim charity in the United States. 0:10:22.340 --> 0:10:26.780 It was at one point, yeah, a huge Palestinian American charity. 0:10:26.860 --> 0:10:29.860 Its offices were raided, its assets were seized, and it 0:10:29.900 --> 0:10:34.469 was closed. Previously, it collected, we're talking tens of millions 0:10:34.510 --> 0:10:37.689 of dollars here, more than $ 10 million, I can pretty 0:10:37.710 --> 0:10:41.610 confidently say. This is a big organization, right? And what 0:10:41.790 --> 0:10:47.050 the SDGTO sanction does is it can list individuals or 0:10:47.190 --> 0:10:51.200 organizations that But it effectively makes them sanctioned so that 0:10:51.220 --> 0:10:54.600 people cannot transfer assets to them, right? So that makes 0:10:54.640 --> 0:10:57.280 them more or less unbankable. And that is what, as 0:10:57.330 --> 0:11:00.089 we'll see, has happened to A slash I, right? It 0:11:00.150 --> 0:11:02.930 is a different designation. This is important from an FTO. 0:11:03.309 --> 0:11:07.050 FTO is a foreign terrorist organization, right? The difference there 0:11:07.150 --> 0:11:11.950 is that this is an economic sanction, whereas an FTO 0:11:12.010 --> 0:11:15.709 also contains the State Department itself, as well as the Treasury. 0:11:16.440 --> 0:11:18.320 Right, like they're probably not going to drone strike people 0:11:18.380 --> 0:11:18.740 over this. 0:11:19.179 --> 0:11:22.660 Yeah, exactly. And FTO designation does a couple of things. 0:11:22.679 --> 0:11:24.300 But one of them, as you say, is it gives 0:11:24.380 --> 0:11:29.210 them that like pretext for more like physical, kinetic, if 0:11:29.230 --> 0:11:30.510 you want to use the term that people in the 0:11:30.530 --> 0:11:34.390 industry use, violence, right? As opposed to like economic attacks, 0:11:34.710 --> 0:11:37.730 like we're seeing here. And the FTO is kind of 0:11:37.770 --> 0:11:41.250 the highest level of designation, right? And with it comes 0:11:41.390 --> 0:11:45.800 a series of things that become illegal for any US individual. U.S. 0:11:45.880 --> 0:11:50.040 person or indeed anyone globally who is involved with that organization. 0:11:50.640 --> 0:11:56.440 In practice, what this does is it removes their ability 0:11:56.940 --> 0:11:59.880 to interact with the global banking system. And being an 0:11:59.980 --> 0:12:04.170 FTO does too. The FTO designations that we saw earlier 0:12:04.190 --> 0:12:07.990 in the Trump administration that impacted Greek, German... Was there 0:12:08.010 --> 0:12:10.850 also an Italian organization in those? I don't think so. 0:12:10.870 --> 0:12:11.490 I don't know. 0:12:11.610 --> 0:12:14.390 Certainly... It has made it very hard for a number 0:12:14.410 --> 0:12:17.630 of organizations in Germany to have bank accounts, period. 0:12:18.010 --> 0:12:21.510 Yeah. And what happened was no one tells you, apparently. 0:12:21.970 --> 0:12:23.429 No one gives you a call to be like, hey, 0:12:23.450 --> 0:12:27.310 just so you know, you're a specially designated global terrorist now. 0:12:27.910 --> 0:12:31.610 They learned that this was coming because of Marco Rubio tweets. 0:12:31.650 --> 0:12:34.600 It had already happened. And then immediately their PayPal gets 0:12:34.620 --> 0:12:37.420 shut down. There's some irony to this because theoretically PayPal 0:12:37.440 --> 0:12:40.459 was created in order to kind of be a libertarian 0:12:40.500 --> 0:12:43.220 way of getting past government interference with money or whatever. 0:12:43.600 --> 0:12:45.820 But that's probably long gone and probably was never good. 0:12:45.720 --> 0:12:46.300 In the first place. 0:12:47.200 --> 0:12:50.900 Their PayPal got shut down immediately. There's no reason why 0:12:50.940 --> 0:12:53.300 their PayPal had to be shut down immediately because in 0:12:53.380 --> 0:12:58.339 this designation, there was a specific exemption given for a month. 0:12:58.540 --> 0:13:03.309 There was a 30-day or one month to September 25th. hey, 0:13:03.390 --> 0:13:05.410 if you have business dealings with this group, you have 0:13:05.450 --> 0:13:10.410 until the September 25th to stop. Now, theoretically, this only 0:13:10.470 --> 0:13:15.559 applies to United States people, right? There is no method. Well, 0:13:15.600 --> 0:13:18.400 there is a method. There's no legal method by which 0:13:18.500 --> 0:13:25.400 this necessarily applies more broadly. But pretty much immediately, Banca Etica, 0:13:25.740 --> 0:13:28.970 which I am not certain, I believe means ethical bank, 0:13:29.510 --> 0:13:33.300 is a specific cooperative bank It is an independent cooperative 0:13:33.320 --> 0:13:36.780 bank working for the highest interest, that of everybody, including yours, 0:13:37.179 --> 0:13:40.260 according to their website. And the bank that is basically 0:13:40.330 --> 0:13:45.069 meant to be the less evil bank of Italy shut 0:13:45.110 --> 0:13:48.929 them down pretty much immediately. And they released, as of 0:13:48.990 --> 0:13:53.070 this morning, as of recording, Tuesday, September 8th, Autostici slash 0:13:53.210 --> 0:13:57.050 Inventati released a statement saying, this is what happened. They 0:13:57.070 --> 0:13:57.910 shut down our bank. 0:13:59.170 --> 0:13:59.510 Because. 0:14:00.160 --> 0:14:02.780 After they received this order, after they got told that 0:14:02.800 --> 0:14:06.819 they are this designation, and they had to tell their 0:14:07.220 --> 0:14:10.780 more than 10,000, not customers, because they're all volunteers and 0:14:10.880 --> 0:14:13.480 no one had to pay to use their services. They 0:14:13.640 --> 0:14:16.829 had to tell all those people like, hey, this is 0:14:16.870 --> 0:14:20.350 what's happening. And when it first happened, they came out 0:14:20.370 --> 0:14:21.610 and they were like, look, we're going to fight this 0:14:21.890 --> 0:14:25.670 because they have fought in court all the time, right? 0:14:25.930 --> 0:14:28.210 But the thing that is important and different in this 0:14:28.250 --> 0:14:32.800 particular situation is They have no legal recourse. They've been 0:14:32.820 --> 0:14:35.880 accused of kind of similar things like, hey, you hosted 0:14:35.900 --> 0:14:39.230 a website that included a manifesto about some people who 0:14:39.250 --> 0:14:41.950 did some crimes, right? It's a thing that gets used 0:14:41.990 --> 0:14:44.070 against them a lot. And they go to court and 0:14:44.090 --> 0:14:45.850 they're like, this is who we are. This is what 0:14:45.870 --> 0:14:47.850 we do. We don't have fucking anything to do with 0:14:47.890 --> 0:14:51.300 the people who we publish or whatever. That is not 0:14:51.360 --> 0:14:53.660 an option in this situation. And so they were waiting 0:14:53.730 --> 0:14:57.050 for their bank to give them a chance to fight, 0:14:57.410 --> 0:15:00.810 to argue. And their bank just didn't because of basically 0:15:00.870 --> 0:15:05.650 a fear of secondary sanctions. So no EU court, no 0:15:05.750 --> 0:15:09.110 Italian court has accused them of any wrongdoing. 0:15:09.570 --> 0:15:11.900 The intention is not to pin a crime on them 0:15:12.080 --> 0:15:15.000 so much as it is to remove this infrastructure from 0:15:15.020 --> 0:15:17.960 the internet, right? Yes. So like what the State Department 0:15:18.040 --> 0:15:20.720 is alleging in its press release here is that, I'm 0:15:20.760 --> 0:15:23.860 quoting here, it provides encrypted tools and services to numerous 0:15:23.900 --> 0:15:27.000 violent far-left extremist groups operating in the United States and 0:15:27.040 --> 0:15:29.840 around the world. And then they say that groups have 0:15:29.860 --> 0:15:32.970 relied on the collective's digital infrastructure to plot or incite 0:15:33.040 --> 0:15:36.550 violent attacks, recruit others to engage in criminal activity, publish 0:15:36.570 --> 0:15:41.470 official communiques by US-designated FTOs, and disseminate maps of critical infrastructure. 0:15:41.830 --> 0:15:43.950 They go on with other stuff, right? But like, They 0:15:43.990 --> 0:15:46.550 are not alleging, the State Department itself is not alleging 0:15:46.590 --> 0:15:49.250 that A slash I themselves did anything. 0:15:49.430 --> 0:15:49.640 Right. 0:15:49.840 --> 0:15:53.440 It's that they hosted a platform where people who they 0:15:53.460 --> 0:15:56.720 are saying did terrorist things could either recruit to do 0:15:56.780 --> 0:15:59.660 those or talk about them or claim credibility for them. 0:16:00.300 --> 0:16:03.320 In amongst the examples it gives, right, sabotage of the 0:16:03.340 --> 0:16:07.460 Transalpine Pipeline that's in Europe, they talk about Jane's Revenge. 0:16:07.990 --> 0:16:11.110 in the United States, which it calls a violent far 0:16:11.150 --> 0:16:15.370 left extremists. It talks about stop cop city. They list 0:16:15.430 --> 0:16:20.620 a number of like listed FTOs, right? But they're saying 0:16:20.640 --> 0:16:23.600 a far left extremist group claiming to be a tool 0:16:23.640 --> 0:16:26.920 for global militants relies on AI. So they're not saying 0:16:26.960 --> 0:16:31.320 the FTOs do directly. They're saying a group claiming to 0:16:31.360 --> 0:16:34.660 be a tool for those people relies on the A 0:16:34.710 --> 0:16:37.990 slash I infrastructure. So it's always, I guess, like one 0:16:38.450 --> 0:16:39.730 tier removed from them. 0:16:40.370 --> 0:16:40.570 Right. 0:16:40.850 --> 0:16:43.790 But I think that that, in a sense, is what 0:16:43.910 --> 0:16:47.550 the point is here, right? Back in the day, they 0:16:47.650 --> 0:16:51.330 used to smash printing presses, right? The state. Yeah, the 0:16:51.370 --> 0:16:53.910 state would smash printing presses. The cops would smash printing presses. 0:16:53.990 --> 0:16:57.080 So would bosses, right? Yeah. When I look at my 0:16:57.150 --> 0:16:59.900 own research, right, when I'm doing archival research and I'm 0:16:59.920 --> 0:17:05.240 writing specifically about Spanish anarchism, about union organizing... My first 0:17:05.640 --> 0:17:09.180 research project was on like the Catalan Builders Union. You 0:17:09.240 --> 0:17:11.840 see this, right? Like they're putting out publications and their 0:17:12.000 --> 0:17:15.700 means of communication is being destroyed by the state. And 0:17:16.200 --> 0:17:19.220 it's one of the most essential parts of any resistance movement, right? 0:17:19.570 --> 0:17:24.390 Is the ability to communicate. I remember reading a biography, 0:17:24.570 --> 0:17:28.770 an autobiography by someone who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, right? 0:17:29.130 --> 0:17:32.629 And the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And there were three things 0:17:33.400 --> 0:17:36.670 that the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were smuggling in from outside, 0:17:36.690 --> 0:17:42.470 the three things that mattered, food, small arms, and printing presses. 0:17:43.070 --> 0:17:46.470 Like the ability to have printing presses, we see it 0:17:46.869 --> 0:17:50.030 over and over again as an essential part, and not 0:17:50.050 --> 0:17:53.050 just of resistance movements, but also social movements, and also 0:17:53.090 --> 0:17:57.830 just free exchange of cultural ideas. Yeah, like, I'm reading 0:17:57.850 --> 0:17:59.470 a lot about the Mexican revolution right now. And I'm 0:17:59.490 --> 0:18:01.859 thinking about like magazines like Vespa, right? Which was an 0:18:01.880 --> 0:18:05.640 anarcho feminist magazine. Even Flores Magón was a journalist, right? 0:18:05.700 --> 0:18:09.460 Like he came to St. Louis to try and continue 0:18:09.500 --> 0:18:12.600 writing safely. You can specifically look at Porfirio Diaz if 0:18:12.640 --> 0:18:15.970 you want to look at like the state attacking people's 0:18:16.010 --> 0:18:19.190 ability in that instance, right? To communicate freely with each other. 0:18:19.950 --> 0:18:23.729 The reason like this is important is because it's one 0:18:23.770 --> 0:18:28.110 of the last parts of that old internet. Yeah. I'll 0:18:28.150 --> 0:18:30.949 give the example of, and I know there are no 0:18:30.990 --> 0:18:34.870 blogs pages about Kurdistan as well, but if I give 0:18:35.350 --> 0:18:40.400 the example of Myanmar, everybody in Myanmar, to talk to them, 0:18:40.820 --> 0:18:43.240 apart from people who are really part of the spring 0:18:43.260 --> 0:18:45.340 revolution who will talk to me on Signal, I have 0:18:45.359 --> 0:18:49.740 to use Facebook. Because Facebook is the internet there. Because 0:18:49.790 --> 0:18:52.890 in some cases, you don't pay for data if that 0:18:52.930 --> 0:18:55.370 data is going through the Facebook app. but you do 0:18:55.430 --> 0:18:57.340 pay for data if you're using it through a browser 0:18:57.420 --> 0:19:01.300 or an email client, right? So Facebook is synonymous with 0:19:01.340 --> 0:19:05.020 the internet. Therefore, Facebook controls the internet. And so we 0:19:05.060 --> 0:19:07.560 get to this situation with the beginning of the genocide 0:19:07.600 --> 0:19:11.240 against the Rohingya people where the military is running a 0:19:11.460 --> 0:19:16.369 massive bot network and we have NLD government officials trying 0:19:16.410 --> 0:19:18.909 to call Facebook being like, yo, like a genocide is 0:19:19.150 --> 0:19:23.540 actively beginning and you are complicit in it. And Facebook 0:19:23.560 --> 0:19:26.620 not responding until they shut it down. They shut down 0:19:26.660 --> 0:19:27.440 Facebook entirely. 0:19:27.500 --> 0:19:27.680 Right. 0:19:27.720 --> 0:19:31.660 Yeah. And then in doing so basically disconnect a large 0:19:31.720 --> 0:19:35.080 portion of their population from the world. And like the 0:19:35.200 --> 0:19:39.380 people who had the tools to stop that genocide were 0:19:39.460 --> 0:19:42.930 in offices in California. And I think they had one 0:19:42.970 --> 0:19:46.169 Burmese language content moderator. What I'm getting at here is 0:19:46.340 --> 0:19:52.080 that the corporate internet is not equipped. It just doesn't 0:19:52.180 --> 0:19:56.240 care about the consequences of lots of things, including misinformation. 0:19:56.260 --> 0:20:02.850 And at least the autonomous internet, people could speak freely. 0:20:02.869 --> 0:20:05.510 They weren't controlled by the policies of Facebook. They weren't 0:20:05.530 --> 0:20:08.520 controlled by the policies of Google. Yes, what the government 0:20:08.580 --> 0:20:11.790 is alleging is part of the consequences of that free speech, 0:20:12.350 --> 0:20:14.790 where they are saying that people who were doing violence 0:20:14.810 --> 0:20:18.510 were organizing on it. Free speech is also, to just 0:20:18.530 --> 0:20:21.710 go super liberal American, right? It is a very First 0:20:21.770 --> 0:20:25.010 Amendment that they made to the Constitution. The printing press 0:20:25.150 --> 0:20:29.730 and pamphlets were integral to the revolution here, right? If 0:20:29.750 --> 0:20:34.110 you just want to be super fucking- Patriotic, yeah. Yeah, yeah. 0:20:34.990 --> 0:20:38.050 It's a betrayal of the concepts that like this country, 0:20:38.470 --> 0:20:40.930 many other of those concepts are bad things like slavery. 0:20:40.950 --> 0:20:42.830 Well, but do you know what else is a foundational 0:20:42.869 --> 0:20:44.470 concept of the American economy? 0:20:44.890 --> 0:20:47.750 Oh, is it the sale of products and services? That's true. 0:20:47.790 --> 0:20:49.650 And the advertisement of products and services. 0:20:49.690 --> 0:20:50.230 Right, yeah. 0:20:50.330 --> 0:20:52.770 Of which we are proud continuing that tradition. 0:20:52.869 --> 0:21:05.240 That's true. All right. We're back. 0:21:06.640 --> 0:21:10.100 So as we discussed before we started recording, neither of 0:21:10.140 --> 0:21:14.920 us are total internet understanders. I read a blow by blow. Noblogs.org, 0:21:14.960 --> 0:21:17.629 et cetera, have gone down. If you want to keep up, 0:21:18.240 --> 0:21:23.630 inventati.org is still up as of this recording. And keepitfree.ai, 0:21:23.930 --> 0:21:27.990 which is probably the only good. ai in existence, is 0:21:28.450 --> 0:21:30.910 where you can find press releases and things like that, right? 0:21:31.510 --> 0:21:33.750 And they did, as of a couple days ago, as 0:21:33.790 --> 0:21:36.430 of two days ago, A slash I was like, all right, 0:21:36.810 --> 0:21:38.389 we're done. We don't exist anymore. 0:21:38.910 --> 0:21:39.489 You beat us. 0:21:40.070 --> 0:21:41.550 And a lot of that has to do with the 0:21:41.590 --> 0:21:44.350 taking down of all of their infrastructure. And it's interesting. 0:21:44.650 --> 0:21:47.030 And part of the reason it's so chilling is that 0:21:47.330 --> 0:21:49.209 back in the day, when we thought of the internet 0:21:49.270 --> 0:21:51.409 as a very resilient thing, it was very decentralized, it 0:21:51.430 --> 0:21:55.170 was very resilient. If you own your own server, unless 0:21:55.230 --> 0:21:58.210 it gets seized in a raid by the police like 0:21:58.250 --> 0:22:01.990 a physical computer as a server right yeah and these 0:22:02.040 --> 0:22:04.419 days it's even hard to imagine that like a lot 0:22:04.440 --> 0:22:06.720 of people used to just have servers like under their 0:22:06.740 --> 0:22:09.679 desk you know or in their closet right they were 0:22:09.720 --> 0:22:11.760 like i run an extra cooling fan in there and 0:22:11.780 --> 0:22:14.320 i have a website in there yeah you know my 0:22:14.400 --> 0:22:19.649 first website was on uh my boss's server living at 0:22:19.710 --> 0:22:22.889 his house you know yeah and so you would defend 0:22:22.950 --> 0:22:26.859 the physical server and fairly regularly the police would raid 0:22:26.900 --> 0:22:29.580 and capture physical servers in various places around the world, 0:22:29.619 --> 0:22:32.100 you know? And it was usually seen as an overreach 0:22:32.140 --> 0:22:34.360 and often found later in court to be an overreach. 0:22:35.080 --> 0:22:37.540 But what's happening here is they got censored off of 0:22:37.580 --> 0:22:40.380