[1] During the early 1990s he co-founded the Contra-Cultura (menor) collective and was involved in the independent media scene in Tijuana—mainly the cyberpunk scene—where he was known to be an eclectic producer working with literature, photography, comics, videofilms and electronic music.

This same year his novel Tekno Guerrilla, a story about the HEM (Hecho En México) graffiti crew in Tijuana, was published by Verbigracia (Basque Country).

There, he became involved with Nettime, collaborating with Florian Schneider, Geert Lovink, Natalie Bookchin, Pit Schultz, Ricardo Dominguez and Alexei Shulgin.

He was an invited professor in the Latinamerican Studies masters programme at Universität Wien and Latinameirika Institut in Austria, and Digital Storytelling course in Malmö Högskola, Sweden.

[2] In 2005, after attending the meetings of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas with Subcomandante Marcos and the EZLN, Ilich launched the autonomous server possibleworlds.org and its economic body spacebank.org.

In 2009 he was a keynote speaker at the EZLN's first Festival Mundial de la Digna Rabia (first World Festival of Dignified Rage) on a panel on "Other communication, other culture", along with Subcomandante Marcos, Comandante Zebedeo, Hermann Bellinghausen, Gloría Muñoz, Sergío Ramírez Lazcano, Francisco Barrios "El Mastuerzo" and Roco of Maldita Vecindad.

[8] Since 2010 Ilich has focused on the cooperative Diego de la Vega and its virtual community investment bank Spacebank, presenting these projects at The Economist 2011 conference in Mexico City, "Change from the Bottom Up".