Electronic mailing lists were the main channels of 1990s European net cultures and the “Net Critique” that formed out of the post-1989 era as an ideology-aware alternative to the technolibertarian “Californian Ideology.” In an ongoing analysis of list archives, David Gauthier has generated this mammoth survey volume, summarizing data about key net and digital culture mailing lists from the mid-nineties until today. The resulting reports are based on algorithmic operations, such as extracting certain years' most-discussed subject threads or most replied to messages. The archives of the lists Nettime, crumb, empyre, spectre, and syndicate are reactivated here through a transversal analysis of quantitative data and discursive themes that move across them.

This work was edited by Torque.

With the support of the Creative Industries Fund NL.