Telepolis – “Magazine of Net Culture” deleted

When the World Wide Web was still in its early days, Armin Medosch and Florian Rötzer founded “Telepolis”. The website of the “Magazine of Net Culture” went online on March 18, 1996, making it one of the pioneers of web journalism. The goal was to create a virtual community that is based on real cities. Since its founding, “Telepolis” has offered an editorially managed platform for articles, comments and discussions. This set it apart from the more unmoderated newsgroups that Internet activists used to get information in the 90s.

To this day, “Telepolis” is part of the Heise Group and covers a wide range of topics, from politics and economics to science, culture and media. The magazine has long been considered an important voice in left-wing alternative discourse – even if there has been repeated criticism of conspiracy-believing articles such as those on 9/11 or the male dominance among the authors. In 1997, the online magazine was even published as a printed magazine for a few years. At the same time, various media outlets, including the Tagesspiegel, began to adopt content from Telepolis.

“Telepolis” has now finally put an end to its historical legacy. The new management under editor-in-chief Harald Neuber, who took over the “Magazin der Netzkultur” in 2021, took all articles from the last 25 years offline on Thursday. Anyone who clicks on the old links will receive the message: “This text is no longer made available by Heise Medien GmbH & Co. KG.” It is estimated that around 50,000 articles and many times as many posts in the forum are affected by the campaign.

Neuber and his editorial team justify the deletion in a posting with journalistic standards, since one cannot “generally guarantee” the quality of older articles. There is also a risk that older posts may have used copyrighted material, which could lead to warnings. Individual “archive pearls”, provided they “still offer added value”, should be revised and put online again on “Telepolis”. Stanislaw Lem, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and Evgeny Morozov are named as outstanding authors.

Florian Rötzer, “Telepolis” editor-in-chief until 2020, criticizes the move as “Stalinist cancel culture” and insinuates in a post on X that the new editorial team wants to adapt to the mainstream “uncritically and in line with the market”. Rötzer has been running the blog “Overton” since 2021, on which Peter Bürger, former author at “Telepolis”, also writes. harsh criticism. The intellectual works of hundreds of authors are affected by the deletion, which, unlike print media, are no longer available for research purposes.

“The de-indexing is by no means a vote of no confidence in previous authors,” wrote the online magazine on Thursday. There was no realistic possibility “to adequately examine the enormous number of articles from a good 25 years.” It remains unclear whether Neuber and his fire-fighting team even made an effort to mirror the posts that had been taken offline on archive websites beforehand. There is at least a low five-digit number of “Telepolis” articles available at Archive.orgbut these each have to be searched for individually using the old links there.

In the article on “Overton,” former authors also speak out and criticize the “authoritarian tendencies” of the new “Telepolis” editorial team. Another user expresses understanding and wonders why the Heise Group should continue to publish “a political magazine with topics from the left-wing spectrum of interests”: “There has certainly been a generational change in the Heise publishing house in recent years, and for Telepolis, how As we knew it before 2021, there is simply no room there anymore.

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