[IMC-Tech] resigning from maintenance of www.indymedia.org

[john duda]

For a number of years now, I've helped maintain the global site at
www.indymedia.org.  The recent breakdown in the mutual good faith so
necessary for collective consensus process that has recently spilled
across every aspect of the global technical infrastructure has
convinced me that I no longer wish to participate in maintaining that
infrastructure, and so I am effective immediately withdrawing as an
admin for www.indymedia.org. 

It saddens me to see the global decision-making apparatus used to
exclude and sanction people whom I have worked alongside of for quite
some time, and while I have learned over the years not to take sides
in conflicts whose contours I can only perceive through mailing lists,
I've also learned enough to see when people are out to make sure their
vision wins out at all costs, no matter what others feel to be the
facts of the matter or the relevant ethical stakes.  I have little
desire to work alongside or on behalf of such people, and consider the
 punitive use of global process to be a bit sickening.  Since I have
no way of knowing when I myself would be expelled from the
network---after all, I've blocked spammers from global based on
temporary harvested IP addresses---it's perhaps best that I leave
first on my own terms.

Perhaps it's nostalgia speaking, and perhaps I never really knew the
full story, but I remember being really happy when I heard that a
bunch of media activists in the UK had autonomously registered an
indymedia domain, borrowing a brand that by all rights should belong
to no one in particular, as all it did was name the strategy that was
on everyone's mind to begin with.  Over the years, I've seen many
attempts to rethink and reinvent indymedia bogged down by the misuse
of a consensus process that no one seemed to understand needed to be
about compromise and cooperation rather than inflexible ideological
posturing.  And at a moment like this I look back fondly at a time
when the network was actually a network rather than some global farce
of participatory democracy.  In my more cynical moments, I get around
to the idea that maybe "Indymedia" as any sort of centralized
instituted process and organization should be put to rest.

In the meantime, however, I want to be clear that I am only stepping
down from the responsibilities I have inherited as a maintainer of the
global site at www.indymedia.org (consisting primarily of the admin of
the mir install that drives it, the mirroring setup that pushes the
static content to a different server, and the provision of space on a
personal machine for offsite backups).  I will be continuing to
support the indymedia.us project in a technical capacity, and I will
continue to support sites like twin-cities and imc-de with whom I have
entered, as an autonomous individual, into cooperative efforts to
build server infrastructure.

-john



-- 

this is where my public key can be found:
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 03817826
Key fingerprint = 6C11 8D70 2ADE EFA9 498D  72CB 77EA 391A 0381 7826