Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
Dear Nettimers: "McLuhanite technological determinism" . . . !! As maybe the only person from the Wall Street "wing" of the technology industry (with at least one confirmed *weird* "assignment" from the CIA) to ever participate in nettime -- starting with that late-night phone-call from Diana asking me to "keynote" MetaForum III (in Oct 1996), guessing that I was the "anti-Barlow" -- I resemble that remark. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1265585,00.asp Perhaps some of my friends on the list would be interested to hear that I've started a strategic research Center, partnering with a retired Naval intelligence officer and many others, to consider how *digital* technology changes civilizations -- starting with China (which I first visited shortly after going to Budapest). _www.digitallife.center_ (http://www.digitallife.center/) Thanks for *all* of your help along the way, I really couldn't have done it without you . . . Mark Stahlman Jersey City Heights # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
On Thu, 05 Nov 2015, John Hopkins wrote: > I'm wondering if there are any deeper stats available -- in > retrospect -- such as subscriber numbers over time; posts over time, > etc... My email archive shows 22600 entries ... but I had a few gaps > of some months over the course of the almost 20 years... I could easily produce some stats (using Jaro Mail, ehehe) but my current archive goes back only to 31 March 2011 without scavenging in backups. Here below a quick graph made using the last 3893 messages, I believe I'm breaking no privacy in reposting all strings that have already appeared in the From: fields I think Patrice deserves a mention as most prolific contributor by far I wonder what are the all time totals, I believe he can make it. 1 # > ! 1 # ! 1 # 0 1 # 010 1 # 12 list 1 # 1wswlh+5d4cycrrfldx4 1 # 646 DJ KUNAL 1 # A 1 # aakasa 1 # Aaron.Smith 1 # abdulaziz.mohammed 1 # abner preis 1 # actor 1 # adam 1 # adam hyde 1 # Adelino Zanini 1 # Adhari Donora 1 # admin 1 # ADRI 1 # afuma 1 # agostino.petrillo 1 # Aicha Visser 1 # aindriu macfehin 1 # air-l 1 # A.J. Keen 1 # Alann de Vuyst 1 # albert 1 # Alberto Cossu 1 # Alberto D'Ottavi 1 # Alberto Martinelli 1 # Albino Russo 1 # alblicker 1 # aldje 1 # Aldje van Meer 1 # aldo bassoni 1 # Aleks 1 # alessandra 1 # alessandro.caliandro 1 # Alessandro Gandini 1 # Alessandro Ludovico 1 # alex 1 # ALexander Geijzendorffer 1 # Alexander Kostenko 1 # Alexandra Sobiech 1 # alexandre.aragao 1 # Alexandre Leray 1 # Alex Halavais 1 # Alex Leach 1 # Allister Clisham 1 # Al Matthews 1 # almud 1 # Amin Zayani 1 # ana 1 # anahi 1 # Ana Isabel Carvalho 1 # Ana Peraica 1 # Ana Viseu 1 # Anders Kjærulff 1 # Andrea Mayr 1 # Andrea Sesta 1 # Andreas Jacobs 1 # andre castro 1 # Andrian Georgiev 1 # andries 1 # angela.mcrobbie 1 # Angela Plohman 1 # Angelica Della Torre 1 # angelica.kaminsky 1 # Anke Asselman 1 # Anko Bos 1 # Anna Borcherding 1 # anna.hennebole 1 # annakovesdi 1 # Anne Julie Arnfred 1 # Anne Marie Hazenberg 1 # Annemarie Staaks 1 # Annemieke vander Hoek 1 # annemie van der zanden 1 # annemtly 1 # Annette Wolfsberger | Sonic... 1 # anouk 1 # antoinettejcitizen 1 # Antonio 1 # Antonio A. Casilli 1 # anton vidokle 1 # Antti Jäinen 1 # app-art-award 1 # Appy 1 # Aram Bartholl 1 # archive 1 # argha mahendra 1 # arjan 1 # arjen 1 # Arjen van Veelen 1 # armbrusterik 1 # ARNOVA-L 1 # Art - Eastern Bloc 1 # Artpool Art Research Center 1 # Arun Kumar 1 # ashkan.soltani 1 # asterides 1 # atrowbri 1 # Audrey Brisack 1 # audrey samson 1 # avlmeuad 1 # awards 1 # Bas de Lange 1 # Bas van Heur 1 # bbrewer 1 # bcomnes 1 # beata szechy 1 # beliz.escapist 1 # beltrandmarco 1 # Ben Birkinbine 1 # Benedict Seymour 1 # Ben Jack 1 # bernhard bauch 1 # Bernhard Garnicnig 1 # Bernhard Rieder 1 # bert 1 # betaalbewijzen 1 # Bezdomny Dotcom 1 # bheilbrunn 1 # biella 1 # billbacon 1 # Bill Stewart 1 # Birchall 1 # birgi 1 # Bishop Z 1 # Bishop Zareh 1 # Bitsy Knox 1 # bk 1 # black 1 # _blank 1 # b.niessen 1 # bob_meininger 1 # 'Boehm 1 # bof-nieuws-request 1 # Bojan Endrovski 1 # Bonnie Dumanaw 1 # Boyd Seltenrijch 1 # Bradshaw 1 # brenno 1 # Brian Degger 1 # brian.holmes 1 # brigitta isabella 1 # broegger 1 # bsteenweg 1 # Burak Arikan 1 # Burcu Baykurt 1 # bureau 1 # buzzwolves 1 # CALLIGARO Victoria 1 # capri gondola venezia 1 # captain.asthma 1 # cardboard boks 1 # Carl Guderian 1 # Carl McKinney 1 # carlo von lynX 1 # Carolien Ligtenberg 1 # Carolin Gerlitz 1 # carvalho.aisabel 1 # caspar 1 # castervermoortece 1 # Cathy Brickwood 1 # cbrickwood 1 # cdycede 1 # Celia Lury 1 # center 1 # Césare Peeren 1 # cest.elisa 1 # cfp 1 # cfp-admin 1 # Charley Fiedeldij Dop 1 # charlie derr 1 # Charlie Derr 1 # charline stoelzaed 1 # chilon 1 # chr 1 # c
Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
A bit late on the thread -- I concur with Jaromil -- a fair, well-written, and inclusive (as far as that goes) account of the list, kudos for taking the time to compose it. Age does (productively or not) bring on reflection on the past, and at two decades, well, it's now a collective history. Thanks, Felix (@305 posts under no pseudonym) & Ted (@351 posts under no pseudonym) (1600 under the 'nettime ...' rubric) I'm wondering if there are any deeper stats available -- in retrospect -- such as subscriber numbers over time; posts over time, etc... My email archive shows 22600 entries ... but I had a few gaps of some months over the course of the almost 20 years... cheers, jh -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD grounded on a granite batholith twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
David, I agree that it's always great to see how Brian situates ideas with incredible breadth. Maybe you should've asked him to write an essay about nettime for your tactical media anthology. :^) But I want to question your account of the time. The rubble of the twin towers was an anthill compared to the mountains of sanctimony that've been heaped on "9/11." The least we can do is try to unearth a few ideas that weren't crushed beyond recognition by the conversion of that Very Large Exercise in Bad Judgment into decades of war. Recovering those ideas will be an important part of the larger project that Eric articulated so well. Less than a week after the VLEBJ, I sent a message to this list describing how 'local' experiences had already been swept aside by an imported schmaltzy jingoism.[1] Far from 'reeling,' for many people and purposes things in NYC were pretty much back to normal within weeks. The N5M4 TML took place more than a year later, in December 2002.[2] By that time Geert was able to open his essay "Tactical Media After 9-11" bluntly: "It is tempting to portray '9-11' as a turning point" -- i.e., it wasn't.[3] And if you look back at nettime's archives in the months following the VLEBJ[4] you'll see that the list's busy and brilliant resilience was as clear as ever. [1] http://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0109/msg00125.html [2] http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/n5m4_journal/index7e86.html [3] https://www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb/case_911/reverberations/lovink.html [4] http://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/ My own sense is that the NYC TML's 'VCB' (OMG WTF LOL ETC) was heavily shaped by institutional agendas. That's not to suggest it was somehow 'bought and paid for' by the host (NYU) or the Rockefeller Foundation (a major sponsor) or anything of the sort. Instead, I just mean that the people and projects, as well as the overall framing, had moved a few steps away from gritty, idiosyncratic 'activism' and closer to 'civil society.' (That was a prominent criticism of N5M4 as a whole.) That context, more than 'reeling from 9/11,' accounts for muffled, arm's-length quality of the collective snapshot. Cheers, T On 4 Nov 2015, at 5:07, David Garcia wrote: Great to once again be able to tune in to Brian's imaginative sweep. Just to add to Brian's example below important but informal collaborations connected to nettime I would definitely add all (except edition 1) editions of Next 5 Minutes festivals of Tactical Media. Nettime acted like an important additional room in which the issues that informed the content of the festival sometimes sourced, debated and developed. In the last edition the content development was disegregated and developed through Tactical Media labs (TML) in various countries. I'll just recall one because it left an interesting legacy which still feels potent. Its the NYU TML took place in the heart of the city shortly after 9/11 and so of course the and its organisors were still reeeling and the planned event had to (in every sense) pivot. The result was a so called Virtual Casebook in which many regular nettime contributors (and many more who were not) generated a series of responces to the attack which, whatever its limitations, still represents a collective snapshot of that moment refracted through the subjectivities of this community (yes I dare to use the C word). In my opinion remains a valuable way to re-connect to that moment. Its sill worth re-visiting as a snapshot in time: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
Dear nettimers,
It feels a bit awkward to respond in this thread as the co-editor of
the anthology this text is going to be part of, where I think the text
is going to be a great contribution, a fascinating account of twenty
years of from a first-hand perspective. However, I am deeply
intrigued by the remarks Brian made about a `third-order cybernetics'
and his call to start figuring this new order out (a 'third age of
net-critique' as he calls it). This is what I want to respond to here.
The anthology we are putting together is part of a larger project,
on-going under a mundane working title 'tactical media connections',
with the aim of connecting different generations of activists, artists,
theorists, discourses and practices between the classic era of tactical
media and current practices and conditions, with the hope of developing
a more informed perspective to move into the future. The project has
been introduced on the list so will not dwell on this further.
One of the things which is on my mind with this project is to raise the
question: "What kind of interventions are required right now?",
assuming that we are in the post-#occupy and post-prism era. For a
variety of reasons we have seen that the various `occupy'
quasi-movements (formations) have failed, unable to transform
themselves into somehow coherent and potent political forces (in part
because of their over-reliance on the play on affective registers),
with the possible exception of Spain as also indicated in the thread
started by Alex Foti ("What if we were all right but all wrong?"),
which runs interestingly parallel to this one. And the post-prism
condition need not really be explained - the confirmation of our worst
nightmares about the extent of the electronic surveillance apparatus
that dwarfs all sci-fi phantasies that may have preceded the Snowden
Files disclosures.
So, what does `intervention' mean in this context? Does it still make
sense to think and talk about this at all? How could intervention be
conceived of as somehow meaningful, viable, efficacious (able to
produce desired results)?
What strikes me, but comes as no real surprise, is the clear presence
of the recent work that science and political philosopher Bruno Latour
has been doing on what he calls "Facing Gaia", and what Brian refers to
as `Earth-system' (see: [1]http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/487 ). This
comes as no surprise because Brian and I discussed this in private
conversations, and also because his recent work with the Compass group
in the Mid-West region (around Chicago) takes up the challenge of
thinking through the meaning of this notion of `general ecology' - see:
[2]http://midwestcompass.org/.
The crucial point here, in my view, is the boundedness of these global
transformations Brian is referencing by our existence on Earth, the
planet as a system of interdependent parts, and the finiteness of
resources available to and within this system. As Latour also observes
in one of his recent lectures, the prospect of the human species (or a
future Ark of Noah carrying the biological diversity of the planet)
embarking on an exodus into space to new `Earth-like' worlds has been
emphatically referred to the realm of fiction by calculations of the
amount of energy and resources required to ship even a tiny segment of
the Earth's current population to the nearest inhabitable worlds, which
makes the entire exercise an entirely laughable fiction. It equally
reduces the chance of us ever being visited by some remote superior
extraterrestrial civilisation (that can solve our problems) to zero. In
short: We are Earth-bound.
Philosopher and aesthetician Jean-Francois Lyotard once observed that
the avant-garde arts share with the techno-sciences and advanced
capitalism an `affinity with infinity': the infinite ability to see,
the infinite ability to know, and the infinite ability to realise /
make / produce. This dictum no longer holds true. We are coming up to
final limits, material and ecological. They are drawing ever closer and
given the rapid material developments in the so-called emerging
economies with exponential speed. The horizon is no longer that of the
infinity of the avant-gardes, techno-sciences, and advanced capitalism,
but instead the finiteness of the Earth's material and ecological
resources.
This imposes clear limits on the scope and extension of third-order
cybernetics and the new modes of global governance (or non-governance)
that accompany this new order. Latour develops his thinking along a
simple line: he considers these systems as being designed by someone,
some groups, some agencies, and that to attune them with boundedness
imposed by the Earth-system we need to re-design these systems. The
discipline of `design' (in a broad
Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
By providing freshly printed and essentially free money to private banks (sometimes even foreign banks, in the US case) governments were able to stop cascading failures and halt any drift toward a great depression. In China a huge infrastructure program was undertaken. In Japan money has been funneled directly to consumers. In Europe, the EU bailout of nationalized banking sectors has concentrated tremendous new power in Brussels. The global currency markets are not coordinated. States, to the contrary, pursue geo-economic grand strategies, that's the big difference. On Nov 4, 2015 2:45 AM, wrote: > On 4 Nov 2015, at 9:23 a.m., Brian Holmes wrote: > The crucial intervention so far has been the unprecedented injection of some 12 trillion USD into the global monetary system by central banks, which know very well what each other are doing. The next crucial intervention will be to actually *do* something coherent with that money. Global volumes of currency trading alone are in the order of 5.3 trillion USD per day. What capacity do the central banks of the world have to substantively influence the overall system? <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
Great to once again be able to tune in to Brian's imaginative sweep. Just to add to Brian's example below important but informal collaborations connected to nettime I would definitely add all (except edition 1) editions of Next 5 Minutes festivals of Tactical Media. Nettime acted like an important additional room in which the issues that informed the content of the festival sometimes sourced, debated and developed. In the last edition the content development was disegregated and developed through Tactical Media labs (TML) in various countries. I'll just recall one because it left an interesting legacy which still feels potent. Its the NYU TML took place in the heart of the city shortly after 9/11 and so of course the and its organisors were still reeeling and the planned event had to (in every sense) pivot. The result was a so called Virtual Casebook in which many regular nettime contributors (and many more who were not) generated a series of responces to the attack which, whatever its limitations, still represents a collective snapshot of that moment refracted through the subjectivities of this community (yes I dare to use the C word). In my opinion remains a valuable way to re-connect to that moment. Its sill worth re-visiting as a snapshot in time: https://www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb/case_911_FLASHcontent.html "From the beginning, served as an environment for experimentation with the new medium and, beyond that, as a collaborative platform to prepare publications outside of it." In terms of publication, Ted and Felix are firstly talking about the "Zentralkomittee" readers that were published in the early days of nettime. But there is a more informal and sometimes unacknowledged type of collaborative writing that emerges from this kind of list, which is also worth some attention. For example, "my" texts on cybernetics in the mid-2000s were to a certain degree products of list-wide debates, as I usually indicated somewhere in the footnotes to the published versions. I also had the great experience of launching a collaborative project on the subject of Technopolitics through mailing-list exchanges with Armin Medosch and others (that project didn't actually start here, but nettime has been the most important venue for written debate about those issues). I would be curious to know if some others have had interesting experiences with this type of informal collaboration? David Garcia # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
> On 4 Nov 2015, at 9:23 a.m., Brian Holmes > wrote: > The crucial intervention so far has been the unprecedented injection of some > 12 trillion USD into the global monetary system by central banks, which know > very well what each other are doing. The next crucial intervention will be to > actually *do* something coherent with that money. Global volumes of currency trading alone are in the order of 5.3 trillion USD per day. What capacity do the central banks of the world have to substantively influence the overall system? # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
This is an intricate text with a lot of angles on the subject - not a bad thing, since the subject in question is now 4,500 people! I want to look behind just one sentence: "From the beginning, served as an environment for experimentation with the new medium and, beyond that, as a collaborative platform to prepare publications outside of it." In terms of publication, Ted and Felix are firstly talking about the "Zentralkomittee" readers that were published in the early days of nettime. But there is a more informal and sometimes unacknowledged type of collaborative writing that emerges from this kind of list, which is also worth some attention. For example, "my" texts on cybernetics in the mid-2000s were to a certain degree products of list-wide debates, as I usually indicated somewhere in the footnotes to the published versions. I also had the great experience of launching a collaborative project on the subject of Technopolitics through mailing-list exchanges with Armin Medosch and others (that project didn't actually start here, but nettime has been the most important venue for written debate about those issues). I would be curious to know if some others have had interesting experiences with this type of informal collaboration? As noted last April Fools', there will be good reasons for fresh conceptual collaborations in the future. The neoliberal order with its bewildering anarcho-libertarian ideology is on the way out. We are headed toward a new state-form based on third-order cybernetics, or general ecology, in which finely grained data on global populations will be used to repress those populations, but also to facilitate and channel behaviors more adaptive to the overall earth system. As resource use continues to grow, survival issues will increasingly make earth-system dynamics into an ultimate reference point, directly present and determinant for all experience, yet not susceptible of direct control. This leads to fundamental epistemological shifts, with many cascading effects on human-machine combinations (we cyborgs, I mean). Of course, the second-order paradigm of multiple autonomous agents modeling each others' behavior will never entirely disappear, just as the first-order logic of command, communication and control has never ceased to govern individual machine systems. First-order cybernetics was exemplified by a missile seeking its target; and the second order, by a bunch of hedge-funds making wild bets according to their speculative models of their rivals' wild bets. I think both of those cases will look very different from whatever kind of system emerges to coordinate, say, the movement of millions of driverless cars through a busy urban region. While neither finance or war are likely to disappear, many new forms of continental- and global-level coordination are likely to take hold, affecting not just states and governments, but also individual agents relating to each other through densely patterned networks. Continental-scale smart grids for distributed electricity production are one possible example of a new kind of large-scale system, and potentially a crucial one. But I would look further to novel forms of water recylcing, emissions control and even weather modulation, not to mention a total embrace of identity control by the included classses, panic-dampening efforts during political-economic crises, etc. Silicon Valley remains the most obvious candidate to invent, commercialize and roll out the early versions of these systems; but Silicon Valley itself will become an ever-more global complex, increasingly shaped by a globally inegrated state-form. I don't say all this is for the better, nor necessarily for the worst. I say it's likely to happen. Wouldn't it be interesting to analyze this gradual metamorphosis? The Technopolitics project was designed as a kind of observatory or distributed digital Wunderblock to keep tabs on the ways that the world is reacting to the financial crisis and the subsequent period of economic stagnation and military chaos, which is not yet over. Now, however, it looks to me as though inter-state cooperation (or what used to be called "inter-imperialist cooperation") will succeed in overcoming the contradictions of capitalism once more, setting the stage for massive new rounds of infrastructure building accompanied by the emergence of previously unimaginable organizational forms and new cultural-ideological horizons as well. The crucial intervention so far has been the unprecedented injection of some 12 trillion USD into the global monetary system by central banks, which know very well what each other are doing. The next crucial intervention will be to actually *do* something coherent with that money. In other words, look forward to attempts at orchestrating global economic productivity, somewhat at the US and the Allies did during WWII and in the decade thereafter. The collapse of
***SPAM*** Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
The unsaid conclusion is that nettime did not get coopted in any particular (and ultimately ephemeral) movement/activism and did not develop stifling intimacy. It remained slightly uncomfortable for all involved, which is a quality rarely attained. (too bad 'cosmopolitan' has been coopted) On 11/1/15 7:24 , nettime's mod squad wrote: Eric Kluitenberg and David Garcia asked us to draft an entry/essay on for their upcoming anthology on tactical media, so we did. But it quickly became clear that if we seriously believed our our argument, we'd need to invite comments from the entire list. So, without further adieu, here it is: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
so good!!! thanks! this text comes timely and is a motivating read. recently you noticed i started being around nettime more often... this little historical text here is a great milestone and feels also very inclusive. I approve and always recommend recommend making less individual names, but perhaps more organization names, to support what everyone of us is doing in different but well attuned directions for which nettime seems to be a methronome. So I'm happy if Dyne.org can fit somewhere there, but I have no idea where really. I was recently rather upset at hearing and reading Geert going around to call himself the "founder of nettime". Then rather than that, perhaps his INC initiative also deserves a quote in the text. ciao # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
choose-your-own adventure: a brief history of nettime
Eric Kluitenberg and David Garcia asked us to draft an entry/essay on for their upcoming anthology on tactical media, so we did. But it quickly became clear that if we seriously believed our our argument, we'd need to invite comments from the entire list. So, without further adieu, here it is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f9Gndq40aFOJMl18lOT79y71X6wtWzbYyK4iClTJRLA/edit?usp=sharing If you have a Google login and use it, you can comment with attribution; if you don't or you'd prefer not to, you can comment anonymously. Either way, we'll do our best to address or incorporate suggestions. In many ways, we think this is the next intuitive step after the 'nottime' April Fool's mail. This essay is very positive, but we've also tried to be fair in assessing the list's weaknesses and failures. We hope you'll do be fair as well. Of course we're aware of the glaring irony that it's a Google Doc. Like it or not, they're an excellent way to collaborate on a text. And, as Benjamin Mako Hill pointed out, Google has most of our email because it has all of yours. the mod squad (Felix and Ted) The list as open collectivity: at 20 years and counting Ted Byfield & Felix Stalder This is an insider account. Both of us have been deeply involved in the project from very early on, and most of that time on a daily basis as the list's moderators. So our story is inevitably biased in ways that we are probably not even aware of; but we hope to make up for this with a nuanced account of the transformations of the project which have kept it, for more than 20 years, an important node in the free-ranging, oppositional examination the cultural and technopolitical transformations of the present. As the footer appended to every message states: # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets Indeed, the peculiar relationship between transformation and continuity is probably the key to understanding and why it has remained relevant for so long and why we call it an "open collectivity." By this, we mean a group of people held together by a shared horizon grounded in common experiences, vectors of interest, and modes of agency; but rather than relying a fixed internal structure or charismatic personalities, its interal composition remains fluid and shifting, in response to desires, pressures, and opportunities. In "technological" terms, it has barely changed at all. Since its founding in late October of 1995, its material basis has been a mailing list — a simple piece of software, running on a server, which manages a subscriber list and distributes email to them. Moreover, has always restricted message to the text-only format. Initially, this convention was driven by communitarian aims of maximizing access (for users who connected over a low-bandwidth modem) and minimizing software conflicts. Over time, though, this became central to the list's culture and, as more communication turns image-heavy, one of its distinguishing features. So there are no "styled" formats, no attachments, and no images, sound, or video. At first, used the majordomo software package, then later Mailman; both are standard (mostly) free software programs. There are some minor tweaks to mailman so the list can still be moderated using a command-line interface – arcane but efficient – but that's it. Nothing special. Running a mailing list also involves technical decisions and social approaches that shape not just the daily ebb and flow of traffic but also the cumulative archive. We recognized this early on, and formulated a few minimal "policies" — for example, discouraging "bare" URLs and encouraging people to send complete texts, which over time ensured that, unlike most mailing-list archives, 's would become an open library of substantial ideas rather than a chatty jumble of links to bitrot, parked domains, and malware traps. Other choices have contributed to this unusual resource — notably, the use of a pseudonymous "digestive system" to anonymize many contributions and incorporate interesting texts on current (and sometimes past) events and phenomena. The list has always been hosted on noncommercial servers run by people within the open collectivity that formed around the list. First, at the International City Berlin, then from February 1996 to July 1999 at desk.nl, then after a brief temporary asylum on material.net (NYC), the list moved to bbs.thing.net (NYC), and since July, 2007 it has been hosted on kein.org (Munich). Its archive, which as of late 2015 contains more than 22,000 messages, the full traffic since the list's inception, was hosted first by the Society for Old and New Media (waag.org [Amsterdam]); since 2014 on servers run by the media arts collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik (Zürich). For most of the users, whose numbers rose slowly but continuously to about 4500 in late 2015, these changes in the technical infrastructure where barely perceptible. Relying
