NTK

» see ntk.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

NTK was a british in-joke with a mailing list. Every friday it landed in the inboxes of people who worked in and around the UK technology press, and a good half of what made it funny required knowing which magazine had just laid off which staff writer. I was a teenager in Ankara reading english-language tech pages on a modem in the same window, and that layer of context was never going to reach me. You could read NTK from outside britain. You just could not get the joke.

Danny O'Brien and Dave Green put it together in 1996 and started publishing in 1997. Both had come out of Wired's short-lived UK edition, which gave them a specific grudge and a specific address book. The format never changed: plain text, fixed width, an ascii wordmark at the top, section headings in capitals, and a dense wall of links wrapped at seventy-odd characters because that is what a mail client could be trusted to render.

The banner line was "THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK", which reads now like a period artifact and read then like a working editorial policy. The oldest issue still sitting in its own archive is dated 21 march 1997. The last one is a Mini NTK dated 8 january 2007.

~ the case file ~

~ how it read ~

The sections were fixed and everyone who read it knew them by name. HARD NEWS, later demoted to BARELY NEWS. ANTI-NEWS for the errors that mainstream papers had made about technology that week. TRACKING for software worth downloading, EVENT QUEUE for conferences, MEMEPOOL for whatever the web had produced that week, GEEK MEDIA for television. SMALL PRINT at the bottom, where the actual jokes were kept.

What made it work was the density. A single issue carried more links than most people clicked in a week, each one wrapped in a clause that told you whether the thing was worth your time. This was the job that RSS readers and then twitter were later built to do, done by two men with a text editor and a mail server, and done better, because a machine cannot tell you that a press release is lying.

~ what it spun off ~

The strange part of NTK's record is how much of it stopped being a newsletter. STAND.org.uk came out of it in 1998 to fight the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill. FaxYourMP followed in 2000 and eventually became WriteToThem, which is still running as a way to make a letter to a member of parliament take ninety seconds instead of an afternoon.

The largest one is the Open Rights Group, called into existence in 2005 by a pledge in NTK asking a thousand readers to commit five pounds a month to a british digital rights organization that did not yet exist. It got the thousand. ORG has been the UK's standing voice on surveillance and copyright ever since, and it exists because a comedy email asked nicely.

~ the long tail ~

The decline was mechanical rather than dramatic. Weekly until 2004, then fortnightly, then monthly from may 2005 until july 2006, and monthly issues that arrived late enough that late stopped being a joke. Mini NTK #33 went out on 8 january 2007 under the line "Back and slacker than ever". Nothing came after it.

O'Brien went on to run activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and later worked on press freedom, which is the same job with a bigger budget. ntk.net is still there, unchanged, serving the entire run from 1997 forward with "every friday" printed in the corner. It is the most honest thing on the site: a dead publication that never got around to admitting it, still promising to arrive at the end of the week.

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