Michele Bottari
EXIT
President
Michele Bottari – Strategic Consultant on AI Governance and Security for SMEs. A manager with 35 years of experience in IT, the environment, and agriculture, he now helps businesses navigate artificial intelligence without getting taken advantage of.
Co-founder of the EXIT group (3x1t.org), a collective that has been helping people escape the traps of big tech for years: it installs Linux and LineageOS, and offers self-managed email servers, encrypted chat, and cloud storage. No ads, no data sales. User data is stored on their servers and is deleted when it is no longer needed.
Author of the essay “How to Survive the Digital Age” (Terra Nuova Edizioni, 2019), he has written hundreds of articles for Zeus News and Veramente.org. He has been involved with Creative Commons Italia and co-founded projects promoting the migration to free software.
A radical critic: he spares neither governments (including left-wing ones) nor European institutions (the GDPR and AI Act as “closing the barn door after the horse has bolted”). He also views so-called “alternatives” like Mastodon and Telegram with suspicion, but without falling into extremism: digital awareness is better than isolation.
Today, he travels around Italy offering courses on hacking, smartphone awareness, cryptocurrencies, and the critical use of AI. His belief is that digital sovereignty is not a technological issue, but a social and cultural one. We need community, not just code.
