[Nettime-bold] txt from C-front: Unsubscribe

["ana peraica" <ana.peraica@st.tel.hr>]

*UNSUBSCRIBE! [On Net citizens and the new geography, a sanitation view]
dedicated to Brian, Dalai Lama and Nokia telephones... and my Delete folder

txt from C-front 2001 (Plovdiv, Bulgaria)

Ana Peraica

A friend's three-year-old child was screaming into the toilet bowl,
'graaaandmother, graandmother', while the parents sitting with guests in the
living room were quite shocked, and slightly embarassed. It took them time
to understand that, if a child still in nappies saw that every apartment has
almost the same toilet, and they all have holes, it logically concluded -
they are all connected. And what is connected are not only toilet bowls
[but, sorry for vocabulary but asses, shits, and sewers...].

A year ago, during the informal lecture of Andreas Broeckman on Oreste and
Syndicate, a visitor, artist Rod Summers handed me an unpublished
transcribed Robert Fillou speech, 'Eternal Network', dated precisely thirty
years before, and speaking on the same topic. The text [1] spoke
romantically about pre-existing networks, such as solar, biological, and
others in pan-psychic terms of Nature as the One; divine, sublime,
glorious... Then it shifted to the even more primitive religion related
terms, of 'meditation', 'feeling'... a kind of a hippy 'being well with it',
at the same time covering the other part of the phenomenon: its horror
element 'of being included unwillingly', 'being absorbed', 'being small',
'being only a particle imprisoned'. It was not precisely, but nearly a
version of the Shreber's anus-centric version of the solar network [2].
The speech was actually about the art of mailing, finding reasons for it not
in art history, but within the theory of the Sublime. Established as a
chain, after the death of the author, the network itself unfortunately ended
up in the closed and therefore anti-networked circle of inner mailings,
still active among forty-year-old artists, who were raised on marijuana on
the shores of Maastrircht, or around.
Humans can only be consumed in networks, as flies can in those of spiders'
webs. And usually they are absorbed without knowing, without giving their
real
name. As, for the network the name is less important than the name of the
network itself. The name simply is only a dot that holds the tension of the
link, rope, of the road.
But after the time of fascination with the Network, with the own program
network, a period of disappointment arrives... As in the net held by many of
them after some time nothing is caught, only the garbage left behind by the
activity of the network itself, its own digestion. Fragile due to holes,
they all intersect, intervene each other, still holding own names. Good and
bad networks; networks in the sky, sewer networks, street networks, spider
networks, networks of the spreading of the pediculum pubis and other veneral
diseases, spamming networks... They morph and become one another. If you are
in the communal network of the city, necessarily you are also in the state
system of communal activities, but also of all countries that direct the
sewers to the sea.
But, the myth of the Network suddenly ended up in a variety of networks,
rising and falling down. But then, as information flows, each of them at
some period turns into an appendix, a footnote, a chapter of the other, in a
different constellation.
Why don't you post it on the Syndicate? Did you read that on Nettime?
Meeting with Faces? Well, wasn't it on the Rhizome Raw? X-change, 7-11...
Report! Report! as in the army, the network asks for constant attention,
constant care... It seems that the relation is inevitable. All networks sort
people; into heroes, receptors and locally politically-correct subscribers.
Emancipated e-mail heroes [as a parallel to the toilet network ones Zizek
was writing on] form their own territories, their own enclaves, and then
send their own programs, party posters all around... Other kind of existing
people are passive, not posting, only reading and trying to catch up, use,
find some sense... That is why networks die becoming parties, as
Internacionala did, becoming a sort of 'being politically-correct', being
pre-programmed, and establishing routes that one not only cannot escape, but
must not. Party marriages, party suicides...
Is there a place for Icarus in Shreber's case? It is obvious on mailing -
event lists: Oreste, Balkania... Once an interesting project, the Balkania
list became one of those devastated territories of paradoxical actions of
commercial advertisement, spamming, petitions etc... Brian, Nokia
telephones,the Dalai Lama on life [2] visit it regularly. The
once-interesting curatorial project Oreste became a closed daily report of
individuals still having time for such a narrative, and posting html
e-mails, and attachments. Digestion...
The scenario is the same - after exchanging some decent e-mails a list
starts to slowly die and serves as a sub-list of the personal announcement
list, there is no communication, no addressing. Everyone escapes, and
finally - an abandoned list, a heaven from spamming. Collapsed networks,
abandoned mailing lists, territories of the vampire spam artists as Integer,
enjoying the political incorrectness, et.al. But even without being
abandoned... mailing lists are open. Just subscribe and send a 'who' command
to Majordomo that lacks protection, as happened to the McLuhan-list in 1997.
Evacuation from the mailing list seems to be a general move of the networked
society. Who gave you my e-mail address? [Unsubscribe... Please, please
remove me from this list. Stop spamming!!!]
But a spammed individual net citizen should not be shocked. Wasted contacts,
redundant greetings, are normal in any kind of network, although the
frequency and dimensional problems of the electronic ones only underline the
principle already existing: Networks raise and collapse. They are only
events. Cohesion and dispersion are its phenomena. The absence of the
networked individual from their own 'forced working place' is similar to
Kafka's stories. After only seven days of absence either a computer crashes
or the server... 'Receiving 25 out of 765 e-mail messages'. Subscribe before
the summer holidays, that is the rule, - the server will not survive. In
other days, fortunately Inbox assistants encountered this impossibility:
just adding an e-mail address or the heading of the e-mail if it is a
mailing list can release us from pressing Delete. And those individuals,
always deleted are not noticed ... [or someone says 'You are on my Inbox
assistant Delete from the server list, you are in my address book under the
letter S, I reserved only for the 'Shit people'? 'She told me that if you
call she is not at home.'].
How to organize the universe of information and not to be killed by it. Some
of the communication and total control freaks fear that something will
happen when they are away and subscribe to the free SMS message solution,
noting the arrival of e-mail. With every e-mail a mobile shakes, beeps,
screams... Nettime, Nettime... Syndicate... Syndicate...
Once, a long, long time ago, people were still saving newspapers even those
bad ones, to wrap the fish, to use when cleaning potatoes, to put in the
summer shoes cleaned up for winter storage. Still then, back on the streets
of peaceful towns where colporters are selling the daily city newspaper...
shouting. [BRIAN. BRIAN. SOLIDARIDAE COOOON BRIAAAAAAAAN! Stop SHOUTING AT
ME. Stop SCREAMING!]. With junk e-mail one can do nothing. But finally, they
do not make such a waste as the plastic bags one gets in every shop as
shopping is about getting rid of the plastic.
Flash, Delete... Use the Big Network, Nature, a Big toilet. Unsubscribe...

FOOTNOTES:
[1] latter published in the publication Hype_text ed. by Jean Paul Jacquet
(Academy Jan Van Eyck, Maastricht, 2000)
[2] Freud's Schreber case symptomising, among others, in his attitude that
his ass is inhabited by the sun ['solar anus'] is a classical example of
schizophrenic dellusion.
[3] Brian [Solidaridae con Brian] is a net spam classic, along with: Nokia
telephones, Dalai Lama on life

LINKS:
Big spam http://www.irational.org/cern
Archives of spams
http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Folklore/Spam/
http://pemtropics.mit.edu/~jcho/spam/archive.html
http://www.annexia.org/spam/
Anti-spam and net.cop tools http://kryten.eng.monash.edu.au/gspam.html



_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold