tbyfield on Wed, 25 Sep 2019 16:28:00 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Supreme Court Rulling consequeces |
On 25 Sep 2019, at 8:11, David Garcia wrote:
Sorry nettime (press delete anyone who has a life and so is uninterested in UK politics and related constitutional/Brexit shenaningans)
Felix and I have been thinking about shutting down nettime-l because (as I'd put it, he may well differ) the list should preserve its historical specificity and energy rather than devolve into yet another forum for debates that are easily available in other venues. If you feel like you need to open your mail with 'Sorry nettime' and tell people to delete your mail, that's probably a good sign that what follows may not be so productive in this context and maybe you should just delete it yourself. I understand the urge to turn to the list as a 😹 semi-sane 😹 outlet; given how nakedly brutal politics have become, there's a good chance that many others feel similar impulses. But the challenge, then, is to talk about what's happening in ways that are relevant to a wider range of people.
Yesterday was a big day in the US, what with the Speaker of the House committing to an impeachment process. But the avalanche of events it led to that came fast and furious, and keep on coming, so the twists and turns seem strangely weightless, as if everything could flip around in a day or a week or vanish in a month. We could argue about what will happen, but why bother? What I'd hear here would be a pale shadow of regular fare on Facebook.
That's not to say there's nothing nettimish about these subjects — there could be. But if there is, I think it lies not in specific events but in their generality: the emergence of transnational political networks that are nakedly exploiting the creaky machinery of democracy to subvert traditions, the speed with which aggressively rightist national movements are leveraging each other's strategies, the fates of entire nations becoming the latest bloody-minded 'season' of some global infotainment franchise, the outsourcing of revanchism to hypercapitalist 'makers' in ex-eastern regions, the rise of a neo–Children's Crusade focused more on planetary discourses than the trite figure of the 'local' as the field of action, the specter of military interventions in the service of environmentalism, the ways that rampant disillusionment is entangled with the self-historicizing impulses of graying radicals, the transformation of cities, higher education, and the internet from sites of liberation into machines of economic exploitation, the mutation of art schools into retirement homes, the appropriation of squatting and occupying tactics as impact-free cultural programming... That list could (and should) go on, and — with a jolt of old-school collaborative text-filtering — it could even bring some new energy and people to this list. But stuff that smacks of remoaning – not just remoaning about Brexit but remoaning about anything and everything – will just waste whatever potential might be left.
Nettime-l's info page[1] says 'no MIME-attachments,' but no one GAF about MIME anymore, so maybe we should change it to something more up-to-date like 'no attachments of any kind, sentimental included.'
[1] https://nettime.org/info.html Cheers, Ted # 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: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: