Sandra Guibert

Nettime is an internet mailing list proposed in 1995 by Geert Lovink and Pit Schultz (then half-jokingly called "the nettime brothers") 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.

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". For example, in 2004 nettime was nominated for an Ars Electronica Golden Nica award. However, the moderators refuse to speak or act as representatives of an organization, preferring instead to serve inasmuch as possible as coordinators of a loose or "headless" collective. 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), Rhizome (1996–present), Fibreculture (2001–present), and -empyre- (2002–2011). 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 have 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, and bitnik.org.

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.

The list, once called "the world's most world list" by Bruce Sterling, has been characterized by pragmatic approach with relatively little change to its format over the years, which has proven to be resilient and durable. The expansive projects of building a web-based platforms, reacting to and generating growing controversies, were unsustainable. The original, mainly English-language mailing list (nettime-l) has spawned several other, more local lists better suited to specific regional and or linguistic contexts, including nettiime-ann (announcements), nettime-fr (French), nettime-lat (Spanish and Portuguese), nettime-nl (Dutch), nettime-ro (Romanian), nettime-see (southeastern Europe), and nettime-zh (Chinese).

As with all mailing lists the subscriber base has changed over time, but the main list has seen participation of a remarkably wide range of people including: Phil Agre, Amy Alexander, Cory Arcangel, John Armitage, Julian Assange, Inke Arns, Jeebesh Bagchi, Rachel Baker, Richard Barbrook, Alexander Bard, John Perry Barlow, Konrad Becker, David Bennahum, Michael Benson, Hans Bernard, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Josephine Berry Slater, Hakim Bey, Andy Bichlbaum, Reverend Billy, the Biotic Baking Brigade, Luther Blissett, Josephine Bosma, Natalie Bookchin, Sandra Braman, Mez Breeze, Andreas Broeckmann, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Axel Bruns, Heath Bunting, Ted Byfield, Brian Carroll, Jon Cates, Michael Century, Gary Chapman, Shu Lea Cheang, Steve Cisler, Gabriella Coleman, Gordon Cook, the Corporate Europe Observatory, Vuk Ćosić, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Florian Cramer, Jordan Crandall, Critical Art Ensemble, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Christopher Csíkszentmihályi, Ctheory, Francesca da Rimini, Călin Dan, Rana Dasgupta, Erik Davis, Brad DeLong, Marco Deseriis, Dimitri Devyatkin, Mark Dery, Julian Dibbell, Steve Dietz, Ricardo Dominguez, Timothy Druckrey, Morlock Elloi, etoy, Jim Fleming, James Flint, Matthew Fuller, Coco Fusco, Alex Galloway, David Garcia, Paul Garrin, Benjamin Geer Dan Geer, Charlie Gere, Mieke Gerritzen, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Michael Goldhaber, Gomma, Rebecca Gomperts, Olga Goriunova, Rop Gonggrijp, Volker Grassmuck, Rachel Greene, Reinhold Grether, Ian Grigg, Marina Gržinić, autonome a.f.r.i.k.a.-gruppe, Aliette Guibert, Michael Gurstein, DeeDee Halleck, Honor Harger, Graham Harwood, Keith Hart, Frank Hartmann, Gita Hashemi, Ronda Hauben, Doug Henwood, Robert Hettinga, Perry Hoberman, Brian Holmes, John Hopkins, Adam Hyde, Fran Ilich, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Jon Ippolito, Manse Jacobi, Katrien Jacobs, Xeni Jardin, jaromil, Jodi, Eduardo Kac, Thomas Keenan, Douglas Kellner, Jamie King, Oleg Kireev, Dmytri Kleiner, Eric Kluitenberg, Ken Knabb, Knowbotic Research, Jörg Koch, Hari Kunzru, Steve Kurtz, Marc Lafia, Fatima Lasay, Jon Lebkowsky, Olia Lialina, Patrick Lichty, James Love, Geert Lovink, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Eveline Lubbers, Alessandro Ludovico, Manu Luksch, Peter Lunenfeld, Sebastian Lütgert, Diana McCarty, Declan McCullagh, Lisa McLaughlin, Michael Mandiberg, David Mandl, Miltos Manetas, Chris Mann, Lev Manovich, Veran Matić, Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org), Tomislav Medak, Armin Medosch, Neue Slowenische Kunst contributor Miran Mohar, monochrom, Margaret Morse, Edi Muka, Andy Mueller-Maguhn, Monica Narula, Joseph Nechvatal, Netochka Nezvanova (author), Ignacio Nieto, Frederick Noronha, V. Z. Nuri, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Andy Oram, Randall Packer, Zenon Panoussis, Drazen Pantic, Matteo Pasquinelli, Mikael Pawlo, Marko Peljhan, Simon Penny, Claire Pentecost, Cary Peppermint, Ed Phillips, Sadie Plant, porculus, Rick Prelinger, Melinda Rackham, the Radical Software Group (RSG), Kurt Ralske, the Raqs Media Collective, Patrice Riemens, Marie Ringler, Felipe Rodriquez, Nils Röller, Martha Rosler, Andrew Ross, Ned Rossiter, RTMark, Douglas Rushkoff, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Julian Sanchez, Keith Sanborn, Sarai, Saskia Sassen, Wolfgang Schirmacher, Florian Schneider, Pit Schultz, Trebor Scholz, Vivian Selbo, Phoebe Sengers, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Benedict Seymour, Alexei Shulgin, Michael Sippey, Kenji Siratori, Ivo Skoric, Rasa Smite, Kermit Snelson, Femke Snelting, Cornelia Sollfrank, Alan Sondheim, Karin Spaink, DJ Spooky, Wolfgang Staehle, Felix Stalder, Josephine Starrs, Bruce Sterling, Janos Sugar, Lorenzo Taiuti, Tiziana Terranova, Eugene Thacker, Nato Thompson, Tjebbe van Tijen, Tommaso Tozzi, Mark Tribe, Arun Kumar Tripathi, Toshiya Ueno, Rob Van Kranenburg, Roberto Verzola, Yvonne Volkart, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, McKenzie Wark, Maurice Wessling, Benjamin Weil, Faith Wilding, Robert Adrian X, Yes Men, Carey Young, John Young, Soenke Zehle, among many others.

As of early 2015, nettime-l had approximately 4500 subscribers. For several years, the list has grown by roughly one new subscriber per day.

Additional Nettime meetings were held during events like HackIt, (Amsterdam) the Chaos Computer Congress (Berlin), ISEA, the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), The MetaForum Conferences (95-96) in Budapest. Nettime's one unique event was the Nettime May Conference - Beauty and the East, organized by Ljudmila (Ljubljana). The Hybrid Workspace drew heavily from Nettime during the Documenta X in Kassel.

Proceedings of the mailing list were periodically collected in print form, with limited editions of xerox copies and in connection with a related conference or event. In 1999, nettime contributions were anthologized in a book form published by Autonomedia.

• ZKP1 The Next 5 Minutes (2) Amsterdam, Netherlands, January 1996
• ZKP2 Cyberconf 5 Madrid, Spain, June 1996
• ZKP3 Metaforum III Budapest, Hungary, October 1996
• ZKP3.2.1
• ZKP4 The Beauty and the East Ljubljana, Slovenia, May 1997
• ZKP5: ReadMe! ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1999. 556pp. ISBN 1-57027-089-9 Online Version
• ZKP6 Catalogue of the Slovenian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2001.