i unsubbed from -empyre- months [years?] ago. it's a poor comparison to the
heady NN days, but yes, i agree it is dying the slow email burn_death.

-@netwurker


On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 12:19 AM, Ana Valdés <[email protected]> wrote:

> I remember I was subscribed to Syndicate as well but I never heard about NN
> and never participated, I felt Syndicate was more a list for announcements
> of events, maybe I only subscribed to the events list.
> But it's interesting to discuss the validity of the mailinglists today, as
> forums for discussion or for sharing information.
> I have been participating in the Australian list -empyre for many years and
> now I feel the list is slowly dissapearing. Some of you (Patrick Lichty was
> a briljant moderator for some month's ago) are members of -empyre too. Do
> you feel the same as me? It's not strange, the list has been on the net for
> ages and the moderators do a terrific job but the most of people are
> freelancing artists or teachers with very little time to spare...
> I tried today to reach their arrchives and the links were broken.
> It would be a real loss if -empyre is gone.
> Ana
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 3:54 PM, marc garrett <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Ana,
>>
>> Thanks for the link to 'Doctress Neutopia', very interesting...
>>
>> Yes - I remember on the (once brilliant) Syndicate list years ago, where
>> Netochka Nezvanova, N.N., antiorp, integer dominated, causing all kinds
>> of upset...
>>
>> "The net entity nn (Netochka Nezvanova, integer, antiorp, etc.), a
>> pseudonym used by an international group of artists and programmers in
>> their extensive and aggressive mailing list-based online-performances and
>> for other art projects, had been subscribed to the Syndicate list in 1997.
>> It was, as the first of less than a handful of people ever, unsubscribed
>> against its will because it was spamming the list so heavily that all
>> meaningful communication was blocked. In January 2001, nn sent an e-mail
>> asking to again be subscribed to the Syndicate mailing list. (What nn
>> never bothered to realise was that subscription to the list had always
>> been open so that, at any point, it could have subscribed itself - we have
>> always wondered why Majordomo is such a blind spot in this technophile
>> entity's arsenal.) After getting assurances from nn that she was not out
>> to misuse the list, we subscribed it to the Syndicate list.
>>
>> Naively, as we had to realise. nn went from one or two messages every day
>> in February to an average of three to five message in April and up to
>> eight and ten messages per day in May and June - and that on a list which
>> had a regular daily traffic of three to five messages a day. The
>> distributed nature of the nn collective makes it possible for them to keep
>> posting 24 hours a day - great for promoting your online presence,
>> irritating for people who have a less frantic life rhythm. nn's messages
>> are always cryptic, sometimes amusing, often tediously repetitive in their
>> quirky rhetorics and style, and generally irritating for the majority of
>> people. Its activity on the Syndicate - like on many other lists it has
>> used and terrorised - soon came to look like a hijack. But the sheer mass
>> of traffic nn was generating, the sheer amount of nn's presence, was
>> overwhelming. Perhaps this phenomenon could be compared to SMEGL, short
>> for super mental grid lock, a term that was developed to describe traffic
>> jam situations in NYC back in the eighties (or was this term coined in
>> Berlin-Kreuzberg's famous Fischbuero? Who knows, the boundaries get
>> blurred...).
>>
>> In the spring of 2001, nn's and other people's activities who use open,
>> unmoderated mailing lists for promulgating their self-promotional e-mails,
>> triggered discussions about 'spam art', on Syndicate as well as on other
>> lists. Actually, given the extreme openness and vulnerability of a
>> structure like the Syndicate it remains quite astonishing that this
>> structure survived for such a long time. What happened in the course of
>> 2000/2001 (not only to Syndicate, but also to several other mailing
>> lists)
>> was that the openness of these lists, i.e. the fact that they were
>> unmoderated, was massively abused, and, finally, destroyed, by relentless
>> 'creative' spamming. One of the basic principles of the Internet - its
>> openness - suddenly seemed to become a mere tool for attacking this very
>> principle. 'Netiquette' did not seem to be of much value anymore and was
>> sacrificed for the egotistical self-expression of (distributed) artist
>> egos. The irony of this process is that, like any good parasite, this
>> artistic practice depends on the existence of lively online communities:
>> it not only bites, but kills the hand that feeds it. - These parasite
>> nomads will find new hosts, no doubt, but they have over the past year
>> helped to erode the social fabric of the wider net cultural population so
>> much that communities have to protect themselves from attacks and hijacks
>> more aggressively than before. Their adolescent carelessness is partly
>> responsible for the withering of the romantic utopia of a completely open,
>> sociable online environment. However educational that may be, we despise
>> the deliberation with which these people act.
>>
>> nn got unsubscribed from the Syndicate without warning on a day when there
>> had been nothing but ten messages from her. After some days of silence and
>> sighs of relief, angry protests by nn came through. On the list,
>> accusations of censorship and/or dictatorship were made. A small but noisy
>> faction denounced unsubscribing nn as an act against the freedom of
>> speech. They called the administrators fascists, murderers, and
>> 'threatened' to report the case to 'Index on Censorship'. While some other
>> list members welcomed the departure of nn on and off the list and the
>> admin team again and again explained their move, the ludicrous allegations
>> and vociferous insults continued.
>>
>> The real shock for us was that the majority of list subscribers did not
>> participate in the discussion and thus silently seemed to accept what was
>> going on. It was personally hurtful not to receive more support against
>> the insults raised against us, but more frustrating was the indifference
>> that made the whole process possible. Within few days, the alienation from
>> the atmosphere on the list was so great that we admitted defeat,
>> re-subscribed nn and began to withdraw from the Syndicate. The list was
>> moved to a different server and is now administered by other people at
>> anart.no/~syndicate <http://anart.no/%7Esyndicate>. We wanted to avoid
>> further verbiage and conflict and
>> therefore gave up the name, but we insist that from our perspective the
>> Syndicate project that was founded in 1996 ended in August 2001. What
>> remains under its name is a zombie kept alive by misconceptions about what
>> the Syndicate really was. Maybe we should have stopped the project
>> altogether in the summer?
>>
>> Filtering has, in a way, done us in. Before there were effective e-mail
>> clients that could filter out lists and other mail communication,
>> everybody on the list got everything more or less instantly, which also
>> meant a higher level of social awareness and social control of what goes
>> on on the list. Today, many people filter the lists they subscribe to and
>> only look at the postings at irregular intervals - some mailboxes don't
>> get opened for months. Like this, people consume the list passively and do
>> not even notice a fiasco like the one that we experienced on the Syndicate
>> list in the summer. I guess that some people who remain subscribed to the
>> Syndicate list still have not noticed that anything has changed. For a
>> social community, that kind of behaviour - automated deferance - can be
>> fatal."
>>
>> <nettime> Rise and Decline of the Syndicate
>> http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0111/msg00077.html
>>
>> wishing all well.
>>
>> marc
>>
>>
>>
>>  > Interesting, it reminds me about doctress Neutopia,
>>  >
>>
>> http://projectwhitehouse.wordpress.com/democrats/libby-hubbard-aka-doctress-neutopia-free-the-slaves
>>  > a selfnamed prophet and the founder of a new religion at the
>> beginning of the Net, around 1995.
>>  > She terrorized many online communities and was expelled from many
>> forums.
>>  > Ana
>>  >
>>  > On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 3:25 PM, marc garrett
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>  >
>>  >     Netochka Nezvanova.
>>  >
>>  >     One of the most famous and infamous EccentricCharacters in
>>  >     turn–of–the–21st Century Western artistic NetworkCulture, Netochka
>>  >     Nezvanova (aka N.N., antiorp, integer, Irena Sabine Czubera)
>> remains an
>>  >     enigma to many. Widely believed to be an IdentityCollective?,
>> Netochka
>>  >     Nezvanova is a PenName named after the title character in [an early
>>  >     unfinished Fyodor Dostoevsky novel] whose name means "nameless
>> nobody"
>>  >     in Russian. The identity always presents itself as female, though
>> it may
>>  >     not be in reality. Despite the meaning of her moniker, N.N. has
>> coveted
>>  >     attention and recognition like few others on the Internet.
>>  >
>>  >     http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/NetochkaNezvanova
>>  >     _______________________________________________
>>  >     NetBehaviour mailing list
>>  >     [email protected]
>>  >     http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
>>  >
>>  >
>>  >
>>  >
>>  > --
>>  > http://www.twitter.com/caravia15852
>>  > http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
>>  > http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
>>  > http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/
>>  > http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/
>>  > http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/
>>  > http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
>>  > http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/
>>  >
>>  > mobil/cell +4670-3213370
>>  >
>>  >
>>  > "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth
>> with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you
>> will always long to return.
>>  > — Leonardo da Vinci
>>  >
>>  >
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>
>
> --
> http://www.twitter.com/caravia15852
> http://www.scoop.it/t/art-and-activism/
> http://www.scoop.it/t/food-history-and-trivia
> http://www.scoop.it/t/gender-issues/
> http://www.scoop.it/t/literary-exiles/
> http://www.scoop.it/t/museums-and-ethics/
> http://www.scoop.it/t/urbanism-3-0
> http://www.scoop.it/t/postcolonial-mind/
>
> mobil/cell +4670-3213370
>
>
> "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
> your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always
> long to return.
> — Leonardo da Vinci
>
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