Cybermind

Beginning in 1994, Alan Sondheim began an email list called "Cybermind" alongside Michael Current, who also ran the Deleuze and Guattari list online. This piece is a text file copy of the original 1994 introduction to the list.

The list "was co-founded by Alan Sondheim and Michael Current in mid-1994 to explore, exemplify and discuss multiple aspects of cyberspace, both from theoretical and experiential perspectives. The list was born in the split of the spoon collective lists from the Thinknet group, over issues of free speech and appropriate philosophical expression. Early membership involved much overlap with the Futureculture List. In more recent years discussions have become more general, but the list still has members from its founding period. Michael Current died shortly after the founding of the group.

List discussion has resulted in books, articles, conferences, more than one academic thesis, a group novel (now available through Lulu.com), and a strong ongoing community. Cybermind itself has been the subject of academic research, including an anthropological doctoral dissertation by Jonathan Marshall at the University of Sydney, which has now been published as the book Living on Cybermind. The book details the life of people on Cybermind over the period from 1994 to 2006 and uses many quotations from list members to analyse the ambiguities of net presence and absence (which is called asence), the paradoxes of the public/private divide, difficulties arising around authenticity and aggression, netsex, net-politics, and the construction of 'community'." -- From Wikipedia