Futureculture

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'Future Culture' is a mailing list also known as "FUTUREC" or "FC" that currently resides on listserv.uark.edu.

1 History
2 Purpose
3 Community
4 External links

[edit] History

The mailing list was created in 1992 on a public Unix system by Andy Hawks, then in high school. Andy withdrew from the list in 1993 and the list moved from nyx.cs.du.edu, ending up on the UAFSYSB mainframe (fondly remembered as "list dad") at the University of Arkansas under the care of Alias Datura ("list mom").

[edit] Purpose

Future Culture was originally created as a forum for the discussion of the integration of fringe technology and fringe culture; a mix of the digital underground and the new countercultures such as modern primitives, rave culture and post punk technologists. The William Gibson quote "The street finds its own uses for things" was an appropriate guideline for the topics on the list.

The topic of the mailing list, as stated in the accompanying, but rarely updated, Future Culture FAQ is to be a forum for "real-time discussion of cyberculture/new-edge/technoculture" which is a deliberately vague description of its contents.

However, as time passed, the topics on the list drifted and the people on the list has, instead, formed a rather tight community discussing everything, including the stated topics, but more often personal and everyday things.

At the best of times, one could say that the Future Culture mailing list defines the future culture. At the worst of times, one can say that it's a mailing list of continuous thread drift that is more concerned with retro-computing and idle gossip than with new culture.

[edit] Community

The FC mailing list has an overlapping memespace and membership with a few other online communities, in particular the Leri mailing list, the NEXUS-GAIA crowd, the Collective and the Cybermind mailing list.

Members of FC was also involved in the production of the opera known as honoria in ciberspazio, the MIT Media Lab MediaMOO as well as many other forms of cultural and technological expressions.