A/I Shuts Down
30 points by kolja
30 points by kolja
A/I is Autistici/Inventati, nothing to do with algorithms.
Why this matters: to quote senior advisor and journalist Anne Roth:
20,000 mail accounts. 20,000 blogs. 5,000 mailing lists. 1,500 websites.
In Europe.
Run by volunteers of @cavallette, perfectly legal, and decidedly antifascist, feminist, queer.
Destroyed and shut down by Trump's administration, extra legally.
This is one of the most devastating cases of politically motivated debanking I have come across.
Triggered by my own comment, I thought this might be a good starting point for a discussion about how to secure platforms not only technically, but also socially and financially.
Mods: this is my first submission, feel free to tell me how to improve. I had a hard time choosing a tag, but I think this may be relevant to the community.
Here's the State Department's press release: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/08/designation-of-autistici-inventati-as-a-specially-designated-global-terrorist
The framework for debanking has been in place since just after 9/11. Plenty of innocent hawala operators got caught up in it in the mid 2000s.
Here is a bit more info on the debanking itself (the article on the submitted URL doesn't give much info on that).
This is quite concerning - US companies shutting down foreign enemies of the state is one thing (and a great argument for EU tech sovereignty), but EU organizations willingly doing this, and without a fair trial at that, is quite another.
Well, it is not willingly.
Note that I work for an european payment network that is presenting itself as a partial solution to some of these problems, but I had this opinion before and I did not join them for ideological reasons. They just paid
Here is the thing. Any transaction in USD has to go through the US banking system. A lot of international transactions (commercial and financial, lot of borrowing and all is in USD for corporations) is in USD.
It means a bank, whichever bank, needs to be able to transact with US banks to be able to act as a bank. Which means that any bank is forced to follow the US decisions on those, because otherwise they are now the one in breach and as such, will be cut off by their US counterparts.
And that is a death sentence for most banks, because you do need the card networks, you need the payments networks, you need access to Treasuries, to US stock market, to international transactions, etc
To be able to stop this and be in the "willingly" situation you mention, you would need most of the international financial and trade markets to decouple from the USD. This is... an aspiration, but not really close to a reality right now. Same for the payment networks.
This. If you can read Italian or have your browser translate this post, it explains exactly that (the comments there are perhaps even more interesting than the post itself).
Thank you for the insider background info on this, I had no idea!
So I guess the only alternative would be to use crypocurrencies, maybe.
how to secure platforms not only technically, but also socially
A good start would be not hosting violent terrorist groups. And if you do, proactively de-host them once you learn of their activities. And if you vet your customers, try to exclude those organising public support for people like this charming fellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Cospito
To be clear about my position: I think debanking in general is horrendous, this specific case is an example of it being used it bypass legal and Constitutional protections, and it's a violation of human rights. I also fear that this may be a case of the current US Govt. testing the waters for more such actions, against political opponents.
I oppose this action because I support the rule of law, not because I have any shred of sympathy for groups who knowingly provide infrastructure for violent terrorists and their apologists.
It takes a special kind of marketing to end up with the list of users mentioned in the State Dept release. Agree wholeheartedly on the difficulties created by the absence of judicial oversight, but in this case it's almost impossible to have any sympathy for the closure of this platform.
And yet we must oppose it, even in the absence of sympathy. "... every infringement of human rights has begun with a given right's least attractive practitioners."
But it does raise a real aspect of socially securing a platform: act on illegal content when you find it, and when it's reported to you.
And it also raises what I have come to realise is an important design principle: if you want to support that which is illegal but moral, your tool shouldn't be a platform at all in the conventional sense. Think torrents, IPFS, etc. rather than a Website.
It is a failing on part of the European legal systems and law enforcement that entities like this may operate for so long as this one did, especially since it seems to have operated completely in public.
Unrelated, as a gay man I really don't like when "feminist and queer" are used as a blanket for justification of something, good or bad. It's just fodder for the far right to demonize everyone under that umbrella. This is one of those cases - now A/I has given a direct link for more association between what the state called "domestic terrorism" (regardless of if it really is that) and "queer people"/"feminists".
Just a stray thought.