Notwithstanding the efforts of Plan R* to make the A/I network more robust against attacks, technical tricks alone are not sufficient. The strength of the project has been that of the community supporting it. The interpretation of the adjective ‘social’ within A/I tends decidedly towards the concept of mutual aid.
Obaz: Noblogs became somewhat self-managed, also because ultimately you have your blog
where you can also allow other people to create an account… There are manuals for the platform, people can study them and explain things to others. ‘Femminisimo a Sud’ (‘Fem- inism in the South’) got every feminist in Italy onto Noblogs and explained to them how it works technically through workshops. She organized a couple of seminars first on how to use Lifetype and then WordPress. Sometimes they got us involved, others they did on their own.
Noblogs attracted a variety of specific communities, from feminists to anarchists, large and small groups which now bonded through action, promoting practices ranging from art to community gardens. Another notable aspect lies in how Noblogs maintained the internation- alist heritage of A/I, so much so that the most read blog, annalist.noblogs.org, is in German.
Obaz: Germans, Russians, Portuguese, South Americans – they all turned up on A/I. We
had versions of the site in many languages, including a couple of pages in Chinese. The translation of the autistici.org and inventati.org website is due principally to the collaboration of individuals who started rewriting the pages in their own language.
We have Russian because at a certain point several texts in Cyrillic arrived at info@; we tried to understand them using Google Translate, if only to work out if they were talking about the same stuff! And then we began to put our documents online in Russian because there was a volunteer who translated them from English. Then there’s Nah, a Brazilian girl who we later got to know in person and who translated the site into Portuguese because she decided that she liked us…
Over the years various experiments were tried to help the users to collaborate with each other, to provide mutual assistance and give life to what could eventually be called a true community.
Psykozygo: The decision to reopen the forum as a space for peer assistance between users was a truly unexpected success. There are many examples of collaboration between people, whether it’s a matter of the visual customization of a specific blog or the resolution of small everyday problems linked to the mail client or other services.
But collaborations are not only triggered via Noblogs. There is the case of Collane di Ruggine, a self-managed publishing project also co-produced by the collective.
Reginazabo: Collane di Ruggine was born at the Hackmeeting in Pisa. Mostly there are three people involved, but lots of others subscribe to the project mailing list. We got to know one
that we all liked to make books. The co-production with the collective happened because it sometimes supports other initiatives on the basis of affinity, even if they don’t strictly speaking have anything to do with the technological agenda. If on the one hand it’s true that inside the collective our views are not always the same, it is also the case that some practices and activities fit within the core of our culture.
Initially the curators thought of a publishing project focused in some way on the use of tech- nology. In fact the first work published was a version of a graduation thesis on the relationship between man and technics in the novels of J. G. Ballard. Over time however they realized that they had lots of short stories and in the end opted for a fanzine, Ruggine,143 in which they publish illustrated fiction.
Reginazabo: Our stories sometimes have a steampunk atmosphere, an imaginary which I think is highly suited to the historical moment. I believe that it manages to fascinate people and thus draw them into ideas they would otherwise never have come in contact with where you simply tell them the truth. The plain truth, that’s it: in Genoa in 2001, I realized that the
simple truth was not enough. When you just tell the truth they throw you in Bolzaneto144and
beat the shit out of you.
In recent years, and stretching beyond its narrow technical role, the collective has paid close attention and given support to some campaigns dedicated to social issues.
Reginazabo: Between 2007 and 2008 we just couldn’t deal with it any more in Italy. Our impression was that there was an attempt to conduct politics based on fear and moral pan- ic, and that it was no accident that politicians and journalists were over-egging it: this was democratic racism at its maximum. I remember the story that broke the camel’s back of my impatience: the Ponticelli pogrom in Naples when a young Roma girl was accused of kidnap- ping a baby and the next day the whole neighborhood attacked the gypsy camps from which
everyone had to flee.145At the Hackmeeting in Palermo we were approached by some people
who proposed that we jointly devise a project against surveillance and the social exploitation of fear. Seeing as there were also positive experiments which no-one was talking about, we thought of using an aggregator to bring them together and thus acquire greater visibility.
Some of those with whom the collective began to work on the project were also running the ‘Freedom not Fear’146 campaign, sponsored by the EFF; their involvement was crucial because
they encouraged A/I to take responsibility and do something.
Reginazabo: We had just bought the domain ‘anche.no’,147just at the right time! First off we
set up the blog paura.anche.no148and gave the password to a group of projects. Then we
143 Ruggine (Rust): A collaborative, DIY, self-published magazine collecting steampunk oriented stories, and much more besides. The project is hosted on Noblogs: https://collanediruggine.noblogs.org/english. 144 See footnote 117.
145 The Ponticelli pogrom followed a campaign of hatred and exploded on the morning of the 12 May 2008. The incidents went on all day.
146 Freedom not Fear: International campaign for freedom of speech and against surveillance – http://www. freedomnotfear.org.
147 Anche.no: Literally ‘also no’. It roughly translates as a sarcastic ‘maybe not!’ 148 paura.anche.no: ‘Fear not!’ or ‘Fear? Maybe not’.
invited the same number again to participate. To a large extent our work was putting together the blog on the topic, but we also produced our own publications. For several months the portal functioned really well.
However the campaign did not finish there. On the contrary, it soon evolved into something quite unexpected. As they say, one thing is born from another, and so it was that in this same period the Babau149 made its first appearance.
Bomboclat: Babau is a spin-off from the collective, which beyond technology is as you know dedicated to the question of communicative forms. In this case it tried to hook into the ‘Freedom not Fear’ campaign by finding a communicative formula which would enable the
deactivation of the strategy of fear and repression, at least at a conceptual level.
It all began when Alieno took it upon himself to draw the essence of the politics of fear, the very incarnation of fear as a political instrument: the Babau. So it was that two eyes and a threatening mouth against a black background became the curious mascot of the campaign against fear.
Alieno: Sometimes the simplest solution is also the most effective. I wasted weeks pondering how to draw fear and it was enough to strip it down to the essentials.
The purpose of the portal paura.anche.no was actually to highlight positive projects from Italy whilst simultaneously ridiculing fear. And the Babau was needed for this purpose.
Bomboclat: The idea was to invoke this nightmare of every child which finds a grotesque echo in the world of adults as a justification for law and order policies, not to mention the senseless paranoia which feeds upon the deterioration of the social context which they themselves generate: a vicious cycle which has enslaved us now for at least a decade in a completely disproportionate and intolerable manner. A way out of so much heaviness is offered in the lightness of this imaginary character, responsible for every evil imaginable, even for some which are distinctly improbable.
The campaign took off and out of it a series of regional initiatives was born in Milan, Florence, Rome and Bologna, then in Pisa, Falconara, Padua, Turin and Parma…
Alieno: The thing to remember in the Babau campaign is the coordination: the Babau showed up both in the big cities and small provincial towns in planned appearances, generating curi- osity and triggering a virtuous cycle which continued autonomously for months.
Eventually a call to arms was made: drawings and stories which illustrate that sense of anxiety that was feeding the emergency politics of the period. The many faces of the Babau were to be sought out.
Reginazabo: At a certain point we got in touch with the Scuola Romana dei Fumetti, the Roman Comics School, from which there arrived various versions of the Babau: about forty illustrations on the theme of social fear, some from well-known artists. This then became an exhibition which toured all over Italy.
149 Babau: In Italian folklore Babau is an imaginary monster, a ‘boogeyman’. Typically, children are told to behave ‘otherwise the Babau will come and get you’.
In addition to the traveling exhibition, the campaign also produced a book of postcards and short stories, inspired of course by the taunt of the Babau. The title: The Babau. Fear of the Dark?
Reginazabo: The exhibition went as far as Berlin, it had its resonance. When we produced the book with Collane di Ruggine with the stories and illustrations, contributions even arrived from abroad written in Italian – it was just incredible!