I remember I was subscribed to Syndicate as well but I never heard about NN
and never participated, I felt Syndicate was more a list for announcements
of events, maybe I only subscribed to the events list.
But it's interesting to discuss the validity of the mailinglists today, as
forums for discussion or for sharing information.
I have been participating in the Australian list -empyre for many years and
now I feel the list is slowly dissapearing. Some of you (Patrick Lichty was
a briljant moderator for some month's ago) are members of -empyre too. Do
you feel the same as me? It's not strange, the list has been on the net for
ages and the moderators do a terrific job but the most of people are
freelancing artists or teachers with very little time to spare...
I tried today to reach their arrchives and the links were broken.
It would be a real loss if -empyre is gone.
Ana
On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 3:54 PM, marc garrett <marc.garr...@furtherfield.org>
wrote:
Hi Ana,
Thanks for the link to 'Doctress Neutopia', very interesting...
Yes - I remember on the (once brilliant) Syndicate list years
ago, where
Netochka Nezvanova, N.N., antiorp, integer dominated, causing
all kinds
of upset...
"The net entity nn (Netochka Nezvanova, integer, antiorp, etc.),
a
pseudonym used by an international group of artists and
programmers in
their extensive and aggressive mailing list-based
online-performances and
for other art projects, had been subscribed to the Syndicate
list in 1997.
It was, as the first of less than a handful of people ever,
unsubscribed
against its will because it was spamming the list so heavily
that all
meaningful communication was blocked. In January 2001, nn sent
an e-mail
asking to again be subscribed to the Syndicate mailing list.
(What nn
never bothered to realise was that subscription to the list had
always
been open so that, at any point, it could have subscribed itself
- we have
always wondered why Majordomo is such a blind spot in this
technophile
entity's arsenal.) After getting assurances from nn that she was
not out
to misuse the list, we subscribed it to the Syndicate list.
Naively, as we had to realise. nn went from one or two messages
every day
in February to an average of three to five message in April and
up to
eight and ten messages per day in May and June - and that on a
list which
had a regular daily traffic of three to five messages a day. The
distributed nature of the nn collective makes it possible for
them to keep
posting 24 hours a day - great for promoting your online
presence,
irritating for people who have a less frantic life rhythm. nn's
messages
are always cryptic, sometimes amusing, often tediously
repetitive in their
quirky rhetorics and style, and generally irritating for the
majority of
people. Its activity on the Syndicate - like on many other lists
it has
used and terrorised - soon came to look like a hijack. But the
sheer mass
of traffic nn was generating, the sheer amount of nn's presence,
was
overwhelming. Perhaps this phenomenon could be compared to
SMEGL, short
for super mental grid lock, a term that was developed to
describe traffic
jam situations in NYC back in the eighties (or was this term
coined in
Berlin-Kreuzberg's famous Fischbuero? Who knows, the boundaries
get
blurred...).
In the spring of 2001, nn's and other people's activities who
use open,
unmoderated mailing lists for promulgating their
self-promotional e-mails,
triggered discussions about 'spam art', on Syndicate as well as
on other
lists. Actually, given the extreme openness and vulnerability of
a
structure like the Syndicate it remains quite astonishing that
this
structure survived for such a long time. What happened in the
course of
2000/2001 (not only to Syndicate, but also to several other
mailing lists)
was that the openness of these lists, i.e. the fact that they
were
unmoderated, was massively abused, and, finally, destroyed, by
relentless
'creative' spamming. One of the basic principles of the Internet
- its
openness - suddenly seemed to become a mere tool for attacking
this very
principle. 'Netiquette' did not seem to be of much value anymore
and was
sacrificed for the egotistical self-expression of (distributed)
artist
egos. The irony of this process is that, like any good parasite,
this
artistic practice depends on the existence of lively online
communities:
it not only bites, but kills the hand that feeds it. - These
parasite
nomads will find new hosts, no doubt, but they have over the
past year
helped to erode the social fabric of the wider net cultural
population so
much that communities have to protect themselves from attacks
and hijacks
more aggressively than before. Their adolescent carelessness is
partly
responsible for the withering of the romantic utopia of a
completely open,
sociable online environment. However educational that may be, we
despise
the deliberation with which these people act.
nn got unsubscribed from the Syndicate without warning on a day
when there
had been nothing but ten messages from her. After some days of
silence and
sighs of relief, angry protests by nn came through. On the list,
accusations of censorship and/or dictatorship were made. A small
but noisy
faction denounced unsubscribing nn as an act against the freedom
of
speech. They called the administrators fascists, murderers, and
'threatened' to report the case to 'Index on Censorship'. While
some other
list members welcomed the departure of nn on and off the list
and the
admin team again and again explained their move, the ludicrous
allegations
and vociferous insults continued.
The real shock for us was that the majority of list subscribers
did not
participate in the discussion and thus silently seemed to accept
what was
going on. It was personally hurtful not to receive more support
against
the insults raised against us, but more frustrating was the
indifference
that made the whole process possible. Within few days, the
alienation from
the atmosphere on the list was so great that we admitted defeat,
re-subscribed nn and began to withdraw from the Syndicate. The
list was
moved to a different server and is now administered by other
people at
anart.no/~syndicate. We wanted to avoid further verbiage and
conflict and
therefore gave up the name, but we insist that from our
perspective the
Syndicate project that was founded in 1996 ended in August 2001.
What
remains under its name is a zombie kept alive by misconceptions
about what
the Syndicate really was. Maybe we should have stopped the
project
altogether in the summer?
Filtering has, in a way, done us in. Before there were effective
e-mail
clients that could filter out lists and other mail
communication,
everybody on the list got everything more or less instantly,
which also
meant a higher level of social awareness and social control of
what goes
on on the list. Today, many people filter the lists they
subscribe to and
only look at the postings at irregular intervals - some
mailboxes don't
get opened for months. Like this, people consume the list
passively and do
not even notice a fiasco like the one that we experienced on the
Syndicate
list in the summer. I guess that some people who remain
subscribed to the
Syndicate list still have not noticed that anything has changed.
For a
social community, that kind of behaviour - automated deferance -
can be
fatal."
<nettime> Rise and Decline of the Syndicate
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0111/msg00077.html
wishing all well.
marc
> Interesting, it reminds me about doctress Neutopia,
>
http://projectwhitehouse.wordpress.com/democrats/libby-hubbard-aka-doctress
-neutopia-free-the-slaves
> a selfnamed prophet and the founder of a new religion at the
beginning of the Net, around 1995.
> She terrorized many online communities and was expelled from many
forums.
> Ana
>
> On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 3:25 PM, marc garrett
<marc.garr...@furtherfield.org> wrote:
>
> Netochka Nezvanova.
>
> One of the most famous and infamous EccentricCharacters in
> turn?of?the?21st Century Western artistic NetworkCulture, Netochka
> Nezvanova (aka N.N., antiorp, integer, Irena Sabine Czubera)
remains an
> enigma to many. Widely believed to be an IdentityCollective?,
Netochka
> Nezvanova is a PenName named after the title character in [an
early
> unfinished Fyodor Dostoevsky novel] whose name means "nameless
nobody"
> in Russian. The identity always presents itself as female,
though
it may
> not be in reality. Despite the meaning of her moniker, N.N. has
coveted
> attention and recognition like few others on the Internet.
>
> http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/NetochkaNezvanova
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>
>
>
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