Re: <nettime> process reporting?

[Ted Byfield via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org>]

On 27 May 2023, at 9:39, Andreas Broeckmann via Nettime-tmp wrote:

> In pragmatic terms, this is probably true; but as someone who finds it difficult anyway to understand why people entrust their most private correspondence to google, and who has been paying an independent internet provider (in-berlin.de) for mail and web services since the 90s, I would say that it is possible to run such a mailinglist away from gmail, i.e. by accepting that people who choose to use gmail accounts actively exclude themselves (or allow themselves to be excluded by their provider).
>
> The more in-principle question for us here is: Why is the choice of those gmailed people for a particularly restrictive provider taken as the determining factor for the fate of Nettime? (Is it as though we were to accommodate our rules and procedures to the Beijing government's idea of online communication?)

On the subject of Gmail, it's pretty simple, imo. When Benjamin "Mako" Hill wrote this blog post nearly a decade ago, Google had a had in delivering nearly 60% of his 'real' emails:

	https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours

The percentage has increased quite a bit since then.

The technical and conceptual issues that nettime (and many other lists) have faced should be seen in large part as a byproduct of Google's domination of email. So, to your question *Why is the choice of those gmailed people for a particularly restrictive provider taken as the determining factor for the fate of Nettime?* My answer: Because it's better understood as a structural condition not a matter of personal choice.

Let's turn it around and say — as an admittedly cartoonish thought experiment — that, in order to address this, the 'new' nettime forbade the use of Gmail addresses and, indeed, of hosting by Google. How would that work out? I think the result would be the Village Green Preservation Society and, more to the point, theoretically and practically antithetical to any more expansive vision of what 'nettime' might become.

I'd certainly prefer it if ~we didn't need to comply with Google's diktats, but doing so also can be cast in a more positive light, as a commitment to universal service, or the closest we can manage at this point. I've never much liked analog analogies for digital things, but here's one: objecting to Gmail is like objecting to postal regulations about the sizes and shapes of mail, about whether postal services can scan them, about the physical design and placement of mailboxes. Yes, we all know that analogy is deeply flawed.

Personally, I admire people who live their principles, and until earlier this year I was one when it came to email. But after thirty years, I finally gave up my Panix address, which dated from an earlier, more open era of the internet and — as a result — had become a spam magnet.

> PS: And just a reminder that on the website (https://nettime.org/archives.php) there are also the "Archive of discontinued nettime lists" and, important for me personally, the "Archives of related mailing lists" (incl. a.o. the Syndicate list which we laboriously reconstructed a while ago).
>
> These would, I hope, of course also be migrated with the rest of the archive.
 <...>

We can certainly discuss this, but my own impulse is to say no. Those archives are a record of what has happened, not a football for people to take control of. If someone wants to clone them, they can scrape it or they can ask us for the internals. There's nothing exclusive about the archives and never had been — but the assumption that they should be 'migrated' suggests there is.

Cheers,
Ted
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