Re: <nettime> Fwd: Re: Nettime is in bad shape. Let's see if we can change it.

[John Preston <wcerfgba@riseup.net>]

Thanks Nina, Molly, André, David, Allan, and everyone else for all your
insight on this thread. 

I'd like to chime in with a quote from our own slice of web [1]: 

<nettime> is not just a mailing list but an effort to formulate an
international, networked discourse that neither promotes a dominant
euphoria (to sell products) nor continues the cynical pessimism, spread
by journalists and intellectuals in the 'old' media who generalize about
'new' media with no clear understanding of their communication aspects.
we have produced, and will continue to produce books, readers, and web
sites in various languages so an 'immanent' net critique will circulate
both on- and offline. 

The internet, as is the want of any globalised socio-technical system,
has de-localised what started off as a small group of people operating
in a particular time and place: there are no borders on the Internet.

Perhaps we do not need to state a purpose for the list, its character is
determined by its history and content, which I suppose is why these meta
discussions can be (a sign of) destabilising in an waning community.
Certainly it is useful to extract common themes. I like 'netcriticism'
as a focus, as it ties in very much with my developing perspective.

In netcrit terms I no longer consider 'the net' to be the Internet, or
even just our increasingly complex relationships with machines, but
rather an all-encompassing socio-technical system, composed of people,
computers, materials, machines, and various relations and transactions
between them -- similar to Hakim Bey's conception but I try to think of
it a model of the economic and power relations in the physical world,
rather than as just an abstract space of information which might map on
to the world somehow.

In that respect I see the list as covering quite a wide area of
discourse, but with a focus on our contemporary setting, and hopefully
with a pragmatic slant too. I believe we (civilization) are nearing both
ecological and social tipping points, and we need to take action to
discover and fix the parts of this sociotechnical system which are
causing harm to the planet and our local communities.

✌️

[1] https://www.nettime.org/info.html
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