<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Thanks for introducing me, Shulea, it’s a pleasure to work with you.<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">On this somewhat dull Sunday morning, here in Amsterdam, I present the empyre list with a few theses on the status of lists and networks. In part this is a continuation of my chapter ‘Media, Network, Platform’ in my recent book <i class="">Sad by Design</i> in which I trying to position these three key concept that defined by own work as an activist and theorist of the past 40 years. Another context would be the upcoming Transmediale festival, early 2020 in Berlin, which is dedicated to a re-assessment of networks in the age of platforms (I am part of an ad hoc advisory group). Lists, networks and communities are terms that have rapidly disappeared from the agenda. Did this happen for the right reasons?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Our work with mailinglists started 25 years ago. Shulea refered to the first period of nettime of 94-95 when I worked on this with Pit Schultz. We can be nostalgic about the excitement of that early cyber period. Early one. when a medium opens up, people see endless opportunities. This is the power of what Hannah Ahrendt describes as ‘new beginnings’. But how can we can create new beginnings today? Should older alternative infrastructures disappear first to make way for these new beginnings? Is empyre standing in the way? Are email lists becoming part of the problem? Do we maintain these lists out of some sort of artisan appreciation of authentic form of horizontal communication that once worked, much like people that re-establish telegraph connections, start sending faxes again, write airmail letters and travel the ocean by sailing boat to make a point? What means UNFINISHED in this context? Finish the unfinished job of finally drawing consequences of our senseless ‘culture of complaint’ and open up new channels, new forms of organization? What’s the art of regrouping?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Since the rise of Web 2.0 and the introduction of smart phones, the world has moved on and rendered our email galaxy irrelevant. Young people associate email with authority (parents, institutions, school teachers). So far, the aging new media arts and activist community has been unable to find an appropriate answer to this shift. Most of us somehow tried to accommodate and (still) use this or that dominant social media platform without the feel of community. This is leaving us with the feeling of a gap; maybe different from the existential feelings of younger generations such as depression, sadness and boredom, but still… We all know the diagnosis by now but what’s to be done? Why are so many of us stuck? Why didn’t a new cool and amazing killer app just wipe out Facebook overnight? Why can’t alternative search engines compete with Google? This is not what was supposed to happen. Wasn’t this going to be the age of true markets?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">The 1990s promise of tactical media was one of flexibility, to switch from one medium to the next. We combined the analogue with the digital, the local with the global, the arts with the activism, but this pervers poly-sexual ‘multi-media’ dream has now been fulfilled and, in a weird dialectical move, jailed us inside a one-dimensional centralized platform that is actively preventing us from self-organisation. Should we read the email nostalgia (or dogmatic inability to move on) as a somewhat subversive gesture? I doubt. Another platform is possible. We have to come together, in ever greater numbers.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">What’s communication with consequences? We know it exists. Look at Hong Kong, Khartoum, but also India, where the widespread use of Whatsapp groups is fueling hatred. We do not just conspire, exchange ideas and debate them but want this to happen in a productive context that responds to contemporarary challenges. Remember the birth of the Italian five star movement out of the Web 2.0 ‘participatory’ blog culture. More and more political parties and movements start small by using the ‘new’ medium of its time. However, many of them these days start off or develop into a right wing populist agenda. That’s the Zeitgeist and it would be foolish for us to ignore this. To grow seeds of concepts is subversive. It may seem futile but history is proved the opposite, time and again. Communication of these new ideas, if done in an innovative and appealing way, can have and will have consequences--one is ready to grow, to create networks, multiply, be in dialogue, and yes. organize meetings (like the one this week in Linz?). Are we? Discussions like this one here, has consequences, despite the feeling of isolation and agist irrelevance.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", Audre Lorde wrote at the height of the second feminist movement in 1979. Why is this so hard for us to apply to Silcon Valley? Facebook, Google and all the rest are part of the problem. The evidence is overwhelming. We should not use their ‘free’ services anymore in our search for solutions. Let’s take back control of the internet infrastructure. We discuss how do get rid of plastics, fly less, feel guilty about this and that, but strangely enough the medium in which all these concerns are expressed manages very well to remain out of sight. The medium has become invisible. Nothing is as frustrating these days to raise the Facebook issue in contemporary struggles. People get annoyed. We may agree that we should use alternatives but there are none so we continue to update and like and follow (three useless gestures in terms of organization). How do we exit these vicious circles and make new beginnings?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Best, Geert</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><a href="http://www.networkcultures.org" class="">www.networkcultures.org</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""><div class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><link rel="File-List" href="file:///private/var/folders/v6/86qvl_ps0fl7t9bdgsfwc65w0000gn/T/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_filelist.xml" class=""><link rel="themeData" href="file:///private/var/folders/v6/86qvl_ps0fl7t9bdgsfwc65w0000gn/T/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0/clip_themedata.xml" class=""><style class="">
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