Re: <nettime> nottime: the end of nettime

["t byfield" <tbyfield@panix.com>]

Felix and I didn't plan any particular follow-up to the announcement, in 
part because we didn't know how people would respond.

First, nettime isn't shutting down. I don't even know how we'd do that, 
or if Felix and I would 'have the right' to do that.

I see moderating nettime as service to -- and these days you have to pay 
me to use this word -- a community. Not just current subscribers but 
also others who might benefit from the open constellation of interests 
and perspectives. But 'service' and 'community' are often laden with 
dreadful overtones, which I don't mean at all. Moderating is snippets of 
time scattered across the day, there's nothing especially heroic or 
monumental about it. I -- it's probably safe to say *we* -- really do 
appreciate your thanks, but what matters is this: you're very welcome.

Over the years, one of nettime's faults has been a whiff of exclusivity. 
People would ask if they could post something ('may I?', not 'how can 
I?'), they assumed membership was 'closed' or by invite only, and so on 
-- and there's lots of 'lurking plus.' I think this stemmed from how the 
list was billed as an 'online salon' early on, and the presence of 
exotic names was exciting -- and also a bit intimidating. These dynamics 
have faded, but they contributed to a slightly narcissistic quality 
that's lasted. In some ways that's been good; it probably contributed to 
the fact that the nettime still exists. But narcissism ages poorly.

The concerns and criticisms Felix and I spoke of in the announcement are 
real. That's not to say they're all valid -- and several responses made 
short work of some of them. But the list's reliability is also the 
quality that would doom it to repetition and irrelevance. It shouldn't 
try to be on some imaginary 'cutting edge' -- if narcissism ages poorly, 
vanguardism is even worse. But I do think we can make some organic 
efforts to care for nettime by nudging in better directions.

I don't want to list off ways we could do that, like 'content' or 
'voices' or 'projects' or 'platforms,' because that kind of managerial 
segmentation *is the problem*. The assumption that meaning -- or maybe 
what Rene Char called 'legitimate strangeness' -- can be extracted from 
actual people, like fracking and strip-mining humanity, *is the 
problem*. So here's a question or, really, an invitation: what can you 
do to bring nettime closer to people who are very important to you, or 
vice versa? (Yes, that includes all you ascii-art terrorists and your 
robo-boolean dividual descendants.)

I liked Armin's suggestion about aging together, and Keith's thoughts 
about it as well, and David's about doing it in the flesh. Nettime 
really is turning twenty, so this is a good time to think about what it 
wants to be when it grows up. Often, describing what we have done is a 
better way to start than asking what we should do.

Cheers,
T


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