Re: <nettime> Oliver Marchart: Greetings from Neutopia

[Alan Myouka Sondheim <sondheim@gol.com>]

Hmmm... I don't want to burst anyone's bubble here, but Doctress Neutopa
is a real person, Libby (Elizabeth Hubbard), who received a Phd. from U
Mass Amherst (standing naked at the podium, but never mind). The
alt.society.neutopia group has gone through numerous changes over quite a
few years and at one point Libby lost her account.

She was included in the Being on Line book (which is not emails but sol-
icited articles, very few of which were found on the Net originally (one
notable exception being Andy Hawks' and Michael Currents' writings), as an
example of the kinds of ideological formations that were developed on
line. I should add this was one of her milder posts.

(She came to the book release party, by the way; she's quite real.)

The alt.society.neutopia group early on split into two - those who
followed the Doctress (of whom she might have been the only member), and a
group called Monster Truck Neutopians, that ran a satirical counterpoint.
The latter also had a Neutopian FAQ-like Substance, if I remember correct-
ly.

Libby by the way was influenced heavily by Carl Sagan, but that's another
strange story.

Alan - this information isn't hard to find by the way - 
---
#  distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/  contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl