To: nettime-l
Subject: Re:
Drazen Pantic (Fri 02/16/01 at 09:17 AM -0500):
Right. or a slightly more accurate, like thefirstauthor at al. In this particular case, nettime or nettime moderators credit might be less misleading.
by and large, most commentaries on the digitalization of bibliography
are very positive: wider distribution of info, easier searching, more
sharing, etc., etc. (one notable exceptions that i know of was a 1994
article by nicholson baker that appeared in the *new yorker*; you can
see how much it was appreciated by poking around these links.[1]) but
you have hit on something interesting: ‘analog’ bibliography was much
more amenable to nonstandarized data. and *readme!*’s data isn’t nor-
mal at all--that’s why ultra-rationalized systems like amazon’s can’t
grok. ‘filtered by’ isn’t in their pulldown menus but ‘edited by’ is,
so their broken system gives excessive weight to josephine bosma. not
a big deal, imo.
[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=%22nicholson+baker%22+%22card+catalog%22+librarians
The main issue still remains… Pushing things to the extreme, lets assume that cnn, fro example, decides to spam its viewers with past and future nettime messages and hands out an offer that is difficult to refuse. Hand offer to whom? To nettime moderators? And who decides what should be done?
FYI, nettime does occasionally receive requests for permissions. these
are very straightforward: we refer them to whoever sent the message as
shown in the From: line (the Sender: line can be diff of course). this
is a very minimal approach, which mostly works fine, and even accounts
for the fact that an email address isn’t necessarily one person. there
are other benefits in handling it this way--for example, it avoids the
kind of expansionist mission creep that often happens when lightweight
functions get bureaucratized through, say, pushes to re-purpose stuff.
nettime’s footer *does* say it’s a moderated list; it doesn’t say that
the moderators are a rights clearinghouse.
I foresee that corporate media will soon start doing what corporate IT industry has done already. As IT companies have incorporated into itself lots of anarcho/hackers, networks will start handing out high $$ jobs to anarcho activists / practitioners /interventionists. What will make lists like nettime a real commodity. What then?
systematic policies (for example, like rhizome adopted early on) tend
to privilege the categorical status of a message (‘content’) over the
more complex matrix of other info that’s generated by email; in doing
so, they also tend to continually reaffirm the centrality of the org-
anization as a fiduciary entity. this whole approach is totally back-
wards, imo: it produces a single point of control thus a single point
of failure. the fact that these kinds of terms are expressed in *law*
itself is proof positive of that fact: jurisprudence is by definition
a backward-glancing, formalized, and conservative approach the world.
so far, nettime’s hands-off approach has worked quite well. i haven’t
seen any need to change it. its weakness is a sort of P2P problem: to
do anything en bloc with the archives would require that everyone who
has contributed to the list assents, so such an effort would be mind-
bogglingly complex and inefficient. but that’s also its strength: the
rights, to the extent that they can even be pinned down, are distrib-
uted. as would be the responsibility to enforce those rights.
that doesn’t solve the potential problem of a situation in which net-
time’s moderators began to regard themselves as ‘spokespeople’ and/or
representatives. but that’s just corruption 101; there is no solution
for it.
cheers,
t