[syndicate] Rise and Decline of the Syndicate

[Andrej Tisma]

A very touching report on Syndicate history, indeed. But listmasters
should have admit some of their faults too, for their full right to
mention the word ethics.

Since I am mentioned personally in the report, and I am thankful for
former listmasters' understanding for keeping me on Syndicate all the
time (unlike Nettime), I want to stress once more: yes I was expressing
my anti-Western and anti-NATO attitude, and I am doing it still with the
same intensity. But in that very vivid artistic and political engagement
my aim was never to defend "Milosevic regime" (in the same logic I could
claim you defended Clinton's or Schroeder's regime on this list), but
rather to oppose Western, mostly American neoimperialism,
interventionism and globalization, like many progressive Western
intellectuals do. In that aim I had and still have a great support and
admiration by numerous people world-wide, specially on the West. Even
now when "Milosevic regime" doesn't exist, you might remark that my
activities didn't stop or change, and that they are maybe even growing.
Also the support for my engagement and art is growing, and with time and
new Western violent, arrogant and inhuman activities the statements I
was publishing on the list seam to get more proofs. 

This is what I wanted to say. And about reasons of Syndicate's "decline"
you should also ask yourselves, if it was right to leave the list in the
most difficult and sensitive moment, or you just felt that your
mastering is under reasonable questioning, which you couldn't endure. 
Regards,
Andrej

Arns/Broeckmann wrote:
> The case of Andrej Tisma, a
> Yugoslav artist from multi-cultural Novi Sad and a defender of the
> Milosevic regime throughout the late 90s, is a case in point: many
> perceived his tirades against the West and against NATO as pure Serbian
> propaganda which became unbearable at some point. Later, Tisma came back to
> the list and continued his criticisms by posting links to anti-NATO web
> pages he had created. For us, he was always an interesting sign post of
> Serb nationalist ideology which it was good to be aware of. And it was good
> that he showed that people can be artists 'like you and me', and be Serb
> nationalists at the same time. The Syndicate could handle his presence
> after he agreed to tune down his rants.
> 
> However, this consensus was further eroded through the last two years. The
> nn episode on Syndicate in August 2001, then, was a symptom, but not the
> reason for the death of Syndicate. This started way before August 2001. Not
> only that there were no more meetings after 1999, one could also notice
> that since mid 1999 people felt less and less responsible for the list.
> Many Syndicalists of the first hour grew more silent (this was partly
> incited by the hefty discussions during the NATO bombings in Yugoslavia),
> perhaps more weary, perhaps less naive, many also changed their personal
> circumstances and got involved in other things (new jobs, new families, new
> countries ...). At the same time, the number of subscribers kept growing:
> more and more newbies kept flowing onto the Syndicate list.
> 
> The major change that occurred on the Syndicate around that time (1999) was
> the transition from a network of people and of trust to a more and more
> anonymous mailing list, a list for announcements like so many others. A
> growing majority of Syndicate subscribers now tended to see the mailing
> list merely as a quick and handy tool for spreading self promotion. The
> mailing list was to serve them for promotional goals, rather than as a tool
> of communication. When calls went out for support in the adminstration of
> the list, far too few people responded at all. Many people still do not
> understand the voluntary nature of the Syndicate initiative, and that the
> whole project depended on the sharing of work and responsibility. Too many
> people took the efforts of too few people for granted. Investing time and
> energy in the administration of such a list became more and more
> frustrating. When some fellow Syndicalists joined the admin team early
> 2001, we could have realised that the project had peaked and should have
> been transformed into something different altogether.
> 
> The net entity nn (Netochka Nezvanova, integer, antiorp, etc.), a pseudonym
> used by an international group of artists and programmers in their
> extensive and aggressive mailing list-based online-performances and for
> other art projects, had been subscribed to the Syndicate list in 1997. It
> was, as the first of less than a handful of people ever, unsubscribed
> against its will because it was spamming the list so heavily that all
> meaningful communication was blocked. In January 2001, nn sent an e-mail
> asking to again be subscribed to the Syndicate mailing list. (What nn never
> bothered to realise was that subscription to the list had always been open
> so that, at any point, it could have subscribed itself - we have always
> wondered why Majordomo is such a blind spot in this technophile entity's
> arsenal.) After getting assurances from nn that she was not out to misuse
> the list, we subscribed it to the Syndicate list.
> 
> Naively, as we had to realise. nn went from one or two messages every day
> in February to an average of three to five message in April and up to eight
> and ten messages per day in May and June - and that on a list which had a
> regular daily traffic of three to five messages a day. The distributed
> nature of the nn collective makes it possible for them to keep posting 24
> hours a day - great for promoting your online presence, irritating for
> people who have a less frantic life rhythm. nn's messages are always
> cryptic, sometimes amusing, often tediously repetitive in their quirky
> rhetorics and style, and generally irritating for the majority of people.
> Its activity on the Syndicate - like on many other lists it has used and
> terrorised - soon came to look like a hijack. But the sheer mass of traffic
> nn was generating, the sheer amount of nn's presence, was overwhelming.
> Perhaps this phenomenon could be compared to SMEGL, short for super mental
> grid lock, a term that was developed to describe traffic jam situations in
> NYC back in the eighties (or was this term coined in Berlin-Kreuzberg's
> famous Fischbuero? Who knows, the boundaries get blurred...).
> 
> In the spring of 2001, nn's and other people's activities who use open,
> unmoderated mailing lists for promulgating their self-promotional e-mails,
> triggered discussions about 'spam art', on Syndicate as well as on other
> lists. Actually, given the extreme openness and vulnerability of a
> structure like the Syndicate it remains quite astonishing that this
> structure survived for such a long time. What happened in the course of
> 2000/2001 (not only to Syndicate, but also to several other mailing lists)
> was that the openness of these lists, i.e. the fact that they were
> unmoderated, was massively abused, and, finally, destroyed, by relentless
> 'creative' spamming. One of the basic principles of the Internet - its
> openness - suddenly seemed to become a mere tool for attacking this very
> principle. 'Netiquette' did not seem to be of much value anymore and was
> sacrificed for the egotistical self-expression of (distributed) artist
> egos. The irony of this process is that, like any good parasite, this
> artistic practice depends on the existence of lively online communities: it
> not only bites, but kills the hand that feeds it. - These parasite nomads
> will find new hosts, no doubt, but they have over the past year helped to
> erode the social fabric of the wider net cultural population so much that
> communities have to protect themselves from attacks and hijacks more
> aggressively than before. Their adolescent carelessness is partly
> responsible for the withering of the romantic utopia of a completely open,
> sociable online environment. However educational that may be, we despise
> the deliberation with which these people act.
> 
> nn got unsubscribed from the Syndicate without warning on a day when there
> had been nothing but ten messages from her. After some days of silence and
> sighs of relief, angry protests by nn came through. On the list,
> accusations of censorship and/or dictatorship were made. A small but noisy
> faction denounced unsubscribing nn as an act against the freedom of speech.
> They called the administrators fascists, murderers, and 'threatened' to
> report the case to 'Index on Censorship'. While some other list members
> welcomed the departure of nn on and off the list and the admin team again
> and again explained their move, the ludicrous allegations and vociferous
> insults continued.
> 
> The real shock for us was that the majority of list subscribers did not
> participate in the discussion and thus silently seemed to accept what was
> going on. It was personally hurtful not to receive more support against the
> insults raised against us, but more frustrating was the indifference that
> made the whole process possible. Within few days, the alienation from the
> atmosphere on the list was so great that we admitted defeat, re-subscribed
> nn and began to withdraw from the Syndicate. The list was moved to a
> different server and is now administered by other people at
> anart.no/~syndicate. We wanted to avoid further verbiage and conflict and
> therefore gave up the name, but we insist that from our perspective the
> Syndicate project that was founded in 1996 ended in August 2001. What
> remains under its name is a zombie kept alive by misconceptions about what
> the Syndicate really was. Maybe we should have stopped the project
> altogether in the summer?
> 
> Filtering has, in a way, done us in. Before there were effective e-mail
> clients that could filter out lists and other mail communication, everybody
> on the list got everything more or less instantly, which also meant a
> higher level of social awareness and social control of what goes on on the
> list. Today, many people filter the lists they subscribe to and only look
> at the postings at irregular intervals - some mailboxes don't get opened
> for months. Like this, people consume the list passively and do not even
> notice a fiasco like the one that we experienced on the Syndicate list in
> the summer. I guess that some people who remain subscribed to the Syndicate
> list still have not noticed that anything has changed. For a social
> community, that kind of behaviour - automated deferance - can be fatal.
> 
> "There's a spectre haunting Europe ..."
> 
> In August 2001, after unsubscribing from the Syndicate, we initiated a new
> mailing list under the name SPECTRE. It is an open, unmoderated list for
> media art and culture in Deep Europe. SPECTRE offers a channel for
> practical information exchange concerning events, projects and initiatives
> organized within the field of media culture, and hosts discussions and
> critical commentary about the development of art, culture and politics in
> and beyond Europe. Deep Europe is not a particular territory, but is based
> on an attitude and experience of layered identities and histories -
> ubiquitous in Europe, yet in no way restricted by its topographical
> borders. (The term Deep Europe was coined by Anna Balint in 1996. It was
> passed on by Geert Lovink. It was used by Andreas Broeckmann and Inke Arns.
> It was interpreted by Luchezar Boyadjiev. It was used more by Sally Jane
> Norman, Iliyana Nedkova, Nina Czegledy, Edi Muka, and many others.)
> 
> SPECTRE is a channel for people involved in old and new media in art and
> culture. Importantly, many people on this list know each other personally.
> SPECTRE aims to facilitate real-life meetings and favours real face-to-face
> (screen-to-screen) cooperation, test-bed experiences and environments to
> provoke querying of issues of cultural identity/identification and
> difference (translatable as well as untranslatable or irreducible). The new
> list was immediately welcomed by many frustrated Syndicalists who quickly
> made the move.
> 
> SPECTRE is an unmoderated, but by not means open mailing list. With the
> Syndicate experience in mind we felt the need to explicitely formulate some
> basic, apparently no longer self-evident netiquette rules, like "meaningful
> discussions require mutual respect," and "self-advertise with care!" The
> list is initially hosted by the two of us who also have to approve requests
> for subscription. The blurb explicitely reads: "Subscriptions may be
> terminated or suspended in the case of persistent violation of netiquette."
> We regret that we have to introduce such a system of control but see no
> other effective way of protecting something that is dear to us. A lack of
> sensible protection brought down the Syndicate. Information about SPECTRE:
> http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
> 
> We try to continue the good Syndicate tradition of amiable exchange and are
> more hesitant about the illusion of being an 'online community'. We
> maintain our romantic belief in lasting friendships and insist on the need
> to infuse networks with a strong sense of conviviality. We believe in
> people and their needs more than we believe in art.
> 
> Inke Arns, Andreas Broeckmann
> 
> Berlin, November 2001
> 
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-- 
ANDREJ TISMA is Novi Sad (Yugoslavia) based artist, art critic and
curator. Since the early '70s mail-artist and networker. Founder of
The Institute for the Spreading of Love (1991) and Embargo Art
campaign (1992). Since 1997 web.artist and activist. 
HOMEPAGE: http://aaart.tripod.com/