Hey stackers, I wish I wasn't writing this, but precisely because of the affection I have for self-managed collectives trying to operate outside the system, and because I know the work behind many of these organizations across their many currents, and like A/I, they already have enough bad press without us throwing stones at our own roof.

A few days ago I told you about how the Italian hacktivist collective Autistici/Inventati (A/I) had been designated a "global terrorist" group by the United States #1573519

No, of course they didn't kill anyone or plant bombs, their job was simply to provide encrypted email and hosting to activists for 25 years, that was their crime. When the US made its move, PayPal took less than 72 hours to freeze their account, the .org registry suspended their domain without a court order, and Banca Etica closed their account out of fear of secondary sanctions. The result: 16,000 mailboxes, 1,500 websites, 5,500 mailing lists, and 10,000 blogs wiped out in a matter of days.

Thirteen years earlier, in 2013, A/I had published an article explaining why they didn't accept Bitcoin donations. The reasons they gave in 2013:

• They offer no specific advantage compared to a normal bank account.
• They're a pump & dump to fool ultra-libertarian anarcho-capitalists.
• It wasn't really anonymous, they said, and it was tied to speculation.

Thirteen years later, they had no Bitcoin wallet. When the financial system they claimed to despise closed every door, there wasn't a single window open.

In a recent interview with Freedom News, after announcing their closure, they were asked directly whether de-banking would make them reconsider their stance on Bitcoin.

Their response:

We never supported bitcoin, so we're not going to suggest that route. Anyone can take their own stance on this particular way of dodging de-banking, but the problem is restoring some democratic legal framework around this, or any authoritarian system can weaken European society and its humanitarian organizations.

Let me get this straight: these guys would rather ask the State to protect them than accept a tool the State can't control. They want the financial system to work "democratically," not to exit it.

I've been lucky enough to know many anarchists and anticapitalists, and believe me, all of them wanted everything outside the system. Everything. Not everything except money. They wanted out of the bank, out of capitalism, out of the State. But not today. And I don't know why so many people, sometimes activists, tend to reject anything they don't understand, or worse, anything that sounds like "capitalist technology", while the system still has them by the balls. In the case of collectives, it's no longer about ideological purity. It's about fear of leaving the system.

A/I died from depending on centralized infrastructure: email, website, funding, all of it went through third parties that folded at the first warning from Washington. The lesson isn't "Bitcoin would have saved everything. The lesson is more uncomfortable: if your infrastructure depends on a third party, your infrastructure is confiscable.

Go forth and multiply, they said. Fine. But carry a wallet. Don't reject sats out of ideological purity. Stop asking permission. Build the exit yourself.

Their website https://www.inventati.org/ is still live as of today, but not for long. A/I announced its definitive shutdown for September 18, 2026, at midnight (Italian time). If you're reading this after that date, the servers may already be offline.

I hope you come back stronger. Health and Bitcoin.