I just posted this to the nettime FB group:
This is very sad news. Michael Gurstein was a nettimer from early on, and he represented a thread that was key for understanding it — but also one of the easiest to lose sight of in retrospect. It’s worth asking why, before the internet became a ‘thing,’ as they say, why anyone — let alone everyone — would have been interested in it. What were they hoping for? What were they contributing to? What did they expect to happen, and how? Those questions sound sophomoric in their simplicity because the alternatives are almost impossible to imagine (a world where the net never happened?!). But if you push the frame back far enough, you’ll arrive at a time when it really didn’t make sense yet: no one knew what you were talking about or understood why anyone, least of all themselves, would care. That ambiguous moment (understood in terms of time) is where community networkers began, in a sense. Understood in terms of place, they worked all around the world, often in communities so ‘marginal’ that negative presumption — ‘who cares?’ — was evaluated in a positive way, as a real, open question: “Who cares? Let’s find out!” Over time, as the net became hegemonic the answer became everyone, so now the challenge is filtering: filtering out the spam, the scams, the noise, the bots, the eggs, the fake, etc, etc. It’s not surprising that community networking would become almost unrecognizable in these circumstances; but following the threads of a life like Michael’s is a good way to remind ourselves of the more positive questions we can and should be asking.