Menno Grootveld on Wed, 25 Sep 2019 21:02:15 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Supreme Court Rulling consequeces


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issues is a bit outdated...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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