Technically speaking, nettime was (and remains) a mailing list — one of the oldest on the net — but such a bland description fails to capture what a phenonemon it was: an online salon featuring people who’ve gone on to become big in this and that, several hundred bespoke pseudonyms, a series of large meetings in European cities across most of a decade, published books of proceedings, and even the occasional writeup about internal dramas in publications like Salon. With the exception of the Cypherpunks mailing list and its depoliticized offspring Cryptography — which spawned Bitcoin, Bit Torrent, Wikileaks, among many other things — few other mailing lists have had such widespread impact. There’s no shortage of histories to elaborate that claim: Wikipedia’s, of course, and Monoskop’s as well, but also…
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Geert Lovink’s essay “The Moderation Question: Nettime and the Boundaries of Mailing List Culture (2001)”, in his Dark Fiber, Tracking Critical Internet Culture(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), and a revised version in his Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture, 1994–2001 (Amsterdam: INC, 2009);
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Inke Arns’s “Translokale Netzwerke: Mailinglisten,” in her book Netzkulturen (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 2002);
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Clemens Apprich’s “The Truth Games of Radical Net Cultures” / “Igre istine u radikalnim mrežnim kulturama,” in Tomislav Medak and Petar Milat, eds., The Idea of Radical Media (Zagreb: Multimedijalni institut, 2013); “nettime,” in his *Vernetzt – Zur Entstehung der Netzwerkgesellschaft* (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015); and “nettime,” in Apprich, Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017);
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McKenzie Wark’s “The Silver Age of Social Media: Nettime.org and the Avant-Garde of the ’90s” in Christiane Paul’s A Companion to Digital Art (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016); and
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my own essays, written both [with](2027(?) > “The List as Open Collectivity — nettime at 25 Years and Counting”) my colleague Felix Stalder and on my own (see 2012 > “Nettime – Fortsetzung folgt…”, in Clemens Apprich and Felix Stalder, eds., Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa [Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012]).
A compilation of many of the messages I sent to the list is here.