This corroded site of a lost and forgotten politics made a spectacularly weird setting for the “Share Conference,” an event originally from Belgrade and Novi Sad. It speaks volumes for the new generation of Balkan activists that they can throw an international event in newly Europeanized, relentlessly hip, Croatian Rijeka.

This Adriatic port town, which used to specialize in toxic paper mills and oil refineries, is remodeling itself as a green tourism and cultural hub. Rijeka got everything they bargained for with the Share three day festival of cybergeeks, pirates, dj s and electronic artists. They arrived from all over the world: the Internet-famous, the net-celebrities: the law professors who were were also tattooed djs, the musicians were somehow cryptographers, the elected officials were Icelandic punk poets, the free-software coders who are game designers. They were all young people of searingly high intelligence who lacked any proper career.

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Strange things have happened in this historical city, which has been Roman, feudal, pre-national, post-national, an independent city-state on long occasions, Austro-Hungarian, Italian, Croatian, various forms of Yugoslavian, and which now happens to be European Union. Ninety years ago, Rijeka was the legendary breakaway pirate republic of the warrior-poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, a sinister genius of political theater who wanted to make Rijeka his springboard to conquer all the other ancient Italian republics along the Dalmatian coast.
In the ecstatic D’Annunzio dictatorship, for a year and a half, this port city was a world laboratory of twentieth-century extremist politics, a cradle of all kinds of oddities: fascism, newsreels, radio propaganda, nudity, fad diets, cocaine smuggling, air-war, torpedo boats, piracy, ship hijacking, Black Shirts, and the revived-Roman Fascist one-armed salute. Rijeka even briefly boasted its own anarcho-syndicalist constitution, based on music. The “cyberpunk academy” was the official title for the shipboard event in Tito’s post-disaster dystopia, where conclaves were held in the wrecked bedrooms of the dictators, where workshops and panels graced the rusty decks with seating from packing crates. We exchanged codes, secrets, plans, good energy…

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