Re: <nettime> Moving Nettime

This is such a good description of email list experience! (See below) Michael has nailed it and it’s this kind of experience that is exactly why there will also be another generation of readers and writers who prefer email to platform! Let us think about them…not those who insist that doom-scrolling mode/hot take brain activity is the way of the future. Books still exist. **Some** students still read them, and for those in that slow-brainpower league, e-mail will be a virtue, not a lapse in deterministic consciousness.

On Dec 15, 2022, at 8:50 AM, Michael Benson <kinpix2001@gmail.com> wrote:

'ello everyone, some thoughts on moving Nettime, for what they're worth.

Email is indeed associated with a given timeframe of net evolution, but it has also kind of established and entrenched itself as the legitimate successor to the snail, for better or worse. It will always be there (ok, always is a long time, but it definitely remains at the backbone or among the chief arteries of whatever online means, even now; in any case, there's little sign that it will be replaced), whereas jumping in the general direction of Mastodon when Mastodon only ten minutes ago entered the conversation runs real risks of marking a kind of end point or extinction of the nettime idea. Such as it is. Mastodons are associated with going extinct, after all, among other things.

Why knows if Mastodon will in fact be the successor of Twitter? Jury's out.

Also I agree with Andreas regarding apprehension that nettime could end up accessible primarily via doom scrolling, that could indeed spell doom, or anyway so I think, evidently in agreement with him.

There is a manner by which topics arrive in modular fashion and are debated in nettime and then kind of recede in the rearview mirror but are ever susceptible to revival via a new spin or turn that I fear might be sacrificed if an ostensibly more "frictionless" mode of discussion is found. Sometimes friction slows speed which in turn helps expedite more nuanced discussion. We're living in a world of "hot takes," self-evidently are the antithesis of what nettime's been up to for decades.

My (temperate, I hope) take.

(FYI none of the above was written, passed through, massaged, or otherwise associated with ChatGPT. But we may all end up in a zoo anyway.)

Best from Ottawa!

Michael

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