"In 1994, hundreds of European artists, activists and pranksters adopted and shared the same identity. They all called themselves Luther Blissett and set to raising hell in the cultural industry. It was a five year plan. They worked together to tell the world a great story, create a legend, give birth to a new kind of folk hero. In January 2000, some of them regrouped as Wu Ming. The latter project, albeit more focused on literature and storytelling in the narrowest sense of the word, is no less radical than the old one. Luther Blissett is a multi-use name, an open reputation informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and social activists all over Europe since Summer 1994. For reasons that remain unknown, the name was borrowed from a 1980's British soccer player (Watford, A.C. Milan) of Afro-Caribbean origins. In Italy, between 1994 and 1999, the so-called Luther Blissett Project (an organized network within the open community sharing the Luther Blissett identity) became an extremely popular phenomenon, managing to create a legend, the reputation of a folk hero. This Robin Hood of the information age waged a guerrilla warfare on the cultural industry, ran unorthodox solidarity campaigns for victims of censorship and repression and - above all - played elaborate media pranks as a form of art, always claiming responsibility and explaining what bugs they had exploited to plant a fake story. Blissett was active also in other countries, especially in Spain and Germany. January 1995, Harry Kipper, a British conceptual artist, disappeared at the Italo-Yugoslavian border while touring Europe on a mountain bike, allegedly with the purpose of tracing the word 'ART' on the map of the continent. The victim of the prank was a famous missing persons prime time show on the Italian state television - Chi l'ha visto? They sent out a crew and squander taxpayers' money to look for a person that never existed. They went as far as London and make fools of themselves until Luther Blissett claimed responsibility for the hoax. December 1999 marked the end of the LBP's Five Year Plan. All the veterans committed a symbolic seppuku (samurai ritual suicide). The end of the LBP did not entail the end of the name, which keeps re-emerging in the cultural debate and is still a popular byline on the web."
LutherBlissett.net

"Something strange was happening in the city of Viterbo (Italy) in January of 1996. Spray-painted messages were appearing on the ancient stone walls and their content shocked the mostly Catholic, conservative population: they were satanic in character. At first, it was just enough to cause a little uneasiness, but as time went on, the graffiti increased. Shock became dread, and dread verged on panic. The media entered the game, and a series of letters began to appear from anonymous sources. They alleged something about a conspiracy: the local right-wing political figures linked to neo-Nazi groups, ties between Nazis and black magic.
It continues for months, and then in May the remains of a black mass is found in a forest outside of town: “bowl, mud, candles, and burned photographs”, along with a “satanic tape”. All it was smashed to bits, as if some sort of “violent fight” had occurred. The public fear is stoked further by extensive coverage, which is then fueled by the arrival on the scene of a vigilante group called “Committee for the Safeguard of Morals”. When a video of the black mass appears, replete with the off-camera sacrifice of a “screaming virgin”, the story leaps from the local press to the national media. As Italy turned its eyes towards Viterbo, a second tape was delivered to the national television station RAI Uno. Sent by somebody named Luther Blissett, the tape was an ‘extended’ cut of the sacrifice, which in turns out didn’t end in blood and murder, but “with a tarantella in which the ‘Satanists’ and the ‘virgin’ hold hands, dance, and sing along.”
What had transpired had effectively utilized the national media to embarrass the local media. The culprit behind the prank, the elusive figure of Luther Blissett, had done it as an act of “media homeopathy”. Detailed in a book that analyzed the country’s willingness to engage in media panic and the way that the media seemed dedicated solely to feeding the flames of panic, media homeopathy involved a hijacking of the channels of communication in order to feed it back to itself. The result was the revelation of the monumental artificiality of the postmodern world’s very infrastructure, a system that could only be regarded, like Jean Baudrillard urged, as some kind of simulation. What was more important, however, was that this very artificiality was precisely the system’s weakest link. Luther Blissett had found a way, it seems, to induce malfunctions in the simulation."
Edmund Berger, Nero editions

"Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. The novel is set in Europe during the 16th century, and deals with Protestant reformation movements. Luther Blissett was a nom de plume for four Italian authors (Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo) who were part of the Luther Blissett Project, which ended in 1999. They now write under the name Wu Ming. The novel has been translated into Danish, Dutch, English (British and American), French, German, Greek, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Basque, Czech, Portuguese, Spanish and Serbian. All of the editions keep the original copyright statement, which allows the non-commercial reproduction of the book. The book follows the journey of an Anabaptist radical across Europe in the first half of the 16th century as he joins in various movements and uprisings that come as a result of the Protestant reformation. The book spans 30 years as he is pursued by 'Q' (short for"Qoèlet"), a spy for the Roman Catholic Church cardinal Giovanni Pietro Carafa. The main character, who changes his name many times during the story, first fights in the German Peasants' War beside Thomas Müntzer, during which time he takes part in negotiations which are eventually formalised as the Twelve Articles. Following this, he battles in Münster's siege, during the Münster Rebellion, and some years later, in Venice. Throughout Europe, several critics have read Q from a political point of view, and maintain that the novel is an allegory of European society after the decline of the 1960s and 1970s protest movements. As in the 16th century, the Counter-Reformation repressed any alternative theological current or radical social movement, and the Peace of Augsburg sanctioned the partition of the continent among Catholic and Protestant powers, so the last twenty years of the 20th century were marked by a vengeful rebirth of conservative ideologies, and the International Monetary Fund-driven corporate globalization of the economy seemed to rout any resistance. This interpretation stems from the authors describing Q as a 'handbook of survival skills', which might cast a revealing light on the book's ending. But, this is just one of the many interpretations that have emerged following publication. According to other readers and critics, Q is a thinly disguised autobiography of Luther Blissett as a subversive, identity-shifting collective phantom. The protagonist has no name (the authors later renamed themselves Wu Ming, which is Chinese for 'no name'), is involved in every tumult of the age, incites the people to rebellion, and organizes hoaxes, swindles and mischievous acts. Both British novelist Stewart Home and American novelist David Liss have interpreted Q as an 'anti-novel', although their respective analyses come to different conclusions. While Home's review emphasized the social, political and subcultural references embedded in the plot, Liss' review dismissed the book as unnecessary and self-referential. Other readers have suggested that Q — apart from radicalism, post-modernism, and allegories — is above all an adventure novel, a swashbuckler in the very Italian tradition of Emilio Salgari and other popular feuilleton authors. In 2018, a reporter for BuzzFeed News suggested that the right-wing QAnon conspiracy theory shared many similarities to plot points in the novel."
Wikipedia

"Rather than attempting to uncover conspiracies after they'd taken place, the LBP set out to predict conspiracies and then prevent them from happening. At least that was the intent before their collective ritual suicide, after which they may have done otherwise."
Stewart House

"QAnon - Luther Blissett - Q novel - Wu Ming - Buzzfeed Interview: Ryan Broderick of Buzzfeed just published an article on this #QAnon conspiracy bullshit titled 'It’s Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters'. The piece features quotes from an interview we gave via email. Here’s the full email exchange.
Can you tell me a bit about when and how your book Q was written?
We started writing Q in the last months of 1995, when we were part of the Luther Blissett Project, a network of activists, artists and cultural agitators who all shared the name «Luther Blissett». Luther Blissett was and still is a British public figure, a former footballer, a philanthropist. The LBP spread many mythical tales about why we chose to borrow his name, but the truth is that nobody knows. Initially, Blissett the footballer was bemused, but then he decided to play along with us and even publicly endorsed the project. Last year, during an interview on the Italian TV, he stated that having his name adopted for the LBP was «a honour». The purpose of signing all our statements, political actions and works of art with the same moniker was to build the reputation of one open character, a sort of collective"bandit", like Ned Ludd, or Captain Swing. It was live action role playing. The LBP was huge: hundreds of people in Italy alone, dozens more in other countries. In the UK, one of the theorists and propagandists of the LBP was the novelist Stewart Home. The LBP lasted from 1994 to 1999. The best English-language account of those five years is in Marco Deseriis’ book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. One of our main activities consisted of playing extremely elaborate pranks on the mainstream media. Some of them were big stunts which made us quite famous in Italy. The most complex one was played by dozens of people in the backwoods around Viterbo, a town near Rome. It lasted a year, involving Satanism, black masses, Christian anti-satanist vigilantes and so on. It was all made up: there were neither Satanists nor vigilantes, only fake pictures, strategically spread rumours and crazy communiqués, but the local and national media bought everything with no fact-checking at all, politicians jumped on the bandwagon of mass paranoia, we even managed to get footage of a (rather clumsy) satanic ritual broadcast in the national TV news, then we claimed responsibility for the whole thing and produced a huge mass of evidence. The Luther Blissett Project was also responsible for a huge grassroots counter-inquiry on cases of false child abuse allegations. We deconstructed the paedophilia scare that swiped Europe in the second half of the 1990s, and wrote a book about it. A magistrate whom we targeted in the book filed a lawsuit, as a consequence the book was impounded and disappeared from bookshops, but not from the web. This is the context in which we wrote Q. We finished it in June 1998. It came out in March 1999 and was our final contribution to the LBP.
I’ve been reading up about it, and it’s largely believed that it’s underneath the book’s narrative it works as handbook for European leftists? Is that a fair assessment? I’ve read that many believe the book’s plot is an allegory for 70s and 80s European activists?
Although it keeps triggering many possible allegorical interpretations, we meant it as a disguised, oblique autobiography of the LBP. We often described it as Blissett’s «playbook», an «operations manual» for cultural disruption.
The four authors I’m speaking to now are Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo correct? The four authors of Q?
You are speaking with three of the four authors of Q, and you’re speaking with a band of writers called Wu Ming, which means «Anonymous» in Chinese. In December 1999 the Luther Blissett Project committed a symbolic suicide - we called it The Seppuku - and in January 2000 we launched another project, the Wu Ming Foundation, centred around our writing and our blog, Giap. The WMF is now an even bigger network than the LBP was, and includes many collectives, projects and laboratories. Luca aka Wu Ming 3 is not a member of the band anymore, although he still collaborates with us on specific side projects. Each member of the band has a nom de plume composed of the band’s name and a numeral, following the alphabetical order of our surnames, thus you’re speaking to Roberto Bui aka Wu Ming 1, Giovanni Cattabriga aka Wu Ming 2 and Federico Guglielmi aka Wu Ming 4.
Can you tell me a bit about your background before the Luther Blissett project?
Before the LBP we were part of a national scene that was – and still is – called simply «il movimento», a galaxy of occupied social centres, squats, independent radio stations, small record labels, alternative bookshops, student collectives, radical trade unions, etc. In the Italian radical tradition, at least after the Sixties, there was never any clearcut separation between the counterculture and more political milieux. Most of us came from left-wing family backgrounds, had roots in the working class. Punk rock opened our minds during our teenage years, then in the late 1980s and early 1990s Cyberpunk opened them even more, and inspired new practices.
When did you start noticing similarities between Q and QAnon? I know you’ve tweeted a bit about this, but I’d love to get as many details as I can. I feel like the details around QAnon are so sketchy that it’s important to lock in as much as I can here.
We read a lot about the US alt-right, books such as Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilisk or Angela Nagle’s – flawed but still useful – Kill All Normies, and yet we didn’t see the QAnon thing coming. We didn’t know it was growing on 4chan and some specific subReddits. About six weeks ago, on June 12th, our old pal Florian Cramer – a fellow veteran of the LBP who now teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam – sent us a short email. Here’s the text: «It seems as if somebody took Luther Blissett’s playbook and turned it into an Alt-Right conspiracy lore. Maybe Wu Ming should write a new article:"How Luther Blissett brought down Roseanne Barr"!», After those sentences there was a link to a piece by Justin Caffier on Vice. We read it, and briefly commented on Twitter, then in the following weeks more and more people got in touch with us, many of them Europeans living in the US. They all wanted to draw our attention on the QAnon phenomenon. To anyone who had read our novel, the similarities were obvious, to the extent that all these people were puzzled seeing that no US pundit or scholar was citing the book.
Have there been key moments for you that made you feel like QAnon is an homage to Q? What has lined up the best?
Coincidences are hard to ignore: dispatches signed Q allegedly coming from some dark meanders of top state power, exactly like in our book. This Q is frequently described as a Blissett-like collective character, «an entity of about ten people that have high security clearance», and at the same time – like we did for the LBP – weird"origin myths" are put into circulation, like the one about John Kennedy Jr. faking his own death in 1999 – the year Q was first published, by the way! – and becoming Q. QAnon’s psy-op reminds very much of our old «playbook», and the metaconspiracy seems to draw from the LBP’s set of references, as it involves the Church, satanic rituals, paedophilia… We can’t say for sure that it’s an homage, but one thing is almost certain: our book has something to do with it. It may have started as some sort of, er,"fan fiction" inspired by our novel, and then quickly became something else. There will be a lot of skepticism I think that an American political movement like QAnon could have been influenced by an Italian novel, how do you think it may have happened? It’s an Italian novel in the sense that it was originally written in Italian by Italian authors, but in the past (nearly) 20 years it has become a global novel. It was translated into fifteen languages – including Korean, Japanese, Russian, Turkish – and published in about thirty countries. It was successful all across Europe and in the English speaking world with the exception of the US, where it got bad reviews, sold poorly and circulated almost exclusively in activist circles. Q was published in Italian a few months before the so-called"Battle of Seattle", and published in several other languages in the 2000-2001 period. It became a sort of night-table book for that generation of activists, the one that would be savagely beaten up by an army of cops during the G8 summit in Genoa, July 2001. In 2008 we wrote a short essay, almost a memoir, on our participation to those struggles and Q’s influence in those years, titled Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise. A copy of Q’s Spanish edition even ended up in the hands of subcomandante Marcos. It isn’t at all unrealistic to imagine that it may have inspired the people who started QAnon.
Have you seen anything in the QAnon posts that leads you to suspect any activist group in particular is behind it?
No, we haven’t.
You think QAnon is a prank? Without some kind of reveal it’s obviously hard to see it as that. If you think it was revealed that QAnon was actually some kind of anarchist prank, would it even matter? Would its believers abandon it or would they just see it as a smear campaign?
Let us take for granted, for a while, that QAnon started as a prank in order to trigger right-wing weirdos and have a laugh at them. There’s no doubt it has long become something very different. At a certain level it still sounds like a prank, but who’s pulling it on whom? Was the QAnon narrative hijacked and reappropriated by right-wing"counter-pranksters"? Counter-pranksters who operated with the usual alt-right"post-ironic" cynicism, and made the narrative more and more absurd in order to astonish media pundits while spreading reactionary content in a captivating way? Again: are the original pranksters still involved? Is there some detectable conflict of narratives within the QAnon universe? Why are some alt-right types taking the distance from the whole thing and showing contempt for what they describe as «a larp for boomers»? A larp it is, for sure. To be more precise, it’s a fascist Alternate Reality Game. Plausibly the most active players – ie the main influencers – don’t believe in all the conspiracies and metaconspiracies, but many people are so gullible that they’ll gulp down any piece of crap – or lump of menstrual blood, for that matter. Moreover, there’s danger of gun violence related to the larp, the precedent of Pizzagate is eloquent enough. What if QAnon inspires a wave of hate crimes? Therefore, to us the important question is: triggering nazis like that, what is it good for? That camp is divided between those who would believe anything and those who would be"ironic" on anything and exploit anything in order to advance their reactionary, racist agenda. Can you really troll or ridicule people like those? It’s hard to foresee what would happen if QAnon were exposed as an anarchist/leftist prank on the right. If its perpetrators claimed responsibility for it and showed some evidence (for example, unmistakeable references to our book and the LBP), would the explanation itself become yet another part of the narrative, or would it generate a new narrative encompassing and defusing the previous one? In plain words: which narrative would prevail? «QAnon sucking anything into its vortex» or «Luther Blissett’s ultimate prank»? In any case, we’d never have started anything like that ourselves. Way too dangerous."
Wu Ming Foundation

from Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594):

"Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light,
To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
To wake the morn, and sentinel the night,
To wrong the wronger till he render right."

While the first time-stamped mechanism in a digital document used in the Surety Blockchain has been invented by Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta in 1990, documented in their paper "How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document" which later then served for the Bitcoin Blockchain of Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, there have been some important pioneers who developed the prototypes of modern blockchain technology as we know it today.
In 1982 David Chaum publishes his PhD thesis "Computer Systems Established, Maintained and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" and draws the first ideas of how computer cryptography may help to create consensus sorted in blocks. One year later, in 1983, Chaum describes in his paper "Blind signatures for untraceable payments" how to use cryptography in order to mint digital currency based on a blind signature. In 1990 Chaum founds in Amsterdam the cryptocurrency project DigiCash and sends the first transaction of a digital currency four years later in 1994, the same year the Luther Blissett pseudonym has been established.
In 1997 Adam Back develops the Hashcash project, based on a Proof of Work algorithm in order to prevent Spam emails - luckily it could not block Mail Art activism to infiltrate your inbox. Today in Italy, there exists a similar system called PEC, a verified authentic email system for sending and receiving formal emails, followed by SPID - a digital identity public service system.
While the first Smart Contract mechanism has been designed by Nick Szabo in 1994, the birth year of the Luther Blissett Project, it shall take more than 21 years before Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Jeffrey Wilcke will code the Ethereum protocol in 2015 with its particular Open Source Smart Contract attributes which are necessary to declare the ownership of NFTs.
Time back, in 1998 Szabo programms the first decentralised cryptocurrency called BitGold, much similar to the architecture of the later following Bitcoin. Another important milestone dated the same year is the document of the Chinese informatic engineer Wei Dai "b-money, an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system" declaring the fundamental baselines for decentralised cryptocurrencies.
One year later, in 1999 Luther Blissett commits a symbolic suicide. The world needs to wait 10 years until 2009 before celebrating the birth of Bitcoin by the anonymous person or group Satoshi Nakamoto.

"But who will guard the guards themselves" - "Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?"

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