Thanks Nina, Molly, André, David, Allan, and everyone else for all your insight on this thread.
I'd like to chime in with a quote from our own slice of web [1]: <nettime> is not just a mailing list but an effort to formulate an international, networked discourse that neither promotes a dominant euphoria (to sell products) nor continues the cynical pessimism, spread by journalists and intellectuals in the 'old' media who generalize about 'new' media with no clear understanding of their communication aspects. we have produced, and will continue to produce books, readers, and web sites in various languages so an 'immanent' net critique will circulate both on- and offline. The internet, as is the want of any globalised socio-technical system, has de-localised what started off as a small group of people operating in a particular time and place: there are no borders on the Internet. Perhaps we do not need to state a purpose for the list, its character is determined by its history and content, which I suppose is why these meta discussions can be (a sign of) destabilising in an waning community. Certainly it is useful to extract common themes. I like 'netcriticism' as a focus, as it ties in very much with my developing perspective. In netcrit terms I no longer consider 'the net' to be the Internet, or even just our increasingly complex relationships with machines, but rather an all-encompassing socio-technical system, composed of people, computers, materials, machines, and various relations and transactions between them -- similar to Hakim Bey's conception but I try to think of it a model of the economic and power relations in the physical world, rather than as just an abstract space of information which might map on to the world somehow. In that respect I see the list as covering quite a wide area of discourse, but with a focus on our contemporary setting, and hopefully with a pragmatic slant too. I believe we (civilization) are nearing both ecological and social tipping points, and we need to take action to discover and fix the parts of this sociotechnical system which are causing harm to the planet and our local communities. ✌️ [1] https://www.nettime.org/info.html # 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: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
