Critique of Ranking and Listing
Exchange with Kenneth C. Werbin
Geert Lovink, nettime
Since the early nineties I have been engaged in email-based
mailinglists. In the beginning it was a tool for to communicate and
exchange texts and arguments with a growing group of people. I hesitate
to use the word community as I never saw lists as safe areas for
identity building but as arenas of contestation. To me, email lists
were primarily discursive machines, essential in the making of a
networked digital public domain. As it happens things started to get
complicated. Group psychology kicked in, there was 'symbolic capital'
created and people's time and emotions had to be rewarded. Five or so
years ago the study of list cultures emerged. These were not technical,
even though many complained about the technical limitations of list
software such as Majordomo, Listserv and Mailman. It was the limited
complexity of the dialogues, the lack of overview one gets of threaded
discussions that irritated common users who had no emotional investment
in the project.
Even though I had a particular interest in contemporary studies of
German fascism, I never made the link between electronic mailing lists
and the bureaucratic efforts of Eichmann's assistants to list Jews,
gypsies and others. The computer aspect of listing deportees had been
described by Goetz Aly and Karl-Heinz Roth in their brief but excellent
1984 book Die restlose Erfassung (The Nazi Census), which, at the time,
made a big impact on me. As Michael Kater writes in his review (1),
order is the premise of destruction. We all somehow know that Ordnung
by punchcard prepared the path to Auschwitz. But to read all the
details, and then remember, and implement its consequences in everyday
politics is something else. In particular if you've made computing your
passion and profession, as happened to me. Edwin Black's IBM and the
Holocaust from 2001 provided us with the complete history. Far more
detailed, it fails the analytic clarity of Aly and Roth, and political
engagement, as this booklet was part of a poltical campaign against
organizing a census in West-Germany. The collective memory of why
authorities gather data of entire populations, back then, and a broad
resistance was still alive, back then — and vanished so rapidly,
particularly after 911. The resistance in 1970 against a census in the
Netherlands is one of the first campaigns that I remember. My parents,
and in particular my mother refused categorically and explained the
protest to me. The burning of Amsterdam's population register was one
of the many heroic acts of the Dutch resistance that I grew up with.
However, the attack in March 1943 came too late, and the question why
the deportation of Jews was so systematic, so successful, particularly
in my birth town, so proud of its Nazi resistance, could only be posed
in the nineties, and is still a matter of fierce debate.
Hailing from a long-line of Marxist thinkers and activists, as well as
Shoah descendants, Montreal-based Kenneth C. Werbin works as a PhD
student in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia
University. His nearly finished dissertation, "The List Serves: Bare
Life in Cybernetic Order," probes questions of list culture; arguing
that the Third Reich's engagement of a conjunction of early IBM
computing technology, listing practices, and discourses of
surveillance, identification and control, was the first cybernetic
feedback system for maintaining social order around bare life; and
investigating how the resonance of this conjunction reverberates today.
Also a part-time lecturer, Kenneth participates as a moderator/event
coordinator for the University of the Streets Public Dialogue Series,
and is a student researcher with the Canadian Research Alliance for
Community Innovation and Networking. I got into contact with Kenneth
Werbin in 2005. The context of this exchange was the June 2006 debates
on the nettime list concerning moderation and the growing limits of
email lists in an era in which most users hang out on the Web, play
games on their mobile phones and no longer care about their
over-spammed email inboxes.
Autonomedia's new Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2007 is now back from the printers, for our fifteenth year in a row. 