t byfield on Mon, 15 May 2000 07:32:56 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Re: (protocol) Re: Histories |
twhid@spacelab.net (Sun 05/14/00 at 02:15 PM -0400): > could the administrators of these lists post some comments on their > long-term plans for archival of the texts? how many back-ups are on > how many servers? are there foundations with a mission to preserve > them? if not, perhaps rhizome, thing, nettime could create one, or > band together to lobby for international funding for one? > > or point us to the public policies you have posted. interesting questions. as for nettime: there's a complete archive on nettime.org (köln); another (i'm not sure how complete) at tao.ca, in toronto, courtesy of jesse hirsch et al.; and another one, much less complete, at The Thing (NYC); and, at least for a while, there was a clone of the complete nettime one at o-o.lt, in lithuania (?). but these are only the publicly available archives (of which there may be more i've never heard of); there are also private ones--mine goes back to 12/95, and is missing only the first ~30 messages sent to 'nettime-l' (there were earlier channels and ur-correspon- dence). if for some reason all these public archives were to vanish, i expect a few people would put some up on the web, however piecemeal. (an excellent example is the more or less complete reconstruction of the first 'cypherpunks' list cobbled together from various partial archives.) and then there are nettime's paper publications: ZKP 1, 2, 3, 3.2.1, 4, _README!_, and (in part) the NATO/FYU isssue of arkzin/bastard, some of which included floppy versions of their content. the impetus behind this series of publi- cations was to make a 'networked discourse' available off- line; but one consequence was to make them available in a form not susceptible to the failures of electronic media. note that the nettime.org archive includes 'raw' files of the traffic going back to 11/95: if you really care about the long-term viability of the archives feel free to suck the files down and archive them yourself. once FreeNet is up and running in a meaningful sense, i'll run a node and make the files available in that way--as an 'eternity ser- vice.' i hope others do too, but the essence of these sys- tems is establishing open and contingent technical setups and seeing what happens. nettime is a 'collaborative text filtering project': it may be that the logic that governs such an arrangement will filter nettime, or subsets of it, into oblivion. as to your questions about foundations, and various lists banding together to start one, my own response is: blecch. in my experience, nettime functions best, for all my skep- ticism about this idea, as a 'gift economy.' that was the basis on which desk.nl supported it; when their technical problems became too severe i moved it to my own material.- net; but that wasn't an adequate long-term solution for a lot of reasons (a cranky server sitting behind a 56k isdn line that was dedicated only because the ISP didn't care), so we asked wolfgang staehle if he'd give the list a home at The Thing for free and he said yes. in that regard the list's existence is parasitic, much as nettime's meetings have piggybacked on other conferences--the only exception being Beauty and the East in ljubljana, which was support- ed by ljudmila (for those who don't know: LJUbljana Digit- al Media Lab--vuk cosic, luka frelih, marko peljhan, iren- a wölle, mitja doma, and more). to institutionalize nettime in a legal or economic format would be fatal. the efforts to produce print publications have been increasingly traumatic; and the efforts to push 'top-down' campaigns under the name 'nettime' were a mess. the fact that certain lists--nettime, rhizome, 7-11, amer- ican express, syndicate, recode, xchange, rohrpost, inter- nodium, the list could go on--had and/or have certain com- monalities doesn't mean that a consortium is desirable or even possible. the strength of these entities, individual- ly and collectively, stems from the fact that they're NET- WORKS: part participants, part technical system, and part something else about which very little is understood, imo, and even this on a heuristic basis. in a way, the network is a new species, and many if not all of the problems net- time has seen--abortive efforts to hijack it, the complex- ities of organizing it in order to move to a 'higher' lev- el, para/neo/quasi/post-paranoiac fantasies about control and cabals--are byproducts of the inability to grasp what networks are and how they function. but to get back to your initial questions, they *do* func- tion through distribution--which (thus far) seems like an unbeatable archival technique. thus far: we'll see how it pans out in the long term. nettime's 'policy' about archiving? DIY. we maintain this list in the here and now *for free*; if you'd like to pre- serve it for another time and place, then Be My Guest. my advice: trust the network. don't try to transform it into something it isn't. cheers, t _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold