Blast! Zap! Pow! From the PAST!! 
Dear Vesna!! Thomas! 
Yes, the glory days, of spreading the word about ZaMir and Eric Bachman and Vam 
Kat https://web.wamkat.de/wam-kat-interview, and the many charismatic souls at 
B92, and many other great underground media in Sarajevo and elsewhere too! I 
googled, and found this link 
https://scene-books.com/items/63366665f5197352b832dfa3 to sept 95 publication, 
a Japanese monthly special on "tactical media" in europe, and the internet. You 
can see photos of early berlin meetings towards the formation of nettime, or of 
Heath Bunting hacking public phone networks in London, or from a rave I 
attended in Split with Benjamin Perasovic, on the way to Mostar. An early essay 
against the "415" SF centralization of internet power. I remember taking copies 
of this magazine, with some equipment/supplies, on my way to ex-Yugo, and 
attending a party in Amsterdam for War Child, and saw things like Brian Eno 
dancing to Sikter, but apparently declining Enes' pleas to produce them. 
Our friends in ex-Yugo, (Vesna!!) their practices, seemed so heroic when "The 
Internet" was a new coinage. It was great to publish so widely, to make good 
noise. The internet, the store-and-forward networks, were undoubtedly helpful 
for some, for coordination and logistical help under war conditions. We, out 
there with our cameras, our microphones, our pencils, certainly believed we 
were helping. Ex-yugo refugees learned from my byline to contact me to help 
them get lawyers and such for visa appeals within Japan. In tokyo we raised 
food and blankets and money to send to organizations in Kosovo. We were told 
our cases of Japanese "sea chicken" (whitefish in vegetable oil) tins were 
quite popular! You go out and you "uncover" and report and you return and write 
and edit and post and publish and broadcast but then you hear that the person 
you wrote about is gone, and you return and can only give a copy of the 
interview to their widow and it triggers a very particular sense of 
worthlessness. Reinforcing these informal networks is good. As always, we need 
to be sure that we're not there to give them a ride, but to help them source 
their own ammunition! 
Peace!!
David

> On 202310 28,, at 03:27, Thomas Keenan via nettime-l 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> In between Bosnia and Kosovo, if I can say that, some of us organized
> a conference on what-difference-the-internet-made, in Potsdam in
> December 1996:
> 
> https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9612/msg00071.html
> https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/citation/wc961225.htm
> https://www.wired.com/1997/04/ff-belgrad/
> 
> On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 1:58 PM Vesna Manojlovic via nettime-l
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Blast from the past...
>> 
>> On 27/10/2023 08:25, Paul via nettime-l wrote:
>> 
>> https://twitter.com/lilyslynch/status/1717562683476635997
>> 
>> 
>> To answer question quoted by Lily: is Internet incapable of helping
>> people in war?
>> 
>> Depends:
>> 
>> there were "internets" that did not offer any support, because they were
>> focused on (big) tech;;;
>> 
>> and then there was ZaMir: using technology to create connections between
>> humans in need.
>> 
>> You can see that on a panel discussion at SEE-10 meeting in 2022, where
>> Wam Kat was a guest.
>>  ">Technical< history of Internet Infrastructure in ex-Yugoslavia" :
>> https://www.ripe.net/participate/meetings/regional-meetings/see/see-10/webstream-recordings
>> 
>> 
>>> Yugoslavia’s Digital Twin, by Kaloyan Kolev
>>> https://www.thedial.world/issue-9/yugolsav-wars-yu-domain-history-icann
>> funny misspelling ;-) "yugolsav" in the URL ^^^
>> 
>> For more links to the history of Internet in ex-Yugoslavia, see
>> https://wiki.techinc.nl/TacticalMediaRoom#HistoryAnd there's a movie
>> "From .yu to .me" , about history of ccTLD DNS :
>> https://vimeo.com/95833310
>> 
>> 
>> Pozdrav,
>> Vesna
>> 
>> --
>> https://becha.unciv.nl
>> https://social.v.st/web/@becha/
>> 
>> --
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