| Sascha D. Freudenheim on Fri, 7 Jun 2019 19:22:51 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Nettime is in bad shape. Let's see if we can change it. |
I resemble that remark, and I object to it strenuously!WTF is a "consistent bourgeois misunderstanding of contextless 'free speech'"? And what makes that misunderstanding "bourgeois" in nature?
As the moderators have heard me say before, my two issues with this list remain that it is (a) too much a monoculture of ideas and (b) relies too heavily on jargon.
Jargon that impedes comprehension, while at the same time softly slandering those "we" (used loosely) dislike (c.f., "bourgeois"; also the use of "neoliberal" in the initial post).
Solzhenitsyn (are we allowed to reference him, or is he too much of a conservative to be taken seriously here?) wrote, in his stellar book "In The First Circle," about the concept of the Language of Maximum Clarity. We should strive for this (and it's certainly the opposite of "bourgeois").
As for the ideological monoculture... I don't know what to do about that except go back to my list filtering and lurking.
Sascha On 6/7/19 12:08 PM, frank tigrero wrote:
OK, I'll bite, as someone who has posted much less than others, but been a member forever. This new policy as is as shallow and milquetoast as YouTube's reluctance to ban actual nazis, misogynists and white supremacists from its platform and all the subsequent mess that has been roiling social media over the last week. Now, there aren't too many outright types of these people on nettime (a few, like Morlock and others) but this consistent bourgeois misunderstanding of contextless "free speech" and a libertarian fetish for nonintervention is really galling, especially on a list that strives hard to understand the social and political and ideological underpinnings of what is ostensibly neutral (eg technology). I urge you to actually start moderating again. Frank. ----- Original message ----- From: "nettime mod squad - nettime@kein.org" <frank.tigrero.c15353ac72.nettime#kein.org@ob.0sg.net> To: nettime-l@kein.org Subject: <nettime> Nettime is in bad shape. Let's see if we can change it. Date: Friday, June 07, 2019 10:41 AM Nettime is in bad shape, don't you think? It has still a lot of goodwill, and more generally there's renewed interest in formats of exchange and collective thinking that aren't defined by the logic of social media. But the dynamics that social media companies exploit are hardly limited to a handful of platforms. For example, nettime has its own 'influencers' -- a 1%, so to speak -- who generate the vast majority of list traffic. That's been true for years. The discussions they sustain may variously seem interesting or annoying, but either way they've become somewhat formulaic. An attentive reader knows more or less what to expect based solely the subject and the sender; and even meta-discussions about whether the list is dominated or by this or that tendency are largely dominated by the same few people. Some might argue the debates that have animated nettime over the last year -- the trajectories of postwar society, neoliberalism, the 'digital,' complexity, surveillance and big tech, Brexit, media and elections, Assange, even the Anthropocene in all its terrifying inclusiveness -- are the defining issues of the day. Maybe so. But if the nettime project had settled for a consensus model of the defining issues of the mid-'90s, it would never have gotten off the ground, and it certainly wouldn't exist almost 25 years later. The challenge, we think, is to maintain a space that attracts ill-defined ideas and uncertain issues -- things and not-things that don't quite exist yet and yet haven't been buried under torrents of authority and theory. So, what can we do? In the past, we've asked people to think about outreach -- say, inviting new people from new contexts. It seems like that's had limited success; but at a time when nettime has been limping along, it's hard to get excited about inviting people to join an environment so heavily defined by habit. We've also joked that shutting it down before it fades into complete senescence might be best. But that joke wasn't really funny, in part because it wasn't meant to be: it was a way of expressing serious concerns about the list's increasingly parochial status. Now, we have a simple proposal: let's switch roles. It goes like this: If you've posted more than others to the list in the last 60 or 90 or 120 or 180 days -- the math matters less than the spirit -- take a break. Let others define nettime, a space made up of nearly 5000 subscribers. If you haven't posted to the list -- say, because it seemed like your ideas, concerns, or whatever you want to share wouldn't fit with nettime's habits -- maybe that will change. Think of it as an un-grand experiment: a way to see what else might happen, who else might speak, what less familiar ideas, perspectives, or styles might spring up. Maybe the list will fade into silence, and we'll be left with a paradoxical object, a list composed *entirely* of lurkers -- not such a bad non-end for nettime. Or maybe not. There might be many ways to find out. For now, rather than the 1% debating how narrowly to define good manners, let's see if a different 'we' can change things. -- the mod squad (Ted and Felix) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> 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: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> 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: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> 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: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: