Autistici/Inventati shuts down after 25 years, citing 'terrorist' designation

Autistici/Inventati (A/I), an Italian collective that spent 25 years running non-commercial email, blog, and website hosting built around privacy and political autonomy, is ceasing all services. The trigger, per the group’s announcement, was being labeled a global terrorist organization — a designation it says exposed not just the collective but its users and anyone connected to them to disproportionate legal, financial, and possibly extra-legal reprisal. Rather than fight on and risk those consequences landing on its community, the collective chose to wind down.

The shutdown is framed as a protective act more than a defeat. A/I argues that in a climate where accusations are ‘disconnected from reality,’ continuing to operate would endanger the very people its infrastructure was meant to shield. It promises to send instructions for backing up blogs, mailboxes, and sites, but warns that access could vanish abruptly — noting that its autistici.org domain was already made unreachable without warning, and that further disruptions may come before users can react.

The closure is a notable loss for the independent, activist-oriented corner of the internet, where A/I was one of the longest-running providers of secure, non-commercial tools outside the commercial and state-adjacent mainstream. Its ‘Stay human’ sign-off underscores the core tension: state pressure severe enough to dismantle privacy infrastructure by making its continued operation a liability to everyone it serves, rather than through any direct technical takedown.