Hi Ted (and others),
I think it is very good and timely of David to post this kind of stuff
on nettime, and I don't see any reason to slap him in the face publicly
or to shut down the list.
We should reconsider the basic tenets of nettime though, since maybe the
whole idea of having a list exclusively for discussions about network
issues is a bit outdated...
On the other hand, I consider it a big asset to be able to read
interesting contributions by people like David and Brian Holmes in a
remnant of the open structure that the net once was, so please keep the
list alive!
Op 25-09-19 om 16:20 schreef tbyfield:
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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