Nettime is an internet mailing list proposed in 1995 by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz (then half-jokingly called “the nettime brothers”)[1] at the second meeting of the “Medien Zentral Kommittee” during the Venice Biennale. Since 1998, Ted Byfield and Felix Stalder have moderated the main list, coordinated moderation of other lists in the nettime “family,” and maintained the site as their nexus.
The name nettime was chosen as a statement against space metaphors such as cyberspace, dominant at the time.
The time of nettime is a social time, it is subjective and intensive, with condensation and extractions, segmented by social events like conferences and little meetings, and text gatherings for export into the paper world. Most people still like to read a text printed on wooden paper, more than transmitted via waves of light. Nettime is not the same time like geotime, or the time clocks go. Everyone who programs or often sits in front of a screen knows about the phenomena of being out of time, time on the net consists of different speeds, computers, humans, software, bandwidth, the only way to see a continuity of time on the net is to see it as a asynchronous network of synchronized time zones.[2]
Nettime has been widely recognized for its seminal role stimulating and disseminating ideas about Netzkritik or Net Critique, net.art, and tactical media and pioneered practices such as “collaborative filtering”. … The list and related meetings were a strong influence on Bruce Sterling’s 1996 science fiction novel Holy Fire.
Initially, it was both part of an early wave of, and served as an inspiration for, a number of related efforts such as Blast (1995–1998),[5] Rhizome (1996–present), Fibreculture (2001–present), Faces-l and -empyre- (2002–present). Unlike these other efforts, which typically sought to affiliate themselves with institutions in order to become institutionalized, nettime has remained independent — at times fiercely so. Thus, unusually for a mailing list, the family of lists has successfully migrated across a series of hosts — many of them culturally significant in their own right — including in-berlin.de, desk.nl, material.net, thing.net, De Waag kein.org, bitnik.org, and servus.at.
From the beginning, the aim has been to provide a space for a new form of critical discourse on and with the nets, focussing on longer, substantive, yet non-academic writings and discussions. Nettime served early on as a pre-publishing and discussion platform to give critical thinkers and writers an international reach. Due to its particular political style, it was often seen as a European online salon, even though it had from the beginning strong non-European, mainly North-American participation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettime
In late 2022, Ted Byfield and I, together with Domo Smoljo and Gordan Savicic, opened new instance of nettime, as a node on the fediverse . A bit later @tante and @leitmedium (https://tldr.nettime.org/@leitmedium ) joined the admin/mod group.
The name, TLDR, Too-Long-Didnt_Read, refers to the email list’s alleged penchant for the long-form.
In August 2023 [a new crew]/https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-2308/msg00012.html) took over the moderation of the email list.
The transition from 1995 email to 2022 fediverse was surprisingly organic, simply bypassing the monstrosity of centralized social media, jumping from one distributed architecture to the other.
About
tldr.nettime is an instance for artists, researchers, and activists interested in exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and politics.
It has grown out of nettime-l, one of the longest-running mailing lists on the net with a focus on the ‘cultural politics of the internet’.
nettime.org
Server
tldr.nettime is based on Glitch-Soc, a fork of Mastodon. It’s compatible with the wider fediverse, but it also offers two tweaks we hope will help make it particularly engaging and fostering a shared sense of place:
- The character count per message is higher — 2000 chars at the moment.
- You can choose whether your post is public or visible only on tldr’s local timeline
Guidelines
We have a commitment to critical analysis, experiments, mutual care, diversity, and anti-discriminatory practices. The instance is lightly moderated, on an account basis. In other words, we will ban accounts that don’t share our commitment.
The community will give itself more detailed rules if necessary.