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Tenth Anniversary of the First Netstrike"

Alessandro Ludovico, Springerin

You won't find many references to Tommaso Tozzi in international media art
sources. You won't find him in Wikipedia (yet), nor in MIT Press books or
Ars Electronica catalogues. Nevertheless, this Italian artist and theorist
is the inventor of one of the key online protest tools. Ten years ago he
conceived and realized the first "netstrike" (network strike) on the
Internet. It took place during the international protest against the French
atomic test at the Mururoa Atoll in Polynesia.This dramatic and insane event generated large opposition all over the
world, partly owing to the new opportunities made available by the
Internet, including its real-time communication possibilities. During this
protest Internet activists had access to many new tools, such as video
streaming — as was demonstrated by a Greenpeace action in which a video was
distributed widely within a very short space of time — and the way a huge
number of petitions could be posted as chain letters on mailing lists and
sent to private citizens as well. In the late summer of 1995, Tozzi spoke
publicly in a couple of online forums hosted by the Italian local and
national network (BBS) about the potential of chain letters as a medium of
protest. He tried to go a step further than this complicated, indirect (or
in some nations even unlawful) method of distribution, with the aim of
establishing a practice that would produce some visible effects. At the
same time he was concerned with developing something that was ethical and
deliberate, to avoid the danger of "knee-jerk" reactions as seen in the
"digital spray" applied in the many "homepage defacement" cases or the
damage caused by "digital software hammers" used to break into systems to
destroy the enemy's data. He wanted nevertheless to establish online public
protest as a inalienable right of the digital citizen, just as the public
strike had been for decades in the real world. In October 1995 Tozzi
attended the international "Metaforum II – No Borders" meeting in Budapest.
He was invited to give a lecture about "Fluctuant interfaces and the right
to communicate" with
particular regard to his action group, "Strano" and its political activity
in Florence, against the background of the peculiarities of the general
situation in Italy. After listing the ethical principles of the telematic
medium, he talked about potential strategies for "protests on the Net", one
of them being a specific "virtual strike".

This was based on the idea that "to boycott a server for a limited period
of time, it is sufficient to organize a large group of people and ask them
to flood the server by accessing it all at the same time. The boycott
should be advertised, made public, and justified." The first netstrike was
publicly announced on many mailing lists and by various media (radio,
newspapers, etc.) starting on December 14. It took place on December 21
(Tozzi's birthday, as it happens), and scheduled to take place from 6:00 to
7:00 p.m. (French time). A report posted later on the
Nettime mailing list stated that during this hour
almost all of the websites indicated as "targets" (mostly French government
websites and the Nuclear Energy Agency) were not accessible due to the
massive participation of people from all over the world who continuously
reloaded the respective web pages. After this success, two of the declared
goals were clearly reached: "The existence of a world-wide movement able to
counteract world-wide injustice" and "the capacity to develop such a
movement in a short time". Tozzi and his Strano Network colleagues also
assumed that "it could be possible (in future) to construct software
oriented to the specific goal of putting on an >electronic demonstration via a web server.

The netstrikes slowly became popular and in mid-February 1996 Tozzi
promoted another one to support the
Chiapas rebellion against the Mexican
government. The action was organized by the "Italian Coordination of the
Committees Supporting the Zapatista", and was intended to show leftist
national solidarity with the Zapatistas. The netstrike started to be
considered as a tool and attracted lots of interest from people who wanted
to organize their own. Due to the rising demand, after a couple of months,
in spring 1996, Tozzi and the Strano Network collective published "Net
strike, no copyright, ecc." (AAA Edizioni), a 145-page book about
counter-information and the underground perspective of human and social
aspects on the Internet. The first chapter was called "Net strike starter".
It was a long and detailed explanation of how to organize a netstrike, with
theorical premises, hints and advice gleaned from their practical experience.

In the following years some netstrikes were organized by a few political
collectives and individuals, mostly Italian. Only two years later (in 1998)
Ricardo Dominguez triggered a netstrike to support the still ongoing
struggle in Chiapas. Media attention was much greater than before, owing to
the newly born dot.com economy. So everybody credited Dominguez as the
inventor. But that is another story...

P.S. In 2001 the Netstrike.it website was even seized, after a pathetic
article in a glossy Italian magazine warned about the allegedly high legal
risks of joining a netstrike. But a massive online mobilization was quickly
started, and a dozen mirror websites suddenly appeared. The website was
quickly reopened.

[Translation: Timothy Jones.]

1
Nettime.

2 Nettime.
3
Nettime.