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

["rtmark.NETTIME-L" <announce0030@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. 

                     # 30 #


#  distributed via nettime-l: no commercial use without permission of author
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailinglist 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
#  un/subscribe: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and
# "un/subscribe nettime-l you@address" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org/ contact: <nettime@bbs.thing.net>