Andrew Thompson on Mon, 10 Mar 2003 02:30:14 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> After Rhizome |
AFTER RHIZOME [the website] Is a website that was started after Mark Tribe from Rhizome unfolded his plans of world domination of all net.art resources at deaf03. It offers several good reasons why not to invest sweat, time and money in the net.art portal Rhizome. Also it will give critical reviews of websites that offer the same or even better content that Rhizome nowadays offers for money. http://www34.brinkster.com/afterrhizome AFTER RHIZOME [questions & answers] Why pay $5.00 and become part of a "community" where some are less equal than others? Examples: As member of the the non- profit organization Rhizome Mark Tribe paid himself $47,260 in 2000, Alex Galloway was paid $36,692 (and he is listed as a part time employee) source: http://www.rhizome.org/info/Rhizome_2000_990.pdf. In the "some are less equal than others strategy" of Rhizome, some people are paid money for writing some lines (the German critic Tilman Baumgärtel for instance was paid several times for small parts of text), while die- hard Rhizome contributors till so far never saw a penny. In fact it's even worse, because this people nowadays even have to pay $5.00 to continue contributing. Why pay $5.00 and become part of a "community" that takes all the rights of what you post or submit and doesn't even have to inform you what they do with your material? An example: You posted several mails in which you explained your ideas to the Rhizome mailinglist as part of a discussion. Six years later Rhizome is asked to publish a book and they decide to include your material. According to the Rhizome Membership Agreement, they don't have to ask you for permission to put your old ideas in the book, also they don't have to pay you anything for your text although they might get a lot of money for it, even worse they even don't have to inform you that you are in the book. One look at the Rhizome.org Member Agreement and you see it's even worse than Microsoft's. Here is a quote of the most terrifying part: "You grant Rhizome.org a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to: (i) store Your Content on Rhizome.org's servers; (ii) distribute Your Content on the Rhizome.org web site and through email lists; and (iii) reproduce, publish, perform, display, adapt, distribute or otherwise make available Your Content in web sites, books, CD-ROMs or any other form or medium whatsoever, whether now known or as may hereafter be developed." ¹ Read the Rhizome.org Member Agreement in full: http://www.rhizome.org/info/29.php Why pay $5.00 and become part of a "community" which is used as a shameless career vehicle by it's crew members (Mark Tribe/ Alex Galloway)? Example: For years the projects of Mark Tribe and Alex Galloway were the only fixed items on Rhizome's frontpage. Also Rhizome correspondence was used for self promotion and all net.projects in which one of them was involved were always covered in Rhizome's digest, a weekly newsletter about net.art and related subject with over 6000 subscribers. Why pay $5.00 when you can get the same or more information elsewhere on the net for free? Find all alternatives at: http://www34.brinkster.com/afterrhizome/ After Rhizome [Rhizome's only fair argument] Rhizome's only fair argument for asking money is expansion. You can ofcourse argue why community members have to pay for expansion while there's also a lot of funding money and there were also always a lot of gifts. You can also doubt what benefits the community has from a lot of these new services, as for example who needs rhizome.net webspace? But shouldn't we in the first place know if and why this expansion is needed. The expansion argument looks to me like an argument that is used by multinationals that only are focused on the growth rates to satisfy their shareholders, but Rhizome has no shareholders... And there we have possible the weak spot. It looks like the Rhizome crew lost contact not with it's shareholders but with it's roots, and growth became a goal in itself, and now the crew is pushing forward without any self criticism or open to any criticism by others. An example of this is the $ 5.00 contribution. Though it was announced and it looked like there would be an open debate, the community never had a real vote in the $5.00 issue. Very reasonable suggestions as for example free access for people who had submitted projects to the artbase never were seriously considered if you ask my opinion. The Rhizome crew just pushed all things through without really listening. Alternatives like concentrating on one or 2 activities were never even considered seriously, instead Rhizome began more and more to act like a monopolist that wants to incorporate everything from artbase to the net.art courses and from mailinglist to internet provider because others could maybe get this marketshare. Rhizome is only acceptable to me when there's a reasonable Member Agreement and not some kind of license, when contributors are somehow equally rewarded, when there's a clear structure and no entangled interests between the people that manage Rhizome that are at the same time artists that use the organization for self- promotion. I believe that Rhizome could have gone other ways and serve the net.art community better without the Member Agreement, services nobody is waiting for and 5 bucks rule for everybody. Though the points I just touched could be easily changed I have my doubts they ever will, just because the plans Rhizome made in the past never changed. Just to prove this point I want to point to the standard strategy Rhizome's voice Mark Tribe always adopts, he is always playing the card the he listens, always expresses concern and last but not least his standard answer is "we will look into it". What means ofcourse he doesn't. This strategy of fake involvement is not only my personal experience but can also be checked in archives of several mailinglists like nettime. Just one example is of the net.artist META that forwarded his email "correspondence"² with Mark Tribe to several mailinglists to open a discussion. The last emails from this correspondence confirms the fake involvement and the always well known answer that Mark Tribe has ready: "it sounds like it might be a good idea, we will look at it", what in fact means end of discussion. But enough of this, let's look at all the alternatives, that are free, plenty and sometimes offer an even a better quality. Vladimir Kovacevic, march 6 2003 afterrhizome@yahoo.com notes: ¹ http://www34.brinkster.com/afterrhizome/membership.htm ² http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0301/msg00079.html ______________________________________________________________ Gratis e-mail en meer: http://www.dolfijn.nl/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net