The city of Barcelona—its squares still pockmarked from a desperate civil war between Fascists and a quickly thrown together coalition of Spanish and international units fighting for the democratically elected Republican government of Spain—was in the eye of a storm of historic forces that would remake Western democracies in the last century. And today, the city seems to be channeling forces that will remake them in the present century.
The Indignados, or indignant citizens of Spain, started the Occupy movement that swept the globe after the economic crash of 2008. In Spain, the financial crisis hit hard. The government of the day, the Socialist Workers’ Party, had passed tough austerity measures in line with other European governments, but the measures deepened the crisis, and inequality and unemployment increased. Ordinary taxpayers were made to rescue financial elites while bearing the burden of wage and social cutbacks themselves. Popular anger grew as conditions deteriorated. By the fall of 2011, the unemployment rate had risen to 25 percent, and youth unemployment to 46 percent.1 The financially engineered real estate bubble had burst, and the Spanish economy, like the US and other national economies, was reeling. The passage of a “Sinde” law—which, like the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) tabled in the United States, allowed, without due process, any website that contained a copyright violation by users to be taken down—had angered people greatly because they understood that it would ruin the free internet.2 They felt their democracy had been hollowed out.
People had started gathering in their neighborhood squares to discuss their situation. These assemblies grew. Banks were occupied, hospitals were occupied and saved from privatization, and vacant land and buildings were occupied and inhabited by squatters. Online protests denounced the Sinde law and unfair copyright enforcement. The student group Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth without Future) staged a large demonstration in Madrid. Demands multiplied for basic citizen rights to home, work, culture, health, and education.
In January 2011, users on Spanish social media networks had created a digital platform called Democracia Real YA! It invited “the unemployed, poorly paid, the subcontractors, the precarious, young people,” and others to take to the streets on May 15, ahead of the next election cycle, in many towns and cities. The movement, which by this time was known as the Indignados movement or 15M movement (for the day the massive mobilization was to take place), rejected affiliation with political parties and trade unions and insisted on independence from institutionalized ideologies and agendas.
The occupations of the squares went on for weeks. By the following year, the movement was organizing itself into collectives and thematic groups formed to tackle specific goals.
Ada Colau was elected as mayor of Barcelona in May 2015. Before her election, Colau had been one of the activists helping people who were losing their homes because they could not pay their mortgages, and had cofounded Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (la PAH) (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages). Colau herself had held more than twenty jobs over her working life and lived as a squatter for a time.3 Her election to municipal office was a victory for the Indignados movement and was accomplished quickly and with little money. One of the most tweeted photos in Spain that year showed Colau being dragged away by police from a people’s occupation of a bank. The caption read, “Welcome, new mayor.”4
Colau has spoken eloquently about the politics in Spain leading up to and following the 2008 financial crisis, and her statements are worth quoting at length because they tell much about the populist sentiment that took off in that country. “We have serious political problems here in Barcelona,” she said in an interview shortly after her election. “There are problems related to the economic crisis, but this economic crisis is a consequence of a political crisis, of a profound democratic crisis. We’ve had a form of government where the political elites have a cozy relationship with the economic elites who have ruined the economy of the country, and the ultimate representation of this was the behavior of the financial institutions, of the banks. They defrauded thousands and thousands of people.”5
Three years earlier, at a hearing on Spain’s foreclosures crisis, Colau had spoken on a panel following a representative from Spain’s banking industry. Famously, she turned to the banker who had just spoken and said,
This man is a criminal. We’ve been negotiating for four years with the banks, with the public administration, with the courts, and we know exactly what we’re talking about, and this leads me to question the voices of supposed experts, who precisely are the ones being given too much credit, pardon the irony, such as the representatives of financial institutions. We just had an example. I would say it was “paradoxical,” to use a euphemism, if not outright cynical for the representative of financial institutions who just spoke, telling us that the Spanish legislation is great. To say that when people are taking their own lives because of this criminal law, I assure you, I assure you, that I did not throw a shoe at this man because I believed it was important to be here now to tell you what I’m telling you. But this man is a criminal, and you should treat him as such. He is not an expert. The representatives of financial institutions have caused this problem. They are the very same people who caused the problem which has ruined the whole economy of this country. And you are treating them as experts.6
Immediately after the event, Colau’s Twitter following grew from eight thousand to a hundred thousand, and her name began to show up on political popularity polls. The need for an organization like la PAH to help people in financial distress was immediately obvious in the wake of the financial crisis, and by 2013 it had two hundred centers across Spain. “People came to us, and they couldn’t even speak,” she recalled. “They couldn’t even explain what had happened to them. They thought that nothing good would ever happen to them again.”7
Later she would say,
When I encountered this banker who said there were no problems in Spain, when there are thousands of families in a dire situation, the least I could do is denounce these lies and talk about what was happening in reality. … I think what surprised people more was that someone was talking about reality in Parliament, because, sadly, this had not happened in a long time. You have the paradox that while the corrupt politicians see the statute of limitations for their crimes lapse and they make off without going to jail, the families who got into debt for something as basic as accessing housing become indebted forever [under the law]. … And it showed that if our institutions did not resolve this problem, it was because our institutions were accomplices in this fraud.8
Colau and others set up a citizen platform, Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common), to gauge support for a united list of candidates to stand in the 2015 municipal election, and money was crowd-sourced to fund their run for office. She has said that city councils were key to a new way of making policy and to proving “there is another way to govern: more inclusive, working together with the people, more than just asking them to vote every four years.”9 She has talked about the democratic revolution all over southern Europe confronting neoliberal economic policies, which have become a problem around the world:
In reality there’s been a continuity in the past fifteen years at least. In the early 2000s, late 1990s, when they began the anti-globalization movement, there was a wide cycle of protest that began, that continues to this day. … And all these mobilizations … have had many things in common. First … that we need to work as a network, because there’s a single global and economic reality, and it’s essential to work in alliances. Also, it’s essential that there’s real democracy, the awareness that even if we have formally democratic institutions, we have the sense that the decisions are not being made in Parliament but by the boards of directors or by international institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, which are profoundly anti-democratic and which the people do not control, and that they also make decisions against their own people, generating misery around the world.
This awareness of a kidnapped democracy has led to the rise of many grassroots mobilizations, propelled from the bottom, by the people, which are [working toward] direct representation. They’ve seen that formal democracy is not enough, that we need to find new ways of political participation where everyone can be an actor and each person can directly contribute as much as each person can contribute.
So, I think that all of these mobilizations that have happened in the past fifteen years, that have also increasingly used new technologies, the Internet, social media, that have pursued new forms of innovation and direct communication, in some way, we are seeing an upgrade of democracy, an upgrade of the forms of political participation that have had many different expressions in different global movements, but there’s clearly a nexus that unites them all.10
As the first female mayor of Barcelona, elected around the same time as the female mayor of Madrid, Colau talked about “feminizing” politics and demonstrating “that cooperation is more effective and more satisfactory than competitiveness, and that politics done collectively are better than those done individualistically.”11
In Colau’s first month in office, Barcelona’s municipal government had a thirty-point plan that included doing away with the privileges of elected officials. The paid expenses, the cars, and the high salaries are “things that can seem simple,” Colau said, “but are symbolically important because they send a message of ending impunity, of an end to a political class removed from the reality of the people.”12
At the Chaos Communication Camp in August 2015, not long after the election of Ada Colau as the mayor of Barcelona, I met Simona Levi, a founding member of the Barcelona-based group Xnet. Levi’s group existed before the Indignados protests and was highly engaged in the politics that unfolded in the city following the 2008 financial crisis.
A gaggle of people had gathered in a tent at the camp for an impromptu meeting called by Gabriella Coleman, the anthropologist known for her seminal book on Anonymous. Coleman had wanted to bring together the academics, journalists, and activists who were increasingly becoming engaged with the camp and the Chaos Computer Club. The discussion circled around motives, methods, competency, and cultural appropriation, until a Dutch hacker piped up, “Sometimes I think academics are dissecting hackers like a strange species. But it should be about how to bring us all forward. Just describing hackers as diverse: that’s fucking uninteresting. It has to be about how we come together and go forward.”
Levi, a slim, dark-haired woman, interjected her view from the trenches:
Hacker philosophy is the last chance for real revolution to change the world. We want it to become “pop” so that our mothers also know about it.
Sometimes the study of hackers as a “tribe” puts them into a ghetto. It’s better to think of it as an avant garde for a new way of thinking that will allow the revolution. It’s a new philosophy of distribution, sharing, and diversity. With the Indignados movement, we are hacking everything now: the grid, the hospitals, the city. … We have to take this academic idea of “hacker diversity” and open it up. We leak a lot of documents in Spain. In a small village, an old lady would hack and send us information on corrupt bankers, using GlobaLeaks. Newspapers say the source of the information is government, but this is not so. It’s the hacker, including the old lady.
I found Levi that evening at the camp set up by La Quadrature du Net. The space was laid out elegantly, with low-slung tarps arranged like the silk tents of a nomadic caravan, Eastern carpets spread on the ground, and people sitting cross-legged around low tables. Andy Müller-Maguhn had referred to it as “the place where the French are serving tea,” and in fact they were, around the clock.
Levi is an Italian who has been living in Barcelona since 1990. She is a well-known theater director in Spain and has a powerful presence. Forty-something, she trained as a dancer and then in physical theater at École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. I found out later that she is related to Primo Levi, the writer and Auschwitz survivor. Primo Levi had been a member of the Italian resistance and wrote about his experience in the Nazi camps and the loss of both guards’ and prisoners’ humanity there.
Xnet, Levi told me, had been active since 2008 and was probably one of the most important groups working in Europe on digital rights issues, including copyright, free software, net neutrality, privacy, the right to encryption, freedom of information, freedom of expression, free culture and information, and censorship on the internet. It was involved in the fight against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an international digital-restrictions-management instrument along the lines of the American Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation: both were successfully defeated by civil society groups. La Quadrature du Net in France had played a large role in that campaign, too.
Xnet had become widely known recently because it had succeeded in having many of the corrupt bankers and politicians responsible for Spain’s financial crisis brought to trial. The first to be targeted by the group was Rodrigo Rato, Spain’s minister of the economy from 1996 to 2004, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2004 to 2007, partner of the prestigious financial firm Lazard, then briefly president of Caja Madrid before becoming president of Bankia, a large investment bank whose collapse triggered the Spanish financial crisis. Bankia received more bailout funds than any other institution in Spain. Levi estimated that one-seventh of the national debt could be attributed to it.
Wrapping one leg in front of the other, Levi leaned in to tell me the story.
Bankia was formed in 2010 through the efforts of Rato while he was director of Caja Madrid. In a restructuring of the financial system in Spain, Caja Madrid, the oldest savings bank in Spain, and six other Spanish savings banks (all of which operated like credit unions) were turned into privately owned banks and rolled into Bankia. Rato became its president. Bankia launched an initial public offering on the stock market in July 2011, but the price of its shares had been pumped up by the bank with fraudulent information. Risky preferred shares were also sold without proper disclosure. The bank’s promotional material targeted families and small investors.
In 2011, Bankia reported profits of €300 billion, and a year later it had to be nationalized by the government13 and then bailed out by taxpayers with losses in the billions.14 Over 200,000 small investors, many of them pensioners, lost a total of €1.86 billion. Some lost their life savings.15 When Levi first read the news, she was appalled, and she met with other activists to discuss what they could do. The group included a gardener, a chef, and a coder.16
On the first anniversary of the 15M occupations, Levi founded 15MpaRato (15M for Rato) with an anonymous call put out over social media networks: “A message for #12M15M from the internet quarter.” She and the others collaborating on the project set a five-year plan for themselves in which they undertook to have Rato criminally convicted and sentenced by 2017. They encouraged people to submit any information that might help to imprison him.17 “We were going for real, individual accountability for the bankruptcy of the Spanish economy,” Levi told me. “Rato was a symbol of the collaboration between banking and government. He got rich as a banker on the laws he made. We said we’d start with him and through him get all the others.”
At the start, Levi told me, nobody trusted them. But it did not take long to gather enough information for a legal case: “Then we did crowd funding that was famous. We received €20,000 in one day from citizens.” They brought in 130 percent of their original goal and hired lawyers to assist in building and presenting the case. Under the “civil code” system in Spain, citizens can file complaints if they believe a law has been broken and have a judge decide whether to investigate. So much damning evidence was collected by 15MpaRato that the court was forced to take up the case, and in July 2012 it charged Rato and thirty-three board members of Bankia as well as Bankia’s parent company.18
In 2013, after an anonymous leaker sent 15MpaRato eight thousand emails belonging to Rato’s predecessor at Caja Madrid, Miguel Blesa, the group was inspired to set up an online leaking platform using the Italian hackers’ system, GlobaLeaks. Xnet and others vetted the leaks received and then released information to journalists and posted it online so that people could work with it in an open-source fashion. Jokes and memes were a large part of the postings. The case against Bankia expanded its focus to include forgery and embezzlement when the leaks revealed a vast scam to siphon money from the bank, initiated by Miguel Blesa while he was president of Casa Madrid and continued by Rato, using “black” credit cards. Designed by Visa to be used by the ultra-rich, the credit cards were used by Bankia executives for their own enrichment and to buy off political parties and trade unions. Officials from every major political party and trade union benefitted from the scam. The court case became a criminal proceeding. All told, the trials would involve nearly a hundred bankers and officials.
It was very empowering, Levi told me, because it was the most impossible thing to do. Rodrigo Rato had been untouchable—a god, the architect of neoliberal policies in Spain. He had held the top post at the IMF in Washington, and after the prosecutor laid charges against him, he lost all his status. “Now he travels second class, and people shout at him when he goes through the airport,” she said.
Simona Levi started Xnet in 2008 with a female coder and musician who goes by the handle Maddish. They both were artists and activists advocating for free culture and “copyleft” in Spain, and as a result they both were having problems with the Spanish copyright collection agency. The recently passed copyright legislation in Spain was predatory, and the collection agency was acting like the mafia, Levi told me, scamming artists and consumers and shaking down small businesses, aggressively demanding copyright royalties (“from bakeries, from hair dressers!” Levi exclaimed) and threatening them with high fines. Instead of giving money to artists, however, the agency was using money collected to speculate in the housing market. “And now,” Levi told me, “they’re all on trial, too.” So this was Xnet’s start before it expanded to other issues.
Xnet is a closed, guerrilla group, she said. “We launch projects, open them up, and then close them again, like the 15MpaRato Citizens against Corruption. The name is a pun: pa rato means ‘for a long time.’ Citizens against Corruption ‘for the long haul.’”
“In Spain,” she explained, “we have a tradition of the left and protest. The doism of hackers is different: we solve problems by doing. I think Spain is on the vanguard of change. Not because of Podemos [the leftist political party]; it is in fact a barrier. At the start of the Indignados movement, there were millions of very active people. In the first two months, eight million people were going every day to the squares. There was an 80 percent appreciation rate from the public. The fifteenth of May 2011 was called via Facebook. Podemos was not involved. They did not come on the scene until 2014. You don’t need to impose your ideology like the left always wants to. It’s not who you are, but what you can do. That is also hacker philosophy.”
“Podemos will try to destroy what the people have created by coopting the movement in a Stalinist way. Like in the 1930s, when the Communists in Spain spent their time repressing the anarchists and lost the war.” (Fighting on the same side as the anarchists, the Communists were supported by Stalin’s regime in Russia and driven largely by its agenda. Some believe the brutal purges they carried out against the anarchists in the last days of the civil war in Catalonia may have contributed to the loss of the war and of the fledgling Republican democracy in Spain to the Fascists.) “Podemos,” Levi continued, “instead of helping Xnet with the trial of a hundred bankers, said, ‘You must be with us, or you must not exist.’”
“For me, the Indignados movement unfolded like the French Revolution. The very modern, innovative ideas of the Enlightenment were developed first in the ‘republic of letters’ and then moved to the Revolution in France. Today, the illustration is from the hackers. They started in the internet and are coming to the whole society.”
The mass demonstrations in Spain, Levi told me, were different than the Occupy movement in the United States because in Spain “we had a successful system based on creating concrete solutions to problems. The movement in Spain was not a discussion, not just series of protests, but active and executed with skill. It is more transitive, active. Action is divided between health, housing, bankers, and the electoral process. And it’s working in important cities. For example, they hacked the electoral system in Barcelona with the election of Barcelona’s new mayor using technical tools, networks, self-organization, and crowd funding. In Madrid, a city with a population of nearly seven million, authorities wanted to privatize the health system, and the movement managed to stop it.”
Xnet, Levi told me, was composed of only seven people. They worked passionately, she said, all day, every day, to achieve what they did. Each of them led in a particular skill field, which was a model of doing things that came from their open-source work.
What Levi was saying reminded me of the lack of a fixed leadership in the 1968 Paris student uprisings. I later found Daniel Cohn-Bendit’s explanation to Sartre about why he thought that was a good thing:
No vanguard, neither the UEC, the JCR nor the Marxists-Leninists, has been able to seize control of the movement. Their militants can participate decisively in the actions, but they have been drowned in the movement. They are to be found on the co-ordination committees, where their role is important, but there has never been any question of one of these vanguards taking a leading position.
This is the essential point. It shows that we must abandon the theory of the “leading vanguard” and replace it by a much simpler and more honest one of the active minority functioning as a permanent leaven, pushing for action without ever leading it. … In certain objective situations — with the help of an active minority — spontaneity can find its old place in the social movement. Spontaneity makes possible the forward drive, not the orders of a leading group.19
“We call it ‘networked democracy,’” Levi told me: “Distributed power via a meritocracy, with skill and action.” Not a vertical democracy. Not a horizontal democracy like Occupy’s. “Obsession with process defeated Occupy,” she said.
It is the summer of 2016, and I’m on my way to Europe to visit Xnet in Spain and investigate another interesting citizen-hacker phenomenon, the Cinque Stelle movement, in Italy. As I leave North America, the campaign for the 2016 US presidential election is in full swing. Larry Lessig (author of “Code Is Law”) is running for president, no less. Lessig has been writing about the need to carry the Occupy movement forward and the necessity, above all, for people to gain control of democratic processes. In America, Lessig believes, the first imperative is to get money out of politics,20 and he is running on that program.
The people I’m traveling to talk to in Europe also see that citizens need to take control of democratic processes. These groups have already been successful at regional and national levels in bringing down politicians corrupted by money and in electing their own candidates to important posts. They, too, have formulated a program, and it is even more ambitious than Lessig’s.
These citizens intend to hack the democratic process itself. They want to disintermediate governance, to move politicians who do not act in the interests “of the people” out of the way, and to enact a direct, distributed democracy. They are not using their votes as an anger-management tool, as the British have just done in the Brexit vote of June 2016 and the Americans will shortly do in November 2016.21 They are using hacker-made platforms, hacker principles, and hacker humor to successfully marshal technology and achieve concrete goals, one thorny issue at a time. This is not “tech utopianism,” but, I’m coming to believe, the hard work of democracy in the digital age.
After a sixteen-hour flight, I finally arrive in Barcelona so jet-lagged I barely make it to the theater in time to pick up the ticket Simona Levi has left for me at the box office. It is the opening night of Hazte Banquero (Become a Banker), a play that Levi and the Xnet collective have created and produced. The title is taken from a slogan that was used by Bankia in its promotional material targeting small investors.
Hazte Banquero is being performed in the historic Teatre Poliorama on La Rambla. George Orwell stood sentry on the roof of this building for several days during the Spanish Civil War and wrote about the experience in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell’s book famously tried to tell the world about the Communists’ betrayal of the anarchists in Catalonia during the civil war and its consequences, the history to which Levi referred when speaking about Podemos and the Indignados movement when I met her at the Chaos Communication Camp the year before.
It is a warm night, and a lively local crowd is pouring into the theater from the street.
As the lights come up on stage, an actor who is well-known in Catalonia strides out to set the scene. The story is complex, but it can be told and understood in plain language, she says. On a screen behind her, an image appears of an abstract painting: yellow astral strands of light connect what look like galaxies, and across it all are spatters of blue and purple paint. Hundreds of lightly written names appear on the screen within this network of connection, and then “15MpaRato” emerges in the center. The actor explains how networks work, how networked democracy can work. She charts how the “robbery” that was the Bankia scandal happened. There are many projections of financial information. She makes the audience laugh.
There is a shot from the Xnet website—a photo of a mouth speaking into an ear with the caption “Filtra contra corrupción” and “#crowdfundpaRato.” So much information was leaked by the people that justice officials had to do something, the actor tells the audience. Their hand was forced.
“Our story tells how it happened,” the actor says. “Are you ready?”
The play focusses largely on the “black” credit-card scam. Whenever a new character comes onstage, the real-life photo of the person involved in the scandal appears on the screen with key information and statistics, like a baseball card, including the amount they were implicated for in the scam. Crazy, freewheeling music plays while the characters describe how they used the money for themselves. Rodrigo Rato, the president of the bank, is shown in photograph after photograph posing with exotic hunting trophies—a gazelle, a lion, a bear—along with the cost of each shooting expedition (“elephant, €3,000 extra”).
The damning evidence was in the emails. These appear on the screen as if they are being typed in real time. As the characters’ thoughts become manifest, the audience guffaws at their audacity. When the bank’s president and secretary sit at a desk and conspire, the camera of the president’s laptop captures the conversation at close range from below and projects the intimate conversation onto the big screen behind them. It is an iconic image of collusion, like the swindlers in a Caravaggio painting.22
The play is sold out for its three-night run. People pack into the lobby, and some press around the box office hoping to obtain last minute tickets. Each night when the performance ends, a crowd streams out onto the street and people congregate in groups for a long time to smoke and talk.
The play is a targeted piece of strategic advocacy. It will tour the country for the next few months. The trials of Rodrigo Rato and nearly a hundred other bankers and officials will start in the fall, and the play informs people of their importance and keeps them in the public mind. Civil suits are also being contemplated.
On the second night, I follow the cast, the production team, and their entourage up the busy Rambla and down a long, narrow street to a tavern that spills out onto the cobblestones. I am absorbed in a conversation with Rubén Sáez, one of the Xnet collective. He has been collaborating with Xnet for the past five years and says that for two years he had no life and little sleep. His girlfriend almost left him because of the demands on his time. He has a day job as a chemist. He came to the collective through the Indignados movement. He went to the local meeting in his neighbourhood square one day and got involved. For so long, a culture of impunity has prevailed in Spain, where the wrongdoers were never held to account. The Indignados wanted to change that.
“Hacker philosophy is becoming more popular in Spain,” Sáez says. “Distributed power, self-organization, independence and sharing: we want these things to become real in Spain.”
First, he says, the Indignados were inspired by the Arab Spring. Then there was the May 15, 2011, demonstration of the Indignados, when the effects of the financial crisis were unfolding. The Indignados were in communication with Occupy in the United States. There was advice going back and forth. There were emails.
A friend of Sáez’s leans over to comment on the show: “When I saw how those officials talked and thought: it was only about themselves, their own profit, what they could get, not about the institution or their public duty. It was disgusting.”
I am supposed to meet Maddalena Falzoni (Maddish) in the El Raval neighborhood of Barcelona, at La Monroe café next to the cinémathèque, but the square and the café are packed with people. La Bohème is being shown on a big screen outdoors. I find Maddish standing under a tree. She has to meet another friend later this evening, so she suggests we find another place as quickly as we can. She briskly heads deeper into the neighborhood. This Barcelona is diverse, bohemian, and teaming with people—laborers on their way home, local and itinerant youth, Muslims, gay men, artists, young and old mingling as in a village. Our trek ends in a small, dimly lit restaurant.
I ask Maddish about the usability of the platform Xnet built for 15MpaRato. She laughs. Usability! This is the most important thing. This is the biggest wall to climb over. You have to build your ideas out into cyberspace, and they have to be usable. You need to emulate the “big guys” because people are used to using their tools.
She is currently working on a platform called MaddiX that will allow people to create and use their own personal cloud, which is an essential tool for maintaining digital privacy these days. There is free software available now to do this, but it is difficult to install. She is creating an interface. It’s not easy because she doesn’t have funds for it, “but we have to make people understand what’s necessary. This is a moment in which people know something is wrong, but we have to build an alternative.”
Maddish came to this work as a musician who was interested in coding. She earned a high school degree in programming and learned to use the COBOL language. She was doing activist work and living in a squat. They did concerts. She was using computers for her music, for TV and film soundtracks, and for “social fighting.” Then she discovered Linux and the philosophy of free software. “This is amazing!” she thought. “You can read all the code here. This is the future.”
“I had a scientific mind, and I could do coding. So with all this background in art and social activism, it made no sense to work for a corporation and build a beautiful system for them. It was very easy to find a hacker community. It was possible to do the important things with no money.”
When I ask how Xnet got so many leaks, she says that it has a large network of people working on these issues that it has built up over the years. “So we became the reference point on this very big leak. And there were really a lot of people who lost money in the scandal, too. We thought, ‘If we wait for some politicians to do something about the corruption, it will never happen. Only citizens can do it.’”
Xnet used the Italians’ GlobaLeaks system, Maddish says, because “the philosophy is don’t reinvent the same code. We investigated different ones and thought GlobaLeaks was the easiest to use.” She worked closely with Fabio Pietrosanti and his colleague Giovanni, who are based in Milan. They will be in Spain next week, she tells me. GlobaLeaks recently introduced a new level of support for their whistleblowing solution. It’s not just a tool that they hand over. They have a new enterprise called Hermes. “They really give support to people who want to install whistleblowing.”
She talks about some of the different collectives working in Europe. There is Linux France. There is a new group, Framasoft.org, in France, too, doing amazing work, she says. The nonprofit behind PeerTube, it has recently built all the tools you need to avoid central services, like corporate-controlled clouds. Framasoft contacted Xnet about a year ago and already had something like twenty-five tools, including a cloud, online. With one click, you can have a cloud account. Framasoft says that it does not want to have a lot of people using its cloud; it doesn’t want to become Google. Instead, it wants want to disseminate its cloud as a demo for others to emulate. Maddish is working on a similar set of tools for users in Spain.
I ask her about the complexities of the way forward. Will these alternative tools ever pull ahead of the monopoly platforms?
“It makes no sense to find a solution for people who are fifty years and older now,” Maddish says. “When I think of the future, I think of the next generation. The new generation has more facility with going from one service or app to another. I talk to my daughter about these issues, and she isn’t interested. But she experiments. She will try this Snapchat app and then something different and something else again. So it’s important that we build the tools now so that the next generation will live with alternatives and start using them. So that they have Quitter to try alongside Twitter. So that when they hit a wall—when the big company tells them, ‘Your account has been suspended,’ or tries to impose something they don’t like—they can turn to try something else.”
With tools like synchro, cloud, and email, the public is a little more aware about alternatives, she observes. But with social networks, we are behind. When Snapchat changes its privacy settings, no one cares. People need to know they can make an account with GNU social, a single platform from which other social media platforms can be used. It gives you more control over your data.
What is her experience as a female coder?
Her handle is Maddish, she tells me, so that people online don’t know if she is male or female and are surprised when they realize she is female. Then she needs to demonstrate she knows as much as a man. Many women don’t talk much on technical projects, but in the digital rights movement, there is no difference, and no distinctions are made.
I ask her how the different groups in Europe work together.
In internet advocacy, she says, they do lobbying all the time. When laws put our freedom in danger, all the organizations get involved.
Like Levi, Maddish is Italian. She came to Spain twenty years ago. In Spain, she says, there is a sense of community and sharing you don’t feel in other places. Coders and hackers, they are just people with skills. What counts is how they use those skills in a community. Xnet is the most influential activist group for digital rights in Spain—not just with tools but also when it comes to hacking the system. It does more global hacking than tech. Xnet’s approach is to seize the political moment. “We could do a great thing in three years or a very good thing that would be effective at the right political moment. We choose the latter.”
I meet Alfa Sanchez, another member of the Xnet collective, at a café near La Munroe the next day. It is a sunny morning in the public square. A man with a dog helps me find the place and hands me over to Sanchez with a neighborly salutation.
Like Rubén Sáez, Sanchez is a chemist. He looks very young, but he is around thirty years old. He has a slight build and a bearded, open face. Sanchez had been working in his profession, and then, like many people, he becamc unemployed. At the time he was collaborating with PartidoX. When he lost his job, he started doing programming and webmaster jobs to survive. After the EU elections in 2014, Simona Levi asked if he’d like to work for Xnet while he was deciding what to do with his life. He’s been working with them for the past two years, getting paid gigs when Xnet has funding to put on events. “This is my situation now,” he says.
On the famous date of May 15, 2011, when the first mass Indignados rallies occurred, Spain was already deep in the financial crisis, Sanchez says. There was high unemployment. The bankers had been bailed out a second time, and the people were paying for the bankers’ irresponsibility, for the housing bubble they had created, for their greed and bad legislation, for their very short-term decisions. The economy they had created was based entirely on buying and selling houses. People went to the streets, and the squares were full. Normally, the unions in Spain make the call for general strikes. “But in Spain the unions are very corrupt. This time it was just citizens—no left, no right. It was not about any political party. People were very skeptical about unions and political parties. We could see that a lot of what they were doing was trying to sell us the story that this crisis was like a storm, a force of nature that came upon us, and all we could do was work harder and earn less. They tried to make it seem like it was the citizens’ fault. This, of course, was very enraging.”
I ask him about the audiences at the play, and he says that they are people from the Indignados movement, sponsors of 15MpaRato, people who follow the cultural scene, and pensioners who were scammed. “You can see it in their faces. This is their story too.” He feels glad to be reaching a lot of new people who are also getting involved.
PartidoX started as a joke, he says—“a freaky futurist party with advanced proposals around democracy and a concrete mechanism on how citizens could participate and control institutions. It got more serious the longer we worked on it. Xnet launched the project of PartidoX and gathered other people around it. PartidoX ran candidates for the EU elections using the hacker or programming ethic in politics.”
“When hackers write code,” Sanchez tells me, “they can work collaboratively, use open source, work on pieces, take existing ideas further. PartidoX had this philosophy in its bones. Our principles were (1) institutions had to be accountable and (2) you don’t rewrite code but build upon others’ work.”
So PartidoX studied the most advanced ideas on democracy from around the world, he says: “For example, in Brazil, in Rio Grande do Sul, they elaborate the state budget with a wiki type application. It’s called wiki governance and wiki legislation. PartidoX gathered all the examples together to show it’s not a fantasy. These things have been done. We opened the discussion to the public and asked for amendments and comments. We got lots. It was a lot of work.” He smiles and shakes his head.
PartidoX started as an anonymous group running for the EU elections. Its platform had been worked out with public participation, and it now was a legal party. The group launched its campaign with a video of two actors saying, “We come from the future.”
“It’s not acceptable to vote every four years for a face that you see on the TV and they give you a speech, and maybe they follow their agenda once they’re elected and maybe not,” he says.
Since the death of Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator from 1939 to his death in 1975, the conservative People’s Party and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party had taken turns running the country. They had both played a role in creating corruption, the financial crisis, and its fallout.
PartidoX was on social media but received little coverage from the traditional media. Even so, the party received 100,000 votes in the election—short of the 250,000 votes that it needed to win, but Sanchez and others running the campaign learned a lot.
The party’s main concerns were rethinking democracy, developing an economic program to address the financial crisis, and fighting corruption. No one knew who was behind the party, and still it went from zero to a hundred thousand votes. About four hundred people were working behind PartidoX, and of these about thirty to forty were very active. Thousands were following the group on social media and sharing information.
“For me,” Sanchez says, “PartidoX was very revealing, very enriching. After the elections, we evaluated what we did. In Spain, we’re a very advanced country in terms of freaky, futuristic politics—very open to using new tech in citizen organization. But basically, in politics nowadays, we learned, the TV is still very powerful. We have an internal joke now: Without TV, a hundred thousand votes!”
In fact, it was the leftist party Podemos that broadsided them very close to the election. “We were busy building our 2014 election platform,” Sanchez says, “then three months before the election, Podemos came on the scene—just three months before.”
Podemos had a lot of TV exposure. “Podemos really is a television product. The leader, Pablo Iglesias, has been working on a leftish TV program for many years. His face is very well known. He is on the air seven days a week for one and a half hours every evening. Everyone knows it’s not ethical or even legal to have a political candidate on your TV channel all the time, so the guy asked his TV channel, ‘If I run in the next EU elections, will I have to step out of my TV program?’ They said, ‘No, you can stay.’” On the voting ballot, instead of a traditional party logo, Podemos used a headshot of Iglesias with his signature ponytail.
PartidoX had been building from the social networks and the internet out to the citizens and the regular media and doing very well. Then Podemos expanded from TV onto the social networks and overtook PartidoX. It was not necessarily a question of a generational divide, Sanchez tells me. Politics are very intergenerational in Spain. Everyone has a mobile phone, so the generations are converging. It will become more and more so, he says.
Every fall since 2008, Xnet has hosted two important events—the Free Culture Forum and the OXcars (Oscars for the people or organizations that have taken the most notorious action for free culture that year). “We bring together people from all around the world who are working on digital rights, and we take stock of where we are, what victories we have had, what to do next,” Sanchez says. Richard Stallman was there last year.
We leave the café and start walking down San Pau toward La Rambla so that he can show me the Xnet studio space. In Spain, he tells me, youth unemployment is close to 50 percent, and overall unemployment is at 25 percent. The distribution of work and wealth will be the defining challenge of the twenty-first century, and he is not sure legislators will be up to solving the problem. The owners of the robots will be like the slave owners of the cotton fields: all the wealth will go into their hands.
As we enter the studio, Sanchez points out the sign over the door from when the building was a canning factory. It is a useful-looking space with a kind of “green room” air about it. There are a couple of desks, tables with chairs, some couches, and in the back a high space that is big enough for rehearsals, workshops, and small theater performances. But the air is bad, and there is no source of natural light. “Sergio and I spend all our time here,” he says, and I think of them there, in the prime of their lives, hunched over their laptops, sustained, if not by fresh air, then by their hope for a better world.
“Why the X?” I ask, referring to Xnet and PartidoX.
He smiles. “It is the unknown quantity. You know, the unknown quantity in the equation, right?”
When I arrive at the small, intimate square where Simona Levi and I have arranged to meet, she is seated already at the outdoor restaurant and calls out to me. She is wearing a kimono-style dress with small colored birds winging their way in flight across its black silk, the suggestion of agitated movement appropriate for the woman. Her hair is cut in a short dark bob. She broke her arm during the play’s production but managed to work around the discomfort. Now, she takes her injured arm out of its sling. She shrugs. “It’s mainly to flag to people not to bump into me.”
We order wine, and she apologizes for having been so busy with the play’s opening. The night before, while I was talking to Xnet members and their friends sitting around the taverna’s tables in the street, she had been at the center of a big table of people inside. “I’m sorry I lost you,” she says. “That was the new mayor of Barcelona sitting beside me,” she explains, meaning Ada Colau. “I wanted to introduce you. She’s a friend.” She orders a regional specialty, cod omelette, and encourages me to have some.
“She [Colau] built a group called En Comú in Barcelona. They are taking the elections in several more cities now.”
I ask if Xnet’s politics have any links with the horizontalidad movement in South America.
Some of that movement’s politics are like Xnet’s, she says, and some are not. Xnet actually criticizes the horizontal democracy espoused by the Occupy movement, she reminds me.
“There is a misuse of horizontality and openness by the Left,” she says. “Horizontality is not democratic because it doesn’t take into account diversity, level of engagement, and competency. We are not all the same. When you give everybody the same authority to speak, you often have men dominating the discussion because they like to hear themselves talk. You get the biggest mouths and the most narcissistic dominating. Like Podemos. They might be completely incompetent, too.
“Xnet believes more in distributed and changeable leadership. I am a good theater director, so I lead in theater. But when it comes to code, I shut up; the leader is Maddish. In horizontality, the big mouth, the big fish, the male, the heterosexual, pushes forward. Xnet believes in distributed leadership, like the nodes in a network.”
This is the networked democracy she told me about when we first met at the Chaos Communication Camp. My mind wanders for a second, thinking of the critiques I have read about John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,”23 buoyed as it was by the frontiersman bravado and counterculture machismo of the early white, Western, male cypherpunks. Barlow has been criticized for being a white, Western, male of a prefeminist era; for making assertions of universalism that are belied by self-centric assumptions about the world; for pushing another one of those utopian projects that have never ended well for Western societies; and for valorizing cyberspace as some virtual, global polity divorced from local, embodied polities.
Listening to Levi, I can see the pitfalls in all of these things. I like the idea of networked democracy, of building a well-grounded politics based on pluralism, polycentrism, and rootedness in the real social relationships of local communities. Then again, I’m not entirely persuaded by the Barlow critiques. I still think there is value to be found in the “universal” organizing principles of the Western Enlightenment that Barlow espoused (liberté, egalité, fraternité) and in the contributions made by him and his (mostly white male) contemporaries to the genealogy of hacker ideas.
Levi is writing a book whose working title is “The Unbearable Stupidity of the Left,” a play on Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. “This new mistake of the left, horizontality, is like its earlier ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ You promise the base that they’ll be the leaders, but you don’t believe it. Now, in postmodernity, the left promises the base that it will have a say in everything, and they do these nonsense surveys online as if that is giving people a voice. When PartidoX asked the public for amendments to their draft election platform, they honoured 98 percent of the amendments they received. Podemos, on the other hand, did a survey, and you see in their final draft platform they have taken nothing from the people.”
She reminds me again of the historical resonances: “During the civil war, and especially in Barcelona, while the Communists were busy suppressing the anarchists, they also lost the war. Today, Podemos, the traditional left, or communists, are repressing us and they are also trying to grab and coopt the movement. For example, the Communists adopted the slogan ‘Freedom for women,’ but they were in fact the last party to vote for women’s suffrage in Spain. Conservatives voted for it earlier. Podemos is grabbing what the Indignados movement created, and then they lose the election. And they wouldn’t carry the Indignados platform anyway. At least if they won the election, they would be the clear enemy. There’s another analogy to the civil war. We choose the Communists as the lesser evil, and we get the Fascists in any case.”
I mention that Alfa Sanchez has been telling me about the near success of PartidoX and its mystery candidates. Who were they?
She points to herself. “I founded and ran for PartidoX. I ran,” she says. “It was hard work—hard because you were up against people who wanted to kill you, not physically but competitively. It’s a competition for votes, and there is a finite number of them. It’s different when you’re just doing advocacy. You can do your thing, and they don’t care so much. At first, we were using fake voices in the debates because we wanted to obscure our identities.” She pinches her nose and speaks in a cartoon voice. “It was like this for the first ten months until we had to present the list with the names of real candidates.”
Levi describes some of her earlier theater work. Her first two plays made her name in the European theater world. One was a feminist piece, Femina ex Machina, and the second was called Non Lavoraremo Mai (We Will Never Work Again).
I ask her about her use of humor in Hazte Banquero. Although I don’t know Catalan, I found it very funny. I was laughing throughout the evening, and so was the rest of the audience.
“You know, Spinoza spoke about la passione triste. They, the bankers and politicians, have destroyed our lives, but I as an artist will give them zero help in making our lives sad. I don’t want people going home feeling like they’ve been abused by history.”
Who created all the multimedia effects with the split-second comic timing?
“Alfa is a monster, this boy,” she exclaims. “He’s a chemist. He’s never been in a theater before. Yet he came to understand the comic timing perfectly.”
She says that in the emails that make up most of the play’s content, “the only thing the characters discuss all the time is how to get more money. The bank’s constitution called for ‘public control,’ so the board was made up of political party members. The emails reveal them saying they will vote for this or that only if they can personally get what they want. The political party was just sucking money out of the bank. It was a mafia structure, that’s what the people discover in the play. In the eight thousand emails that Xnet obtained, the word crisis (as in ‘financial crisis’) was mentioned only five times, while the word remuneration was mentioned fifty-three times.” The players used coded language, too. For instance, the adviser to the king of Spain tells the bank president that he will give the money to a particular political party, “but instead of party, he uses the word sensibilidad.”
At one point in the play, the three actors address who has been through the “revolving door” on the board of various banks, political parties, unions, government departments, or “arm’s-length” agencies related to the scandal. They each open a computer printout that is so long it falls to the floor. The audience laughs. As they mention a name and an affiliation, the name appears on the big screen with a chart of all the organizations. And as a person is appointed to successive organizations, their printed name flutters like the wings of a butterfly up the chart to alight under the name of the second, third, and even fourth organization.
Levi, sitting on the side of the stage with the techies at the control board, jumps up to say, “I have a feeling this will take a long time, so I will change the scenography a bit, if you don’t mind. Audience, if you would act as chorus and repeat the names in a sexy whisper as they are said. That would be good. And we will play some nice music. …” The audience willingly complies, and the actors get into it too, swaying to the sexy bossa nova–style soundtrack and whispering the names suggestively. Soon, everyone is enjoying being silly.
Levi says she created this direction the day before the opening of the play, and the actors, who are professionals from the regular theater, “freaked out” about the late change. But then they got into it. And the second night, the actor playing Blesa, the first bank president, began to play with the audience, crooning “Cris-to-bal …” and letting them answer, “Mon-to-ro!”24 Levi smiles. “He did that for me.”
On my last day in Spain, I meet Sergio Salgado at the iconic Café Zurich in Plaça Catalunya just as it is opening. It is a place where people have been meeting for over a hundred years, one of the few cafés near the main transportation lines of the city that survived the Spanish Civil War. The day is éblouissant. Dazzling.
I imagine my own Canadian countrymen meeting here, part of the international effort to aid the democratic Republican government in Spain in its fight against Franco’s Fascists, who were supported by Hitler’s regime in Germany and Mussolini’s in Italy. I recall how many in the Canadian contingent, known as the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, or Mac-Paps, were recruited in Vancouver’s Stanley Park at a May Day picnic and smuggled to Europe on trains and ships in defiance of the government ban on their going.25 An international movement had been a long-held dream of the left when these men left their democracy to help another. It seems also to be a dream of postleft, post-twentieth-century “progressive” politics, whatever these are. The 1930s was a time, like the current era, when people were organizing everywhere and at every level—unions, political parties, working men’s clubs, farmers’ cooperatives, civic organizations, the Labour and Socialist International …
Salgado and I speak in French, as he doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Spanish. We agree not to correct each other’s grammar. He is from Galicia, an autonomous region in northwest Spain. He gives me a little more context about the financial scandal that was the subject of 15MpaRato. Savings banks had a social goal, he says. By their mandate, they could not seek profit and were supposed to help the community. The Caja Madrid was the biggest and oldest and in Spain, three hundred years old, and it held a lot of pensioners’ savings. The government took this and other savings banks, which had a combined budget for social programs as big as that of the Gates Foundation in the United States, and transferred these social funds into the investment bank Bankia. They stole this money, too.
Part of the problem is that in Spain, as elsewhere, there has been less and less investigative journalism and more “click” journalism, Salgado tells me. The press searches for the scoop, dissects it, and publishes the story in uncontextualized bits. So the role Xnet played was necessary. When Rodrigo Rato and Miguel Blesa are criminally convicted, Salgado says, the message the press will convey will be “the system works.” But the real story is that the citizenry has done it. And the citizenry needs to know this. This was the goal of Hazte Banquero.
Salgado wrote the play’s script with Levi. He was good at searching out the right emails to include. Levi is the theater person. Salgado studied human behavioral ecology in Lisbon, went to the Science Po university in the capital of Galicia, and did a course in information technology at a college in Barcelona. He has worked with Xnet for five years. Politically, he has always been interested in digital rights.
Is he a hacker?
He replies, “Je ne touche pas le code.” He doesn’t do code. “Mais, politiquement, dans le sens important,” he is a hacker. He is committed to the hacker ethic. The hacker ethic is a question of politics, not programming, he tells me. “C’est un question politique, ne pas un question de technique.” It is an ethics of production; it is to produce results. “Dans la réalité,” he says, people adhering to this ethic can create a capacity for massive production and effectiveness socially, politically, and culturally. Because the results of their efforts are digital. 3D printing, blockchain, protocols— lots of impactful technologies are at a tipping point at this moment. I notice he uses the same word Ada Colau used when talking about the bankers—“reality” rather than “in the real, physical world”—and wonder if this is just his French or a deliberate choice to juxtapose against the “unreality” Spanish elites have been living in.
Xnet wants to take the hacker ethic for the production of software and apply it politically, culturally, and socially, Salgado says. “C’est une methode pragmatique pour tous les activités humaines.”
When I ask if Xnet considers itself a vanguard group or just a group of facilitators, he says the word they use is catalyzers because people are already thinking about these things. When the moment arrives to do something, Xnet is there.
Spain, he tells me, is a paradise of guerilla communication. There is a critical mass of people who know how to connect. Everyone, including Salgado’s mother, uses social media tools for political communication, and as a society they are historically very political. The hacker principles are embraced by the population. La PAH (the movement against foreclosures), Xnet, and 15M do not put their faith in traditional parties. Between its first election cycle and the second, Podemos, the traditional leftist party, lost one million votes. “It is not a party of the twenty-first century but of the twentieth.”
The new mayor of Barcelona, I have learned, has been working on a plan to achieve information self-determination for the city. Barcelona was already an early entrant into the “smart city” space when Colau came to office, with its municipal network of 500 kilometers of optical fiber, free WiFi routed through street lighting fixtures, and sensors to monitor parking, air quality, and garbage bins.26 With its Barcelona Initiative for Technological Sovereignty (BITS), Colau’s municipal government announced its intention to retain ownership of the network, the platforms, and the data; and to give citizens’ some control over their own personal data,27 while making information that belonged in the public realm accessible to citizens and companies.28 It is a remarkably ambitious and risky effort, full of potential quagmires. The companies in this sector, apparently, “went crazy”29 when they learned Colau’s political platform might usurp their monopoly platforms.30 The city has also taken on Airbnb, which it says has become a kind of welfare, something people have to do to get by. This is not popular with everyone in Colau’s political base, but many see its wisdom.
The people of Spain are very intelligent, Salgado tells me, summing up our conversation. “They love complexity and diversity.” They are politically sophisticated. “Les Indignados éclataient [burst] la réalité du société, politiquement.”
We stand up and shake hands wordlessly, and I leave to catch my plane.
That fall, the case against Rodrigo Rato and nearly a hundred other officials would come to trial. Simona Levi would report that members of Xnet were enjoying their time going to the trials in Madrid by day and performing their play by night.
The verdict would come down in February 2017.31 Rato, president of Bankia from its formation in 2010 to when he abruptly resigned in 2012, was sentenced to four and a half years in jail for embezzlement related to his use of the corporate “black credit cards.” The court found that Rato and other Bankia executives gave away credit cards to purchase political favors. The cards were used for expenditures lavish and petty. Miguel Blesa, the president of Caja Madrid from 1996 to 2010, before Rato took over and rolled it up into Bankia, was sentenced to six years. Rato was found to have replicated the “corrupt system” established by Blesa. Also in February, the former Bank of Spain governor was charged for allowing Bankia to float its initial public offering on the stock exchange while knowing its shares were overvalued.32
15MpaRato had sworn to see Rato sentenced by 2017. This mission accomplished, the group released a statement thanking everyone who made it happen. “The lawsuit is not over yet,” they added. “15MpaRato and Xnet’s fight against corruption goes on and more will fall. Expect us.”
Leaving Spain, my next destination is Italy. I’m headed to Rome to investigate the rise of a controversial new force in Italian electoral politics—the citizens’ movement known as Cinque Stelle (Five Stars) that calls itself an “antiparty.” Danilo Toninelli and Riccardo Fraccaro are newly elected members to the Italian Parliament from the Cinque Stelle movement, and in late July 2016, I meet them at their parliamentary offices in the heart of Rome. Both are slim with dark hair, Fraccaro’s gray at the temples. We sit down together in a small boardroom along with Silvia Virgulti, a Cinque Stelle communications staffer. Through an open window, a slight breeze wafts in with the sounds of the city as we talk.
Cinque Stelle is another manifestation of the populist sentiment that swept Western liberal democracies following the financial crisis of 2008. It was started by a comedian, Beppe Grillo, a popular, foul-mouthed performer known for his political rants. Grillo was channelling Italians’ frustration with their politics after decades of entrenched patronage capped by the base vulgarities and corruption of Silvio Berlusconi’s premiership. In 2004, Grillo was inspired when he read an article about the internet by tech consultant Gianroberto Casaleggio. Casaleggio (who died in 2016) was a counterculture figure from the same generation as Grillo. He was a European cypherpunk with long hair and granny glasses, a hippie technolibertarian who had worked as an executive for Italy’s largest telecommunications company and ran his own Milan-based internet marketing consultancy.
Both Grillo and Casaleggio viewed Italian politics and the growing economic inequality in the world with disgust.33 Casaleggio set up a website for Grillo, and he predicted that the blog Grillo would write for the platform and its interactive design would change Italian politics forever. In a country where people expect little from politics except graft and chronic dysfunction, the two wrote a book in 2011 titled Siamo in Guerra: Per una nuova politica (We Are at War: For a New Politics), in which they celebrated the internet for its anticapitalist and democratizing potential.34 They also claimed it was “Franciscan,” meaning perhaps that the internet as a phenomenon evinced an ethic of collective solidarity similar to that espoused by Franciscan monks, an observation meant to resonate in a Catholic society like Italy.
Grillo’s blog became wildly popular in Italy and beyond, and his interactive webpages overflowed with, well, interaction, as people began to feel inspired, too. Oliviero Ponte di Pino, author of Comico e Politico, has written that Grillo spoke to the “stomach” of ordinary Italians.35 Certainly, he resonated with a younger generation who were suffering through a 33 percent rate of youth unemployment. If they had jobs, they often earned so little that many had to forgo starting families or leave the country.36 Emulating the Moveon.org practice of organizing local, in-person meetups, Grillo’s nascent movement flourished. People came together to discuss their problems, and local cells multiplied to create a resilient political organism.37 People began to feel they were participating in an important new phenomenon. At the start, it was aimed at giving ideas and advice to politicians, but their doors were closed and they did not listen.
In September 2007, Grillo organized a national day of protest, which he called V-Day, meant to cap off a “clean parliament” campaign started two years earlier. “V” stood not for victory but for vaffanculo (“go fuck yourself”). Two million people showed up to the “happening” in Bologna and the 220 other cities where it was live-streamed. Grillo led them all in a chant of “Vaffanculo!” directed at Italy’s political elites.38 They presented their manifesto. No one should stand for election who had been convicted of a crime. Politics should be a temporary service and not a career: anyone who had served two terms at any level (local or national) should go back to his or her original job. And last, voters should be able to choose individual representatives for parliament rather than voting for a slate of candidates composed by party leaders from a pool of party insiders who often had no ties to their local constituencies.39
Grillo and Casaleggio announced the launch of Cinque Stelle in 2009, and the group ran candidates in elections at various levels in 2010, 2011, and 2012, with modest results. But in 2013, in the national elections, it took a quarter of the country’s votes, pushing Matteo Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party (DP) into the difficult position of having to form a coalition with Berlusconi’s party when Cinque Stelle, on principle, refused to make a deal.40
The Cinque Stelle movement is hard to categorize as either left or right, and as mentioned earlier, it even refuses to be called a political party (it claims to be an “antiparty”).41 In fact, it speaks to a restive mix of voters that in America might be either Bernie Sanders’s “Our Revolution” supporters or Trump’s working-class voters, although overall the movement seems to skew more to the left and to younger voters.42 On the one hand, the movement has been anti-immigrant, virulently against the traditional press, and economically protectionist. On the other, it is environmentalist, distrustful of global capitalism, and fervently egalitarian. It is a “big tent” political organization, but it also is proving there has been a realignment of traditional political party views.
By consensus, Cinque Stelle is Euro-skeptic, suspicious of professional politicians, idealistic about cleaning up corruption in politics, and determined to use digital technology to make the Italian political system responsive to ordinary citizens. One of its signature policy recommendations has become the adoption of an annual basic income in Italy.43 Other positions range right, left, and center on the traditional political spectrum. The five stars in its name stand for the five policy areas the movement initially decided to prioritize—public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, a right to internet access, and the environment.
I ask Fraccaro and Toninelli how they became involved with Cinque Stelle.
“Most of us came to it through Grillo’s blog, one of the top ten most influential blogs in the world,” Fraccaro replies. “Each one was about a different issue. I was inspired by an event called the Cinque Stelle Woodstock, held in 2008. We talked about ‘solutions to the problems,’ we heard music, there was open discussion with people from all over Italy, all ages and classes. I came to agree. A new politics is possible. A politics that does not divide but unifies.” Fraccaro organized a meetup in his locality and eventually ran for the general election.
Toninelli says that, for him, he had “arrived at a point where I did not want to vote anymore because I did not feel respected by any of the political parties. I was already working politically on issues relating to food and education. Those issues were essential but not covered by political parties. When I had the opportunity to become involved, I became a registered member of Cinque Stelle, and I set up local events in town halls. And what I realized, what struck me as extraordinary, was that we actually had a white canvas to paint what we wanted, other than the basic principles of equality and direct democracy that the movement was based on. What’s new is the power pyramid is upside down. Before, if you wanted to be a politician, you had to enter a party like it was a company. With Cinque Stelle, the citizen can decide to become a politician and they’re directly involved in choosing candidates.”
Direct democracy, Fraccaro explains, is an institutional tool for citizens to legislate or block legislation. This is real democracy because the citizens can use their power directly. “E-democracy is a tech tool to use in the simplest way possible. One must not underestimate this tech tool because we know revolutions in history are based on tech innovations. The two main revolutions we had in Europe previously, in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, were based on the printing press and the steam engine. An information and an energy revolution. Today, we are facing two bigger revolutions at once, based on the internet and on sustainable energy, and these are changing society. We have the possibility to change democracy.”
Casaleggio, the creator of Cinque Stelle’s “operating system,” they tell me, believed it was essential to break through the barriers between citizens and politics. He felt that ridding intermediation allowed people to create a “global intelligence” that would let citizens make better decisions.
I ask Toninelli and Fraccaro how the “operating system” works. Is the platform “transparent,” or does it give the coders undue influence with how the algorithms are designed?
It is transparent, they say, with majority voting.
The critique of direct democracy is that in its purest form it can amount to “mob rule,” in which there is no protection for individual rights and minorities. In this pure form, it is not a consistent social contract. And it lacks expertise. Ordinary people do not have time to research or even to vote on every question.
But Cinque Stelle practices both direct and representative democracy. Toninelli says that so far they have had a political process that includes open discussions; election of councillors; an online voting system that allows all members to vote and decide, by majority, who runs for office; and elected officials putting legislative proposals online with an invitation to members for their input, comments, and revisions.
“This is not wiki legislation,” says Toninelli, “but we have added more functions to the platform. Now, every registered member can make their own legislative proposal, and the elected members will review them and choose one per month to work on. Two elected officials are assigned as ‘mentors’ to the member making the proposal to help them refine it, and he can count on the two MPs to present the proposal as a bill in Parliament.”
Last week this happened for the first time, and Toninelli acted as tutor for the citizens to help them present the proposal. They have received fifteen hundred proposals since they began accepting them from members a month and a half ago.
Silvia Virgulti has been translating our conversation up until now, and she makes an expression to mirror my own: fifteen hundred is a lot of proposals.
“Our victory is to see that citizens are happy to be making these proposals,” Toninelli says. “Cinque Stelle is currently in opposition, not the government, so we cannot pass the proposals by ourselves. Not yet. The most important part of direct democracy is how spokespersons are chosen. In Cinque Stelle, anyone can run, and the whole membership votes on who the candidates should be. Second, all the proposals must be discussed for a minimum of a month on the internet platform before they are adopted as a Cinque Stelle position.”
They have about 400,000 registered members now, who can vote on party positions. Cinque Stelle belongs, at the supranational level, to the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD) group. All members of EFDD espouse some form of direct democracy, but their similarities do not necessarily go any further. Toninelli and Fraccaro say that you need to join a coalition to have any influence at the EU level, so Cinque Stelle joined EFDD to be free from decisions that might be imposed on them from other parties. A minimum of seven groups is needed to form a coalition under EU rules.
When I ask them how Cinque Stelle is a “new” politics, Fraccaro says that “Cinque Stelle was born because of a political crisis. Citizens don’t feel like they live in a democracy, and the economic crisis demonstrates it. What we have had is a wealth transfer from the lower classes to the upper classes. How can one say we live in a democracy when that is happening?
“Cinque Stelle has actually established ourselves as the major political force in Italy right now. What we advocate is neither left nor right: that’s not the point. The point is, ‘What is the solution to the problem? Is it right, or is it wrong?’ Political parties divide people with left and right, but they do the same thing in the end and blame each other. Neither the right nor the left listened to the people.
“According to some polls, Cinque Stelle is the top political force in Italy, and we made it there because we are trustworthy for the citizens. It was simple: we kept our promises. The left and right never kept their promises, and so they demonstrated that they’re not good politicians.”
What they have come to understand in their short time in political office, they say, is that although politics is complex, complexity often is used as an excuse. “If we need to accomplish big things, citizens understand that it can take a long time, but the path must be trustworthy day by day,” Toninelli says. “To get rid of poverty in a month is not enough, but to cut our own wages [as elected officials], we did it in a day. Our movement is bound to grow because direct democracy is the right method. The horizontal organization is the right one, not the vertical.”
Was there an Occupy or Indignados movement in Italy?, I ask.
Toninelli replies that in Italy the movement was called Forconi but lasted only a short time “because we were able to listen to it. Cinque Stelle is not the parallel to the Indignados because we are over the division between the left and right.”
But many of the Indignados dislike the traditional left, I offer. They say that Podemos came from traditional party politics and used the momentum of the grassroots movement to coopt it.
Yes, Toninelli says. Podemos was born criticizing the old left parties but then they’re actually the same thing. It was formed by professional politicians, not by the citizens.
What is the role of humor for Cinque Stelle?
“I think our power is that we’re citizens,” Toninelli says, “and by using humor and irony, we’re remaining citizens. Is it black humour? I think at first it was more rage. Not anymore though. The humor now consists in not taking oneself seriously and doing one’s best. Grillo makes fun of us, and we make fun of him.”
And Beppe Grillo’s role, is it not a little anomalous?, I ask.
“Beppe Grillo has created the values, principles, and ethos of Cinque Stelle. His role is in keeping the rules of legality and transparency. And Casaleggio helped Grillo transform the vision of a better world into a citizen’s party.”
There seem to be historic resonances between Cinque Stelle and earlier anarchist movements in Italy and some overlap in principles, too, such as “self-organization,” “local solutions,” a “rejection of coercion,” and “collaboration.” “Of course, the past influences the present,” Fraccaro says. “Casaleggio studied the anarchist movements a lot. That allowed him to create a vision and solutions for the present. Some principles are shared. The idea of decentralizing every power is one of the main themes of the Pirate Party, too. Today, governments are subject to capitalism, not the other way around. This will lead to two possible results. You will either have countries governed by a few people in an authoritarian way or political movements that will try to transform the country into a system of direct democracy and citizens’ choices, based on citizens’ needs. That’s what Italy is facing today.”
Toninelli excuses himself. He has to leave for another meeting. “I would just like to add the idea of financialized capitalism,” he says, pulling on his jacket. As he goes out the door, Virgulti calls out in Italian, “Don’t forget to put your collar down.” Her job as a communications officer is also to mentor new members of Parliament (MPs).
“We are aware we are not perfect,” Fraccaro concludes. “We are not better than the people who elected us. But if we want to grow as a community, we must trust this community. We may face wrong decisions, but if they are shared, we will grow together, and we will walk the path together without leaving anyone behind. That is our slogan: ‘No one can be left behind’ (‘Nessuna deve rimanere in dietro’).”
Silvia Virgulti takes me to see the rest of the offices for the MPs, which seem newly renovated while being housed in an old stone building. We pass into a long room lined with large tables where about eight male MPs work side by side, their computers aligned across the tops of the tables. The energy in the place feels like an old-style news room. The men range in age from their late twenties to their early forties and, like Fraccaro and Toninelli, are dark and slim, some with tinges of gray. In an inner office, separated from the larger room by wood-paneled walls with glazing halfway up, four more men stand around the desks, discussing something animatedly. “Che cazzo!” (What a dick!) one exclaims, then stops abruptly as I enter.
In a country where the political system has been described as a gerontocracy, Cinque Stelle has allowed younger people to break in. The youngest Cinque Stelle deputy was twenty-four years old when elected in 2013, and the oldest is sixty-something. Registered members are from all walks of life, Virgulti tells me—carpenters, engineers, teachers, and lawyers. “These people didn’t know what they were facing when they came in, but they learned. It took them some time, it was not easy, but they learned.”
Virgulti opens the door to the next inner office and asks something of the four young men there, who are grouped together working out something in an informal meeting. They are very busy.
Their Cinque Stelle colleague Virginia Raggi must be even busier. She was elected mayor of Rome a month ago. Virgulti says it is a challenge when people have not held office because the learning curve is steep, but Parliamentary staff are trying to help them over at the municipal office.
At around 6 o’clock, I go back out through security to the street, Via degli Uffici del Vicario. A stone’s throw away is the Parliament building in Piazza Montecitorio. Across the narrow street of black cobblestones is the venerable gelato shop Giolitti, its windows glistening in the evening sun. Its trade is still busy with tourists and office workers emerging from its doors, gelato cups in hand. The air is still warm, and the light is golden.
There are criticisms of the Cinque Stelle movement. Beppe Grillo has retained ownership of the Cinque Stelle copyright and denied political adversaries the right to use it. He remains the “guarantor” of the movement’s direction. In many rounds of purges, members have been voted out of the party and off its platform for dissident views or violating the party’s tenets. More than a quarter of the Cinque Stelle representatives across both houses of parliament were expelled between February 2013 and January 201544 for errors such as appearing on talk shows against Cinque Stelle rules and suggesting that Cinque Stelle might negotiate with the Democratic Party.45 These expulsions have been justified by Grillo and others as being necessary to maintain the movement’s integrity.
In his comic performances, Grillo has expressed some fairly wacky ideas (one was that HIV was a conspiracy of pharmaceutical companies), and he has stirred up feelings against illegal immigrants.46 This might be a concern if he unduly affects Cinque Stelle’s policy positions on health or immigration. But it might be a good sign that diverse views can coexist in a polity without splitting it—the hope being that if people keep talking to each other, they might temper and inform each other’s views, or at least find compromises they can all live with. When Cinque Stelle representatives in the Senate proposed decriminalizing illegal immigration in 2013, Grillo and Casaleggio attacked the idea in their blog. Yet when it was put to a vote on the Cinque Stelle platform, the members went against the founders and backed the proposal.47 Since then, one commentator has observed, the party has “criticized the left for what they consider its lax policies toward illegal immigration, but stop[ed] well short of the right’s full-throated call to deport 600,000 illegal immigrants.”48
Concerns were also raised within the movement about the transparency of the movement’s operating system, which was run on a website owned by Casaleggio Associates, a consulting firm that served corporate interests that were potentially at odds with the movement. The platform was subsequently transferred to an ostensibly arm’s-length nonprofit entity named the Rousseau Foundation49 (after the Enlightenment’s “most radical theorist of democracy”).50 However, a document was leaked that showed the nonprofit was essentially being run by Casaleggio’s son.51 Meanwhile, Grillo has refused to use a third-party monitor or open-source software like the “LiquidFeedback” software developed by the German Pirate Party.52
Of course, all of these things could be addressed by the Cinque Stelle membership at some point. As it would turn out, the most concerning thing about Cinque Stelle is its small and falling participation rates. Months after my journey to Italy, I would check on those rates and find that from 2012 to 2017, online participation fell from an average of 36,000 to 19,000 participants. Although the number of registered members eventually grew, that increase made the decline in active participation steeper—a drop from 68 percent to 13 percent over the same time period.53 By 2018, less than 5 percent of the 10.7 million people who voted for its candidates were registered with the website. Both the online discussions and the choice of candidates, which are open to every registered member to participate in, would be shaped, in fact, by a small, active minority. The Parliament leader, Luigi Di Maio, would receive only 490 votes in his online primary for the 2018 election.
Still, Italians seem to want to have the option of direct participation that Cinque Stelle’s operating system provides, and they seem to place confidence in their fellow citizens who do participate. Votes for Cinque Stelle have not just remained strong since the 2013 election but risen. The movement has gotten the voices of ordinary Italians back onto the political map and opened up a chance for them to renew their democracy. Even if they do not succeed this time around, politics will not go on as before in Italy.
Indeed, in March 2018, Cinque Stelle would become the leading party in the national elections, winning 33 percent of the votes and allowing it to form a coalition with the far right La Lega party54 to govern the country.55
John Richardson was once thrown into jail with some of his clients, and he appealed his arrest all the way up to the British Columbia Court of Appeal. This was in 2002, the year of the Woodward’s Building protest in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the part of the city known for its disabled, mentally ill, homeless, and drug-addicted and its community activism. The former department store building had been empty for more than a decade, and the government had promised to build more affordable housing in the area. Homeless people grew frustrated and occupied it, and Richardson became their lawyer. After the police threw them out, people camped on the sidewalk. Richardson was arrested on a day when police started hitting people with batons and throwing their belongings into garbage trucks. The stuff was going into the crushers, and the police were harassing people into leaving. When the police told Richardson he could not cross the police line to reach his clients, he crossed anyway. He said later, “It was kind of like you make a call. It was a split-second decision.”
The events were filmed and provoked public anger. Union representatives arrived on the site the next day and handed out tents and mattresses so people could continue to camp there. Because a municipal election was going on at the time, the city wanted to avoid a repeat of the earlier scene, so it made a deal that led to the creation of public housing as part of the redevelopment of the Woodward’s Building.
I know Richardson through the civil liberties community in British Columbia. I’m meeting with him in Vancouver, not long after my trip to Italy, to learn about his new enterprise that, as I understand it, is a hack on democratic decision making itself. We sit at a table looking out over Coal Harbor toward the dark green mass of Stanley Park and the snow-dusted coastal mountains beyond. Small sea planes fuel up and take off, engines whirring. A large percentage of the high-end condos looming behind us are owned by wealthy foreigners (the global 10 percent), who leave them vacant most of the year and pay risibly small property taxes and often no income tax to support the local economy.56 This is no longer a city where working people can afford to live and go to May Day picnics, although the union movement in the province is still one of the strongest in the country.
I tell Richardson about the Spanish collective Xnet, its actions in Barcelona and Spain, and its ideas about distributed action and distributed political power. I tell him how Xnet has differentiated itself from the traditional left, which it says relies on ideology and protests, while members of Xnet, as social hackers, act and use their own skills to take things in hand and make actual changes. It is a revolutionary way of doing things.
He asks how they make decisions, and I compare Xnet’s process to the old communist idea of a vanguard or central committee. Xnet members have a small guerrilla group that initiates things, but they are more like anarchists. Anarchists don’t believe in democracy in any case, I add a little flippantly, realizing as I do that these old labels are getting me into trouble. They don’t map satisfactorily onto how hackers engage in politics and I’m making a hash of what Simona Levi has told me about the role Xnet has played within the broader Indignados movement. (Xnet’s manifesto is, in fact, “Democracy, period.” Its members are not anarchists.)
“A central committee is not revolutionary!” Richardson says. The Occupy movement embraced the anarchist rejection of democracy, that is, the idea that minority votes should lose. So it tried to run meetings and make decisions by consensus. People were supposed to make a certain hand gesture to indicate their support for something, and later they tried using hand-held voting machines. He knows this because he traveled down to Zuccotti Park in New York City to talk to people during the Occupy Wall Street protests.
“But it’s a limited paradigm,” he says, “because you have limited options presented, and they’re expressed in a certain way, and the group ultimately votes in the old way. It’s amazing to think how much our society is actually determined by the optimal size of group decision making. Beyond optimal size, we do delegated authority: the board will appoint a CEO, Parliament will appoint a cabinet, a group size that can actually manage it. This creates hierarchy. Hierarchy is ultimately related to optimal group size for decision making.”
Large groups, he tells me, can be very smart—smarter than the smartest experts. There is the famous jellybean example. Statistically, the average of the guesses of large groups of people will be the most accurate determination of the number of jellybeans in a jar. But this works only for groups of twenty to thirty and for simple decisions. The question is how do we scale up to increase intelligence by adding more people to decision making and examining more complex questions.
“All of society’s problems are solvable—war, poverty, global warming. It’s the group decisions that wear us down,” he says. “When you talk to people on the ground, they have solutions. They’re just paralyzed by the systems. People on the ground know what to do but can effect change only through group decision.”
I ask him if he’s ignoring the political dimension, the question of political will.
He’s not ignoring it at all, he says. In fact, his new start-up is all about how to distribute power and influence fairly across a group or population.
Richardson studied math and philosophy before he went to law school. He created a legal clinic for Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and then went on to start Ethelo, a small, nonprofit, digital tech company that is inventing new ways of making decisions. As a mathematician, he studied group decision theory and was interested in what the legal philosopher John Rawls had to say about the conditions needed for making a good decision and a good social contract. Richardson asked himself, How can you quantify fairness in a group decision? Is there a way you can quantify it mathematically? That’s the genesis of it.
He grabs a napkin and scrawls something on it. This is the formula he started with and he’s been been refining it ever since: Decision strength = [Average support] – [Variance in support].
Each person’s support for a decision will fall on a spectrum from total opposition to total support. The variance in that support across a group indicates the polarization of the group. Decisions that polarize groups are weaker than decisions that unify groups. Calculating this strength score across all possible decision scenarios, Richardson explains, is how the Ethelo algorithm identifies optimal outcomes. It is more sophisticated than the hand signals of Occupy.
People will support outcomes they do not like if they think the process is fair, Richardson says. And they will resist ones they like and will benefit from if they feel the process is unfair. Many social animals insist on fairness in social relations.
What is Ethelo? Take a problem, apply collective analysis, and Ethelo will generate a ranked list of possible decisions in order of their likelihood of being supported by a group. It can fine-tune the level of fairness, too. The scores are crowd-sourced, produced by algorithms that capture collective analysis. The Canadian government’s Department of Public Works is one of Ethelo’s major clients, and its online endorsement calls the software program, “An exceptional advance on the state of the art that is clearly ahead of competitors.”
There’s a host of companies offering services for crowd-sourcing and group decision making right now. They all use computer technology but lack a model of group decision making, Richardson claims. They use a model that pulls together information and gives it to a single decision maker. That approach is not as sophisticated as Ethelo in terms of incorporating social factors like fairness, distributed influence, minimization of resistance, and optimization of buy-in. Another client, Lead Now, the largest online political organization in Canada, led a campaign in the last election on strategic voting. It was an “anything but Harper” campaign (the Conservative government of Stephen Harper was seeking reelection), and it used Ethelo.
Right now, Ethelo is a managed service company, but when Ethelo 2.0 is released, the goal is to enter the mass market with a turnkey platform that any group can use on its own.
Richardson sees this kind of decision making as revolutionary in our democracies. “What would happen to human society if we could make smarter decisions instead of dumber decisions?,” he asks. “But how do existing social conditions/political frameworks affect the development of this kind of technology? This is a question that should not be underestimated. It comes down to money. People who have money right now aren’t visionaries.”
“If you were to corner the market for the ‘decision-making’ platform,” I ask, “what would you do with it? What would your goal be?”
“Global democracy,” he says without hesitation. “A single world government. Every person gets their input—one humanity. We have to have a common operating system for democracy—global democracy.”
One platform controlling the decision making of the entire world? Isn’t that a little scary?
“There could be a pluralism of smaller systems—as long as they were compatible with each other, as long as they could plug into the one operating system. Think, for example, about Linux. It is the dominant, most stable operating system in the world now. It achieved its stability by opening up its code and letting lots of minds peck away at it. Google is based on Linux. Linux is the go-to operating system. That’s what we would do at a certain point: open up our code and see where that takes us.”
Many more groups are conducting experiments in hacking democratic processes along the lines of what Cinque Stelle, Ethelo, and PartidoX have done. They include the Democracy Earth Blockchain, Loomio’s algorithm for collaborative decision making, Madrid’s CONSUL, the Pirate Party’s Liquid Democracy, the P2P Foundation, and the P2P blockchain political parties in Argentina and Australia, which vote only the way citizens want them to.
Direct democracy is not a new idea, and neither is participatory democracy, self-organization, shared leadership, or direct action. The difference is what can be achieved to upgrade the quality of Western liberal democracies with these and related ideas, employing digital tech, networks, and a hacking ethic.
The citizens who used their votes for Brexit and Donald Trump in the last half of 2016 felt they did not have much more than these wrecking balls to change the status quo. If Western liberal democracies can be upgraded in the twenty-first century, these citizens might have more to work with than mere votes next time. Both technological and philosophical innovations will be needed. As suggested earlier, the new political economy has yet to be fully theorized. What you see in the experiments of Xnet, Cinque Stelle, and Ethelo is a first cut at the project.57