[-empyre-] VI feud and passion

Thu Oct 11 03:25:04 EST 2012

And I was a member of Cybermind of course, checked my mail archive and
I have saved messages from Alan :) from 2006. "We danced around the
maple", was one of them :)
Ana

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 1:53 PM, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:
> One small thing to add, and again as someone who was "on" but not "of" the
> Cybermind list... I didn't realize that a lot of the darker/painful (or
> joyful/happy) things were happening as they were going on.  It was only
> afterwards when I met a few people f2f (like Alan) that I was able to
> explore further some of the rather vague hints or casual mentions on the
> list.  What I saw on the surface were occasional anomalies, hints,
> references, undeleted private conversations appended to other emails and
> thus forwarded inadvertently to the public list...
>
> All of course, happening dare I say, contemporaneously with the release of
> Blue Velvet and the broadcasting of Twin Peaks...
>
> M
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> [mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Alan Sondheim
> Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2012 7:48 AM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] VI feud and passion
>
>
> Mike, I agree with you; most of what went on with Cybermind was and still is
> fairly heart-warming; there was pain when there was death, but there were
> also marriages that came out of the list, relationships of all sorts, and
> the Cybermind conference in Perth, which set the tone of the list for a long
> time, was exhilerating. I'm surprised at the account below; I'm only writing
> into Empyre here because I want to support another view of Cybermind here -
> people on empyre for the most part haven't heard of it, and the list is one
> of the few that have lasted now for close to twenty years.
>
> - Alan
>
>
> On Tue, 9 Oct 2012, michael gurstein wrote:
>
>> Interesting...
>>
>> As one of the (non-central) denizens/occupants/participants (but
>> certainly not victims) of Cybermind in those days I don't remember it
>> as a place of pain, although I do remember painful episodes --
>> basically accounts of the pain of others--sometimes onlist but mostly
>> off... Mostly I remember it as a place of motion--ebbs and flows of
>> conversations, personalities, sometimes emotions but with a very
>> strong sense of flow--a sort of time's arrow in flickering pixils...
>> And very interesting people--sometimes even more interesting in the
>> flesh and sometimes less but always with that heightened
>> expectation/possibility that comes from the magic of turning the virtual
> into the real...
>>
>> M
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> [mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Jonathan
>> Marshall
>> Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 11:02 PM
>> To: soft_skinned_space
>> Subject: [-empyre-] VI feud and passion
>>
>>
>> VI
>>
>> Amongst my first attempted papers were long accounts of feuds and
> passions.
>> The first version of the thesis was almost nothing but an account of
>> conflict and pain, of misunderstandings, miscategorisations of others,
>> of impositions, of temper, of exile and resentment. I attempted to
>> relate these to the 'structures of communication', as mailing lists
>> are structured differently to newsgroups, IRC and MOOs - the age shows
>> although the same is true of facebook etc - and hence the easier
>> possibilities of ways of life and actions, are different on each
>> format. Communication structure might be thought of as analogous to Marx
> and Engel's infrastructure.
>>
>> This supposition implied there was no uniform life online, even if
>> cultural differences offline, brought to the online were of no
>> importance in making that online life, which seemed improbable.
>> Sometimes I would relate these conflicts to the way categorisation of
>> others was used in the offline world (such as gender, political
>> allegiances). The politics of offline life always permeated online
>> space, again whether it was wanted or not, because it allowed meaning to
> be resolved with some ease and made response possible.
>> And that involved repression, and attempts to avoid repression, to
>> move others, to persuade others, the making of power, and patterns of
>> power and convention, and what could be spoken and what could not.
>> This again was 'concrete' and affective in nature, it was grounded in
>> bodies and bodily or bodily/linguistic responses.
>>
>> [Currently I'm using the term 'information group' to try and work out
>> how wider group allegiances filter information, so that groups have
>> differing views of the world. These differing allegiances then
>> maintain difference and distortion, while rendering others inhuman or
> inferior or hostile.
>> Communication, in information society, breaks down as a matter of
>> course.]
>>
>> However, to portray Cybermind as simply a long series of hurts,
>> delusions and conflict was missing the mark by a long way. There were the
> other sides.
>> The ease with which people gave support, even to those they had been
>> feuding with a day or so earlier, the massive intertwining of
>> relationships, and all the correspondence which never appeared onlist,
>> the love affairs, the group meetings, the collaborative work, the way
>> it was used to enable people to live offline. It was dense and not
>> just dense with pain.  If had been only pain, how would any of us have
>> stayed so long? Living online, at least on CM, involved a large spectrum
> of affects and connections.
>>
>> But this is much harder to write about (why does it seem harder to
>> write of joy than pain - for me to write comedy than to write tragedy?
>> Why do we seem to value melancholy as a source of truth?). Hurt seems
>> to channel attentions. Just as small amounts of flame seemed to
>> overwhelm the rest of the mails which went on with either good humour
>> or without connection to the hurt. That was an early 'discovery': that
>> times that people remembered as completely times of pain, were in
>> terms of volume, not. The singleness of mood of some mails overwhelmed
>> the disparate moods of the rest. So what made that the case?
>>
>> jon
>>
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>
> ==
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