On 25 Sep 2019, at 8:11, David Garcia wrote:
Sorry nettime (press delete anyone who has a life and so is
uninterested in UK politics and related constitutional/Brexit
shenaningans)
Felix and I have been thinking about shutting down nettime-l because (as
I'd put it, he may well differ) the list should preserve its historical
specificity and energy rather than devolve into yet another forum for
debates that are easily available in other venues. If you feel like you
need to open your mail with 'Sorry nettime' and tell people to delete
your mail, that's probably a good sign that what follows may not be so
productive in this context and maybe you should just delete it yourself.
I understand the urge to turn to the list as a 😹 semi-sane 😹
outlet; given how nakedly brutal politics have become, there's a good
chance that many others feel similar impulses. But the challenge, then,
is to talk about what's happening in ways that are relevant to a wider
range of people.
Yesterday was a big day in the US, what with the Speaker of the House
committing to an impeachment process. But the avalanche of events it led
to that came fast and furious, and keep on coming, so the twists and
turns seem strangely weightless, as if everything could flip around in a
day or a week or vanish in a month. We could argue about what will
happen, but why bother? What I'd hear here would be a pale shadow of
regular fare on Facebook.
That's not to say there's nothing nettimish about these subjects —
there could be. But if there is, I think it lies not in specific events
but in their generality: the emergence of transnational political
networks that are nakedly exploiting the creaky machinery of democracy
to subvert traditions, the speed with which aggressively rightist
national movements are leveraging each other's strategies, the fates of
entire nations becoming the latest bloody-minded 'season' of some global
infotainment franchise, the outsourcing of revanchism to hypercapitalist
'makers' in ex-eastern regions, the rise of a neo–Children's Crusade
focused more on planetary discourses than the trite figure of the
'local' as the field of action, the specter of military interventions in
the service of environmentalism, the ways that rampant disillusionment
is entangled with the self-historicizing impulses of graying radicals,
the transformation of cities, higher education, and the internet from
sites of liberation into machines of economic exploitation, the mutation
of art schools into retirement homes, the appropriation of squatting and
occupying tactics as impact-free cultural programming... That list could
(and should) go on, and — with a jolt of old-school collaborative
text-filtering — it could even bring some new energy and people to
this list. But stuff that smacks of remoaning – not just remoaning
about Brexit but remoaning about anything and everything – will just
waste whatever potential might be left.
Nettime-l's info page[1] says 'no MIME-attachments,' but no one GAF
about MIME anymore, so maybe we should change it to something more
up-to-date like 'no attachments of any kind, sentimental included.'
[1] https://nettime.org/info.html
Cheers,
Ted
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