X-Net
Description
Antonio Blanco-Gracia (2017):
"X-Net is a legally established association with eight cyberactivist members (four women and four men) promoting neutral and free Internet and the free circulation of culture, knowledge and information. Their activities range from networked political actions and campaigns to cultural events, training, conferences and research. In addition to being an international reference in the fight for free and neutral Internet, their latest achievement fighting against Spanish political and economical corruption has attracted international attention and has been depicted as “a model for citizen action against the architects of financial collapse” (Koch,2016). The members of X-Net logistically supported the Barcelona Chapter of DRY, one of he main groups that called for protest in the streets on the 15 of May of 2011, a day of protest that gave the name to a movement also known as the “indignados” movement, and since then, X-Net has been training activists of this movement, and launching actions such as the15MpaRato against the former IMF director Rodrigo Rato, or the “X Party” from which Podemos took all of its innovations as a political party (Jimenez and Vargas, 2014), before becoming a more traditional one. One of their most important aims is to digitally empower other activists and transmit their hacker ethics, in order to make the overall ecosystem of activism more effective. For instance, X-Net trained the Movement of Mortgage Victims -Plataforma de Afectados por Hipotecas (PAH) members, and helped them to make the most of the social networks and become an “open source” organizations. X-Net finances their activities by having a tiny structure of costs, raising money from public institutions for curating cultural events, performing some consulting work, and most members have part-time day jobs. Unlike Las Indias, there are not economists in their members and they are not particularly worried about their economic sustainability but concerned about defending the conditions of free culture and Internet freedom, like other similar collectives such as The Quadrature of Net, etc. In their view, the most effective way to transform society is by creating work and collaboration networks based on the federation of competencies. They do not even have a name for this kind of ad-hoc organizational confederation of skills, that I call Netguilds."