<nettime> Nettime is dead

[anna balint <abalint@merz.hu>]

Dear mod squad,

 
i thought the contrary, that nettime is exactly the only list that failed
to remain open in the new media criticism&art lists environment,
every other list came up with an idea...

I am one of those persons whose mails normally don't hit the nettime
quality standards or does not fit in the policy, and this also makes 
me even more than oppose moderation, 
but besides that, i think nettime failed exactly because of moderation
or bad moderation in several respects:

- it lost the intimacy of personal communication and personal culture
as opposed to commercial and largely spread push content and academic culture
- it failed to cover both Western and Eastern underground culture,
largely based on the aesthetic of the imperfect *West* or on formal perfection
*East* [just think to nettime's resistence to ASCII art and culture, law-fi, 
or compare this mail of the mod sqaud with a former  mod mail 
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9802/msg00002.html]
- the list suppressed or neglected among others criticism concerning female 
participation, race politics, multiple cultures, information and network culture 
- together with the increasing number of subsribers the list gave up somewhere 
to found the Neue Frankfurter Schule, but it also failed to concentrate on
research both in the field of art and media. Somehow first it became a 
dog driven by the tail of media activism, a term originally coined by Toshia Ueno
to describe the task of including subcultures and counter cultures in an interface
remaking and changing the public sphere - now look, nowadays even online activism is meant 
for saving curators of the elite. Meanwhile, together with establishing, 
the list also became one of the many lists...
- moderation is a good ground for abuse, it may exclude alternative views,
and favour unjustly other ones, ex aequo et bono it does, and so does
nettime's moderation model - just to mention the example of nettime's influence
on the syndicate list once started to encourage East and West European art and information 
exchange, where the two West European moderators failed to recognize a subscriber's East European
attitude and identity, and kicked it off the the list without the community's
approval, without discussion, and even without letting known the unsubscription.
Problems with the nettime moderation started with the rejection of posts that could 
have been relevant for the list content, goal and manifesto, and ends with the
complete change of the character of the list.
- Pit Schulz was sighing from his boots in 1996 that there is need of a software
for a list, I don't know what happened since than, where is that software?
Why did the nettime bold include all the spam, why the list was not set to reject
non-subscriber's mail? 
Even a small list like syndicate, that has no instutional
support except for hosting the list on a safe server,
experiments much more in the field of information exchange,
with the KKnut project for example, that allows direct interaction
of URL, text, and a mailinglist. Have a look at http://anart.no/~syndicate/KKnut/.
- if once the nettime meeting took place as a 'let's also do something' alibi
when I wanted to go to Venice in 1995, and since i did not get the visa for Italy,
i got the nettime list instead of Venice, now, together with the dead of nettime bold,
i state that I don't need it anymore, this year I'll make it to Venice,
and i am one of the five guards who keep alive the fire of openness at the syndicate
list.

greetings,
Anna Balint

2003.05.28. 19:17:40, the nettime mod squad <nettime@bbs.thing.net> wrote:

>Dear Nettimers,
>
>We are closing nettime-bold.
>

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