Re: <nettime> some more nuanced thoughts on SWARTZ

[Jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org>]

dear Ted,

On Sun, 24 Jul 2011, t byfield wrote:

> OK, guys, it's safe -- he's gone. Finally, we can stop pretending to
> be ~4000 international leftoids and really let our freak flags
> fly. Let me tell you, I'm *totally* excited! After thirteen years of
> co-moderating this list, Felix and I can finally change its stupid
> name. I mean, WTF does "nettime" mean anyway?!

OK. Nick is right. rants are rants and mine was barely needed.

yet what moves my anger is the fact that most academics, when the
issue enters the domain of the very institutions that grant our
incomes are just defending the idea that content production should be
paid, without posing the main issue that Brian outlines: *access*.

we can keep biting our own hands on this and think how bad it went
also for us, leftoids intellectuals (and hopefully practicioners, as
we should all have learned to swim by now <g>) since our ideals of
sharing knowledge have just appealed privileged lobbies, not the
public. and when the lobby is gone we are left alone defending
privileges.

or we can take a stance, at the cost of flattening the discussion
around political lobbying, to point out the fact that cultural
production should be "neutrally subsidized", for which the best
argument has been Florian's point on how in NL funding cuts aren't a
liberal stance, but a political move to actually redirect funds to
neocon initiatives.

yet, in all this discussion there is very little reflection on access.

we can keep the good ol race in positioning our cultural production on
the nettime platform (and other platforms even less interesting), but
this won't change anything that needs to be changed, because it will
not touch the issues at stake now. sure we can hopefully build
sustainable networks by marketing ideas around, even use what we
already have for that. but let's speak frankly, the race to the
audience is a lost game: we'd better be off brewing beer then, as a
funding model for our cultural gigs. will we then share the recipes?
or circulate the best brewers among our venues? will the beer be free?
and why it should? ....

back to nettime, what we can do to avoid that it becomes a platform
for positioning content, and what can we do to progress in a critical
debate? here lies the potential for this place. now is the time.
so let's speak about architecture?

gratefully yours, for your patience and good irony

ciao

p.s. is that new list rly up? :)

-- 
jaromil,  dyne.org developer,  http://jaromil.dyne.org
GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org