Canceling Emily

Meet Emily van Lidth de Jeude, an artist who lives on an island and has the most adorable chicken coop you’ll ever see. Those URLs start with emilyartist.ca now; until recently it was emilyvanartist.noblogs.org. But that site, there for many years, is down now, and not coming back up. Why? Well, her email address used to end with @autistici.org (it’s gone too now), and therein lies the story. It’s because the Trump administration declared that the “Autistici/Inventati” collective hosting Emily’s website and email was a terrorist organization, and blasted them off the Internet with legal nuclear weapons. Here is the A/I collective’s statement. A more compact journalist narrative is Als de Amerikaanse regering je tot terrorist heeft bestempeld: deze Italiaanse internetprovider kwam vorige week op de sanctielijst which is in Dutch but it machine-translates nicely. Emily’s own take, on her blog, is Canaries of Hope. It’s been professionally and personally devastating, vanishing her online…