
from cavallete
Here we go again, another year gone by but we can still celebrate our good health and hopefully yours too.
We’re all still overwhelmed by a situation that is evolving from an emergency to regular day to day life. A state of normality that looks closer to the previous one, but worse. A reality made of necessary constraints and protections, but which mostly seem to safeguard the stability of the productive system, rather than the safety of people.
We’re astonished at the proliferation of ridiculous distortions of the imaginary of the Net like crypto-coins and NFTs, or vaporware ideas like Web3 and the metaverse. Speculations that demonstrate how capitalism is the underlying issue, infiltrating our lives, replicating its disfunctionalities. But this greed is built on nothing.
Through all this, we keep offering tools to those who want to fight, those who are not resigned, who want to resist, and who want to build something.
We do it in the hope that the ties between us will grow stronger. That the quality of the communication flows around us will improve, helping us to understand better the reality that surrounds us. If it’s true it is important to listen to many voices, it is also important to avoid toxic narratives, and this can be achieved by participating the places where those are kept at bay. This is the reason for our policy: we don’t want to provide space to those who do not share our principles, even while maintaining a diversity of perspectives that sometimes tests our patience.
To select trusted entities, the ones whom we acknowledge the value of the words they use, it’s an essential process, which is complicated by rate and amount of information we receive. To build trusted networks and keep them active is a constant process that
helps to feel less alone, it helps to enrich our knowledge and start new mutualistic relations which are needful to be able to build a better future. The resources to get informed via web today are infinite even though they propose different levels of accessibility (either technological and cultural). On top of this there a places (like the social networks) that are since too long simplifying, polarizing and polluting the debates with false information, either for bad faith from a human intervention or by way of definite algorithmic behaviour.
Here are some resources that we selected, hoping to contribute to inform you on some issues near and dear to our collective hearts:
* work, Internet, big platforms:
https://www.valigiablu.it/grandi-dimissioni-lavoro/ [IT]
https://blog.robutti.me/introduzione-alla-politica-dei-tech-worker [IT]
* web3, cryptocurrencies, social network:
https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/web3-fraud
https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html
https://kylechayka.substack.com/p/essay-digital-nostalgia
* suggested reading: a book with many interesting references to the history of
digital activism in Italy:
http://neural.it/it/2021/12/alessandra-renzi-hacked-transmissions-technology-and-connective-activism-in-italy/
For the collective, it has been a mostly quiet year. We haven’t had memorable legal issues, and the technical work done in the last few years has paid off by ensuring a smooth operation most of the time.
We have introduced a couple of new services last year, meant to support communications during the hardest part of the pandemic: https://vc.autistici.org for video conferences, and https://live.autistici.org for live streaming. These are being actively used, so we intend to keep them running for the foreseeable future.
We also updated our authentication systems, which now fully support hardware tokens (U2F/FIDO) as a second authentication factor (https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2021/12/9697).
We’re also working a bit to improve Noblogs, and have a few ideas about new services, but you’ll hear more in 2022 about that!
Finally, we’d like to remind you that the work to keep everything running is on a volunteer basis, at least as long as you’ll help us pay for the servers and the bandwidth necessary to keep this project free, self-managed and independent.
+KAOS - 10 Years of Hacking and Media Activism
10 years after the creation of our collective, we finally
managed to tell at least a part of our story, and what it meant to us.
After another few years, the English translation is finally available! :)
About the book
At the end of the 20th century, hacking was bleeding edge. When the ideas, practices and pranks of this experimental niche of technophiles attracted the attention of a handful of activists in Italy, they understood that information and communication were what would give shape and voice to social, political, and cultural processes in the near future.
+KAOS is a cut and paste of interviews, like a documentary film transposed on paper. It describes the peculiar relationship between hacktivism and activism, in Italy and beyond, highlighting the importance of maintaining digital infrastructures. While this may not sound as glamorous as sneaking into a server and leaking data, it is a fundamental topic: not even the most emblematic group of hacktivists can operate without the services of radical server collectives.
Download
The English translation of the book is published by the
Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam.
Comments
when it comes to blogs, self
anon (not verified) Tue, 12/28/2021 - 10:01
when it comes to blogs, self-respecting anarchists use noblogs, chist, or self-host
wordpress? medium? substack? dafuq is dat?! get outta here!!
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