by Inke
Arns & Andreas Broeckmann
[published in Who if
not we should at least try to imagine the future of all this? 7
episodes on
(ex) changing Europe, ed. by Maria Hlavajova & Jill Winder,
Amsterdam 2004]
Preface
2004: The following text was written in November 2001 after the demise
of the
“Syndicate” Internet mailing list which had been in existence since
1996. The
list connected people involved in media culture from all over Eastern
and
Western Europe and some non-European countries. The text offers both a
description of the list and the “imagined community” it connected, and
an
analysis of how a successful list and networking project like the
Syndicate
could fail. Here we, as the mailing list’s administrators, present our
personal
perspective on the opportunities and the limitations of networking
people
online. The successor list project, “Spectre: list for media and
culture in
Deep Europe” has around 750 subscribers (May 2004) and a stable,
low-noise flow
of announcements and informational postings on media art and digital
culture,
mainly but not exclusively from Europe.
* * *
The
Syndicate mailing list imploded and went down in August 2001,
destroying the
lifeline of the Syndicate network. The network had been in a shaky
situation
for a while, due—we believe—to the destabilization of the precarious
balance
between the personal contacts of list members, the lurking and
filtering-and-not-reading-let-alone-posting subscribers and a growing
number of
self-promoters who used the list as a personal performance space and
disregarded the social rules of the online community.
Some people
insisted on continuing the list on a new server, taking over the
subscriber
list, while we decided to form a new list, Spectre, which has been
running on
the previous Syndicate list-serve in Berlin since Aug 28, 2001. The
list
currently [as of November 2001] has 250 new subscribers and continues
the
tradition of the Syndicate list as a low-noise, open platform for
exchange and
cooperation in media culture in Europe.
After six
years of successful work with and for the Syndicate community, the
demise of
the Syndicate list in August 2001 was a rather shocking experience for
many of
us, imposing on us the realization of how feeble such a community
channel can
be and how easily destroyed. It proved that responsibility and care are
essential elements in a viable social online environment, and we had to
learn
the hard way that there is no consensus about the rules that should
guide
behaviour and interaction. The following text gives a brief summary
from our
personal perspective of the Syndicate initiative as it developed since
its
inception in 1996, and attempts an evaluation of its end.
Andreas Broeckmann started administering the Syndicate mailing list after its installation on the server of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz (www.aec.at) in January 1996, helping people to subscribe, unsubscribe and post to the majordomo list. As the subscriber base grew from the original thirty subscribers to about 300 in 1998, Inke Arns joined in administering the list and—together with Arthur Bueno of the V2_Organisation in Rotterdam, who also maintained the Syndicate website and archive on www.v2.nl/syndicate from 1998-2000—mostly managed the list administration through these years. We taught ourselves the basic majordomo commands, had our private mail accounts jammed with bounced messages, and therefore installed an admin account. Each time we would look into this account there would be hundreds of mails sitting there waiting for us ...but somehow it worked. Problems started appearing on an entirely different field.
With its
completely open structure (technically and socially speaking) the
Syndicate
mailing list soon proved to be vulnerable. In the beginning of November
1998
the list was first targeted: all the subscribers were unsubscribed.
Luckily we
had been extracting the “who”-file on an almost daily basis and thus
were able
to reconstruct the list quickly. In September 2000 the list software on
the
server faced a serious crash that the sysops in Linz could not take
care of
because of the festival they were in at the time. So we decided to
relocate the
list onto a server to which we would have easier access for
administration and
configuration. Since then, the Syndicate list was hosted by an ISP in
Berlin
(www.openoffice.de) which also soon gave us the opportunity to switch
from Majordomo
to the more easily administratable Mailman software.
But the Syndicate was much more than a piece of software: it was a network of people. The Syndicate was founded in January 1996 on the last day of the Next 5 Minutes 2 Festival in Rotterdam. It was a network that devoted itself to fostering contacts and co-operation, improvements in communication and an exchange between institutions and individuals in Eastern and Western Europe active in the media and media culture. By allowing regular e-mail communication between participants regarding forthcoming events and collaborative projects, the Syndicate mailing list developed into an important channel and information resource for announcing and reporting new projects, events and developments in media culture. The complete mail archive is kept at http://www.v2.nl/mail/v2east/.
Since the first meeting in Rotterdam in 1996, which was attended by thirty media artists and activists, journalists and curators from twelve Eastern and Western European countries, the Syndicate network grew steadily. In August 2001, it linked over 500 members from more than thirty European and a number of non-European countries. The original idea was to establish an East-West network as well as an East-East network. In the meantime, however, the Syndicate had increasingly developed into an all-European forum for media culture and art. Over the last few years the division between East and West had been growing less important as people cooperated in ever-changing constellations, in ad-hoc as well as long-lasting partnerships.
Syndicate meetings and workshops had been held regularly, in most cases as part of festivals and conferences. The main meetings took place at half-yearly intervals in Rotterdam (Sept. 1996), Liverpool (April 1997), Kassel (July 1997), Dessau (Nov. 1997), Tirana (May 1998), Skopje (Oct. 1998), Budapest (April 1999; this meeting had been originally scheduled to take place in Belgrade, but had to be relocated due to the NATO bombings) and Helsinki (Oct. 1999), with many smaller meetings and joint projects, presentations and workshops happening in between. Hard copy Syndicate Readers edited by Inke and published on the occasion of some of the meetings (Rotterdam 1996, Ostranenie Dessau 1997, Junction Skopje 1998) collected the most important texts from the mailing list in printed form. [1]
It was worth condensing Syndicate stuff in this way because most of the time the mail traffic was dominated by announcements. Attempts to turn the Syndicate list into a discussion list and to encourage people to send their personal reports, views and perceptions of what was happening were met by only limited response. In the beginning, when many people on the list still knew each other personally, this strategy was more successful, later, with the exploding rate of lurkers, less.
While in the first three years of its existence, the Syndicate held meetings quite regularly (almost every six months!), and organized panels and workshops with its members, since 1999 the Syndicate list came to be more like a sleeping beauty which in times of crisis would awake and show its full potential. Suddenly, when necessary, everybody was back on, communicating almost breathlessly with each other (“Have you heard about X?”—“The cultural centre Y was closed!”—“Z received his mobilisation call”.) The list was last activated in order to support Edi Muka, a Tirana-based long-time Syndicalist, who had been sacked from his post at the cultural centre Pyramid by some politically malevolent officials.
The meetings and personal contacts off-list were an essential part of the Syndicate network: they grounded the Syndicate in a network of friendly and working relationships, with strong ties and allegiances that spanned across Europe and made many collaborations between artists, initiatives and institutions possible. The Syndicate thus opened multiple channels between artists and cultural producers in Europe and beyond, which is probably its greatest achievement. It connected people and made them aware of each other's practices, creating multiple options for international collaborative projects.
A structure like that can work so long as it is supported and protected by a sufficient number of participants. It needs an ethical consensus about what is and what isn't possible on the list, which kinds of actions support and which may tilt the social equilibrium. The case of Andrej Tišma, a Yugoslav artist from multi-cultural Novi Sad and a defender of the Milosevic regime throughout the late 1990s, 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, Tišma 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 signpost of Serb nationalist ideology that 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 people’s promotional goals, rather than serve as a tool of communication. When calls went out for support in the administration of the list, far too few people responded at all. Many people still did 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 realized 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), 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 realize 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 came to realize. 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 twenty-four 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 rhetoric and style and generally irritating for the majority of people. Its activity on the Syndicate—like on many other lists it has used and terrorized—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 gridlock, 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 the list 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 www.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. In this way,
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
deference—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 explicitly 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 explicitly 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 is available at: 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.
[1] Inke
Arns and Andreas Broeckmann, eds., Reader
of the V2_East / Syndicate Meeting on Documentation and Archives of
Media Art
in Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe (Rotterdam:
V2_Organisation,1996)
<http://colossus.v2.nl/syndicate/synr0.html>; Inke Arns and
Andreas Broeckmann eds., Deep Europe: The
1996 - 97 edition. Selected texts from the V2_East / Syndicate mailing
list,
(Berlin, 1997) <http://colossus.v2.nl/syndicate/synr1.html>; Inke Arns, ed., Junction Skopje, selected texts from the
V2_East/Syndicate mailing list 1997 – 98 (Skopje: Soros Center for
Contemporary Art ,1998) <http://colossus.v2.nl/syndicate/synr2.html>