<nettime> txt from C-front: Unsubscribe

["ana peraica" <ana.peraica@st.tel.hr>]

*UNSUBSCRIBE! [On Net citizens and the new geography, a sanitation view]
dedicated to Brian, Dalai Lama and Nokia telephones... and my Delete
folder

txt from C-front 2001 (Plovdiv, Bulgaria)

Ana Peraica

A friend's three-year-old child was screaming into the toilet bowl,
'graaaandmother, graandmother', while the parents sitting with guests in
the living room were quite shocked, and slightly embarassed. It took them
time to understand that, if a child still in nappies saw that every
apartment has almost the same toilet, and they all have holes, it
logically concluded - they are all connected. And what is connected are
not only toilet bowls [but, sorry for vocabulary but asses, shits, and
sewers...].

A year ago, during the informal lecture of Andreas Broeckman on Oreste and
Syndicate, a visitor, artist Rod Summers handed me an unpublished
transcribed Robert Fillou speech, 'Eternal Network', dated precisely
thirty years before, and speaking on the same topic. The text [1] spoke
romantically about pre-existing networks, such as solar, biological, and
others in pan-psychic terms of Nature as the One; divine, sublime,
glorious... Then it shifted to the even more primitive religion related
terms, of 'meditation', 'feeling'... a kind of a hippy 'being well with
it', at the same time covering the other part of the phenomenon: its
horror element 'of being included unwillingly', 'being absorbed', 'being
small', 'being only a particle imprisoned'. It was not precisely, but
nearly a version of the Shreber's anus-centric version of the solar
network [2]. The speech was actually about the art of mailing, finding
reasons for it not in art history, but within the theory of the Sublime.
Established as a chain, after the death of the author, the network itself
unfortunately ended up in the closed and therefore anti-networked circle
of inner mailings, still active among forty-year-old artists, who were
raised on marijuana on the shores of Maastrircht, or around. Humans can
only be consumed in networks, as flies can in those of spiders' webs. And
usually they are absorbed without knowing, without giving their real name.
As, for the network the name is less important than the name of the
network itself. The name simply is only a dot that holds the tension of
the link, rope, of the road. But after the time of fascination with the
Network, with the own program network, a period of disappointment
arrives... As in the net held by many of them after some time nothing is
caught, only the garbage left behind by the activity of the network
itself, its own digestion. Fragile due to holes, they all intersect,
intervene each other, still holding own names. Good and bad networks;
networks in the sky, sewer networks, street networks, spider networks,
networks of the spreading of the pediculum pubis and other veneral
diseases, spamming networks... They morph and become one another. If you
are in the communal network of the city, necessarily you are also in the
state system of communal activities, but also of all countries that direct
the sewers to the sea. But, the myth of the Network suddenly ended up in a
variety of networks, rising and falling down. But then, as information
flows, each of them at some period turns into an appendix, a footnote, a
chapter of the other, in a different constellation. Why don't you post it
on the Syndicate? Did you read that on Nettime? Meeting with Faces? Well,
wasn't it on the Rhizome Raw? X-change, 7-11... Report! Report! as in the
army, the network asks for constant attention, constant care... It seems
that the relation is inevitable. All networks sort people; into heroes,
receptors and locally politically-correct subscribers. Emancipated e-mail
heroes [as a parallel to the toilet network ones Zizek was writing on]
form their own territories, their own enclaves, and then send their own
programs, party posters all around... Other kind of existing people are
passive, not posting, only reading and trying to catch up, use, find some
sense... That is why networks die becoming parties, as Internacionala did,
becoming a sort of 'being politically-correct', being pre-programmed, and
establishing routes that one not only cannot escape, but must not. Party
marriages, party suicides... Is there a place for Icarus in Shreber's
case? It is obvious on mailing - event lists: Oreste, Balkania... Once an
interesting project, the Balkania list became one of those devastated
territories of paradoxical actions of commercial advertisement, spamming,
petitions etc... Brian, Nokia telephones,the Dalai Lama on life [2] visit
it regularly. The once-interesting curatorial project Oreste became a
closed daily report of individuals still having time for such a narrative,
and posting html e-mails, and attachments. Digestion... The scenario is
the same - after exchanging some decent e-mails a list starts to slowly
die and serves as a sub-list of the personal announcement list, there is
no communication, no addressing. Everyone escapes, and finally - an
abandoned list, a heaven from spamming. Collapsed networks, abandoned
mailing lists, territories of the vampire spam artists as Integer,
enjoying the political incorrectness, et.al. But even without being
abandoned... mailing lists are open. Just subscribe and send a 'who'
command to Majordomo that lacks protection, as happened to the
McLuhan-list in 1997. Evacuation from the mailing list seems to be a
general move of the networked society. Who gave you my e-mail address?
[Unsubscribe... Please, please remove me from this list. Stop spamming!!!]
But a spammed individual net citizen should not be shocked. Wasted
contacts, redundant greetings, are normal in any kind of network, although
the frequency and dimensional problems of the electronic ones only
underline the principle already existing: Networks raise and collapse.
They are only events. Cohesion and dispersion are its phenomena. The
absence of the networked individual from their own 'forced working place'
is similar to Kafka's stories. After only seven days of absence either a
computer crashes or the server... 'Receiving 25 out of 765 e-mail
messages'. Subscribe before the summer holidays, that is the rule, - the
server will not survive. In other days, fortunately Inbox assistants
encountered this impossibility: just adding an e-mail address or the
heading of the e-mail if it is a mailing list can release us from pressing
Delete. And those individuals, always deleted are not noticed ... [or
someone says 'You are on my Inbox assistant Delete from the server list,
you are in my address book under the letter S, I reserved only for the
'Shit people'? 'She told me that if you call she is not at home.']. How to
organize the universe of information and not to be killed by it. Some of
the communication and total control freaks fear that something will happen
when they are away and subscribe to the free SMS message solution, noting
the arrival of e-mail. With every e-mail a mobile shakes, beeps,
screams... Nettime, Nettime... Syndicate... Syndicate... Once, a long,
long time ago, people were still saving newspapers even those bad ones, to
wrap the fish, to use when cleaning potatoes, to put in the summer shoes
cleaned up for winter storage. Still then, back on the streets of peaceful
towns where colporters are selling the daily city newspaper... shouting.
[BRIAN. BRIAN. SOLIDARIDAE COOOON BRIAAAAAAAAN! Stop SHOUTING AT ME. Stop
SCREAMING!]. With junk e-mail one can do nothing. But finally, they do not
make such a waste as the plastic bags one gets in every shop as shopping
is about getting rid of the plastic. Flash, Delete... Use the Big Network,
Nature, a Big toilet. Unsubscribe...

FOOTNOTES:

[1] latter published in the publication Hype_text ed. by Jean Paul Jacquet
(Academy Jan Van Eyck, Maastricht, 2000)
[2] Freud's Schreber case symptomising, among others, in his attitude that
his ass is inhabited by the sun ['solar anus'] is a classical example of
schizophrenic dellusion.
[3] Brian [Solidaridae con Brian] is a net spam classic, along with: Nokia
telephones, Dalai Lama on life

LINKS:
Big spam http://www.irational.org/cern
Archives of spams
http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Folklore/Spam/
http://pemtropics.mit.edu/~jcho/spam/archive.html
http://www.annexia.org/spam/
Anti-spam and net.cop tools http://kryten.eng.monash.edu.au/gspam.html





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