<nettime> RTMark Quarterly Report (second quarter, 1999)

["rtmark" <announce0080@rtmark.com>]

"MAYORAL AIDES CAN'T UNPLUG PARODY PAGES" 
(http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/biztech/articles/14rudy.html)

Rudy Giuliani is known for his thorough "financial cleansing" of 
Manhattan, but not for his glowing 1983 appraisal of Haiti dictator 
"Baby Doc" Duvalier. 

RTMark hopes to correct this and other omissions with 
http://YesRudy.com, as the Times (New York edition) reported on 
Friday.

Giuliani, whose official website is at http://RudyYes.com, is running 
for a U.S. Senate seat against Hillary Clinton. According to his 
campaign, he has "absolutely no resource" to fight the RTMark site.

MICROSOFT DOES?

That's not what Microsoft is saying about http://microsoftedu.com/ 
(RTMark project SOFT), which calls Microsoft's influence on higher 
education tantamount to intimidation and bribery. Microsoft lawyers 
have ordered the site taken down (http://rtmark.com/microsoftedu.html), 
but project participants have yet to show interest in complying.

WHAT DO THEY MEAN BY "NO RESOURCE"?

RTMark and its workers have never been seriously affected by such legal 
threats, but have sometimes "spun" groundless efforts to intimidate 
them into extensive and embarrassing publicity (most notably in the 
cases of Geffen, who tried to stop Deconstructing Beck, and George W. 
Bush, who tried to stop GWBush.com).

Many others, however, have not been so lucky. RTMark will soon initiate
a program to use its proven "tactical embarrassment" methods to deflate
quasi-legal corporate intimidation tactics--tactics that range from 
threats of the sort RTMark has often received, to the much more serious 
SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) suits aimed at
community activists.

SLAPP suits are usually not intended to hold water, only to enmesh 
targets in paralyzing legal nonsense that can go on for decades. These 
targets are most often isolated activists, like residents distressed 
about the effect of a neighboring toxic waste dump. 

In the process of trying to embarrass a SLAPP suit or two into vanishing, 
RTMark hopes also to highlight for public scrutiny some aspects of the 
democracy corporations have helped build in America.

---------------------------

USA OR SERBIA? http://helpKPFA.rtmark.com

Modelled atfter helpB92.xs4all.nl, the purpose of helpKPFA.rtmark.com 
is to investigate the depth of the similarities between the plight of 
independent media in the United States under the "free market," and 
in the former Yugoslavia under Milosevic.

Included on the site is a letter of support from banned radio station 
B92's Belgrade staff, in which they assert that there is "an unexpected 
similarity between the media in the US and Serbia today... Freedom of 
speech is being stifled in a similar manner... The character of media 
repression is virtually the same under openly totalitarian dictatorships 
as it is under democratic systems which are increasingly influenced by 
conservative structures."

(Public radio station KPFA was recently shut down by its owner, who 
intended to sell it. After enormous public outcry and moves towards 
government intervention, KPFA has been at least temporarily reopened.)

PROJECT DEVELOPMENT DATABASE (PDD)

On an organizational level, RTMark's newly installed Project 
Development Database (PDD) downsizes administrative overhead by 
creating an anonymous mailing list for each project, allowing users 
of the system to communicate directly with one another. The impromptu 
think-tanks created by this system are working quickly to improve the 
probability of successful projects.

MUTUAL FUNDS REORGANIZED

Many RTMark projects have been repositioned within very small and 
specific funds, each of which also has a mailing list. One effect of
this restructuring has been to increase PDD traffic considerably. 
Some new funds are:

* The Frontier Fund, which challenges naive, utopic visions of the 
  "global village," focussing on the implications of allowing 
  corporations and other multinational interests to operate free of 
  social context (this fund is managed by DJ Spooky);
* The Education Fund, which addresses the changing ways that education 
  is conceived, distributed, and perceived in the "global marketplace";
* The Health Fund, which concentrates on human health and welfare 
  within a market-ruled world; and
* The Labor Fund, whose projects focus attention on labor practices and 
  workers' rights;
* The Y2K Fund, whose projects concentrate on issues pertaining to 
  millennium, especially corporate-promoted utopic visions of the future.

Thus far, the most active fund-level discussions in the PDD have 
occurred with the Frontier Fund and the Y2K Fund, perhaps because of 
their extreme timeliness.

OLDER SECOND QUARTER NEWS: 
    GWBush.com (http://rtmark.com/bush.html)

ONGOING PROJECTS BEGUN IN THE SECOND QUARTER:
    TBLA (http://rtmark.com/tbla.html)
    2995 (http://rtmark.com/2995.html)
    VCR2 (http://rtmark.com/vcr2.html)

---------------------------

FINAL NOTE

The impending millennium calls us to consider the enormity of the so-
called "Y2K Bug," whose (social) effects and consequences utterly dwarf 
those of any RTMark project, planned or historical. The free market is 
necessarily extremely short-sighted and, as corporations profit from 
real or imagined scourges and threats, they can only react to events; 
but RTMark must begin to look towards distant horizons--not just one or 
two years hence, but even decades into the future--using lessons of the 
past like the "Y2K Bug" to model the course of its actions with 
intentionality, purpose, and directed resolve.


RTMark (http://rtmark.com/) uses its limited liability as a corporation 
to sponsor the sabotage of mass-produced products. One of RTMark's 
ultimate aims is to eliminate the principle of limited liability. 
Occasionally, as with http://YesRudy.com/, RTMark participates in 
advocacy directly related to issues of corporate abuses of the 
political process.

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