Subject: Re: From:

[Fr. M.]

To: ?

It has come to my attention that some posts are collated on the Nettime 
mailing list under the monicker of "Unstable Digest", well yes I admit that 
i've been aware of this because Netochka objected to it a while ago but 
then again I am not subscribed to nettime and have stopped looking at the 
archives years ago too.

Still I have several objections to make which are not aimed at 
discontinuing this service that Florian, Beatrice and Alan are providing to 
the Nettime community but rather would hopefully lead to explain how some 
of those objections can benefit _our communities instead. This is namely 
why I choose the Syndicate list to voice my concerns, because it is 
currently one of my preferred out/inlet and is where I see that this debate 
can be fruitful; also because some (most ?) of the thruput to the UD comes 
from Syndicate, our list.

First, here's an example of this UD:
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0301/msg00086.html

Of course, in this particular edition there is a post by me, in response to 
August Highland cross posting twice a day here as you might remember. I 
chose this example because I specially want to point out that I am not 
opposing redistribution of mail even in this case where no permission is 
asked to the original sender of the message. After all, as far as I know, 
they have been published on mailing-lists for all subscribers to see and 
some of those MLs have archives which can be accessed w/o subscription. 
This could lead us into a probably more tiring than tired debate about 
private vs. public and I expect the Unstablists to have thought long and 
hard about those issues in relation to their digestion and regurgitation 
over Nettime.

As I believe they have thought long and hard about the way their production 
(for it is theirs and only theirs ultimately) is formatted. For this is my 
main theoretical gripe about UD and frankly when I noticed this it gave me 
an irresistible _physical pain in the thorax: the posts chosen for whatever 
reason they were chosen by our determined and relentless readers have been 
stripped off the "To:" header. The only remaining "To:" being, of course, 
not "us" but the nettime mailing list - in this case, again this is not 
about or against nettime this is about understanding, yup, email . Because 
what remains of an email which has been sent "To:" no one ? Even Nettime is 
aware that spammers are in the business of pretending to send personalized 
one-to-one communications 
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0301/msg00146.html 
so what to make of this deliberate castration ? I do not claim to know what 
was the  purpose of this decision but can put forward two interpretations 
for it and will let the perpetrators answer (because those are merely 
questions), if they wish to do so, "To: syndicate at anart.no"

One is that the Unstable Digest is a piece of artwork in itself, a collage 
which like all collages is not the mere sum of its parts but subsumes them. 
Which leads to the fact that the actual makers of the artpiece are not the 
expeditors of the "original" mails but the collagists themselves; in 
that  frame of mind the "From:" header should have been removed as well and 
this is not the case; The UD is not a piece of artwork, a collage, it is a 
Digest but a digest which is very different in nature to all the moderated 
digests that make  their way to Nettime; it is a digest of posts that were 
not  sent "To:" Nettime but elsewhere, a digest of posts that  would (I 
suspect that policy over there has not changed a  lot) have been rejected 
if sent directly, or cross-posted to,  the list. It is a digest of the 
foreign. Unlike Netochka's messages which are in fact very much collagist 
taking bits and pieces of mail received privately and publicly and turning 
them into something new, all the same highlighting that communication by 
email is always a collage.

so, if it is not a piece, not a collage, this digest is what it seems at 
first a collection of pieces that use the email medium as a genre within 
art and also some other pieces which are reflections on that genre, hence 
the inclusion of my post, perhaps. And this is where the exclusion of the 
"To:" appears to me to be at best a failure and at worst a dangerous 
decision which would encourage unthoughtful misuse of mailing lists as 
springboard for abusive promotion instead of communities. A failure, first, 
because an important aspect of mail - and it is somewhat sad to have to 
state the obvious - lies in the context where they are bred and of course 
much of this context is made of who you are talking to, or at least with. A 
mail with no recipient, no "To:", is a void. It is a sheep that is lost and 
will be eaten whole by the preying wolf that grabs it and adds his own 
"To:" making it entirely his own. A dangerous decision because it indeed 
validates the degrading practice of cross posting, a practice that many of 
the specialists of the genre we are adressing here have adopted, 
shamelessly trampling over the context that we are trying to build here, by 
assuming that all the oulets they use is ultimately the same: a certain 
number of subscribers, an audience that adds up numerically.

In fact, after that particular email to august on the list, we tried to 
discuss this offlist and at some point august asked me what posting 
something specific to syndicate would be.  Well, I would say that this is 
mostly very fragile and intangible, that this is something we will always 
be trying to define by not constricting it, and that this fragility we will 
try to protect and also cherish, that this specificity will not be digested 
or cross posted to hell.

ok, I'm sick and tired, physically again as well. You can always write back 
to me on this, I'm on syndicate.

f.