Exploring the Richness of Culture and Technology

On Friday 22 May, Internet Archive Europe’s Amsterdam space hosted two very different events that, in retrospect, belonged together.

A Funeral for the Networks We Lost

The afternoon began with Resurrecting Networks, a workshop led by Sevgi Tan that asked participants to do something rarely granted in tech culture: slow down and grieve.

Tan’s practice draws on media archaeology and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, taking deprecation seriously as an event worth marking. The premise is simple and slightly radical. When a network dies, it doesn’t just disappear. It takes with it communities, habits, ways of communicating, and forms of trust that were specific to it. AOL chat rooms were not just a primitive version of Slack. MSN Messenger was not merely a precursor to WhatsApp. They were particular places, with particular people in them, and when they went, something real was lost.

Participants arrived in funeral attire, as requested. Together, the group built a graveyard: a collective list of dead networks. Then came the eulogies. Some people wrote short paragraphs. Some read poems. Some brought physical objects. Singing was involved. The format was deliberately open, the mood somewhere between solemn and warm.

What made the session land wasn’t nostalgia, exactly. It was the act of paying attention. Tan’s framing insists that slowing down around technological loss is a form of resistance to the consumerist logic that treats obsolescence as natural, inevitable, and not worth mourning. If we want to understand what we’re building now, it helps to understand what we’ve already buried and why.

For an organisation that archives the web, that question is never abstract. What survives depends on choices: what gets collected, what gets preserved, what gets remembered. Resurrecting Networks made those choices visible and personal.

Fifteen Years of Open Government, Celebrated with Cake

The borrel that followed brought a different energy. Together with Open State Foundation, IAE marked fifteen years of the Open Government Partnership as part of Open Government Week, an annual moment when countries and civil society organisations across the world take stock of what transparent, accountable governance actually looks like in practice.

There were drinks, Affligem, Fritz Kola, red velvet cake, and the kind of conversations that don’t fit neatly into a programme. A short presentation anchored the afternoon at 16:00, but the real work of the evening happened in the margins: practitioners, archivists, and open government advocates comparing notes, making connections, and arguing about what progress looks like.

The Open Government Partnership launched in 2011 on the premise that governments perform better when they operate in the open. Fifteen years on, the gaps between commitment and practice remain wide in many places. But the coalition has grown, and the principle has held.

For IAE, open government and digital preservation are not separate issues. Archives are how accountability becomes possible over time. A government that controls what gets preserved controls, in the end, what can be known about it. Open access to public records, open data, and the right of memory institutions to collect and keep digital materials are all parts of the same argument.

The afternoon made that connection visible, without needing to say it out loud.

Both events are over, but the questions they raised aren’t. If your organisation works in this space, we’d love to hear from you.

On 10 April, Internet Archive Europe joined SETUP and the Next Nature Museum in Eindhoven for the opening of the Facebook Museum, a project that asks a question most of us avoid: why can’t we let go of the platforms that hold our lives?

The evening brought together Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, researcher Marissa Memelink, cultural sociologist Siri Beerends, and Koert van Mensvoort, Next Nature Director, for a conversation that moved quickly from nostalgia to urgency.

Kahle traced the arc of digital communities from FIDO Net and GeoCities to MySpace, Vine, and Twitter, not as a history lesson but as a warning. These platforms held real communities, real memories, real voices. Most are gone. What survives lives in the Wayback Machine. “People want to share what they know,” he said, “and they’re awesome.” The problem is what happens to that sharing when it sits on someone else’s servers, subject to acquisition, shutdown, or deletion without notice.

The panel pushed on something harder than technical preservation: trust. A Facebook Museum visitor had described their account as an external hard drive, assuming the data would simply be there whenever they needed it. Kahle was direct. That assumption is false, and most people know it, in the way you know your phone photos might not be backed up, but do not act on it. The question is not just how to save things. It is how to build systems that people can actually trust enough to rely on.

That question has a political answer. Kahle pointed to the stakes for Europe specifically. If the continent does not build public digital infrastructure, including public AI trained on cultural heritage, the choice will narrow to American or Chinese models. “That is not good enough,” he said, “and we have the technologies to do something about it.”

The decentralised web offers a different model: protocols instead of platforms, data you actually own, switching costs that do not feel like surgery. This vision is being practicalised at events like DWeb Camp, which moves to Europe for the first time this July in the forests of Brandenburg, close to Berlin, Germany. By gathering technologists, artists, and policymakers to build “root systems” for a more resilient internet, the camp serves as a living laboratory for these principles. The path is not easy, but the direction is clear.

This is exactly the work Internet Archive Europe exists to support. Preserving the web is how societies remember who they were and what they chose to build. It is too important to ignore.

The Facebook Museum runs at the Next Nature Museum in Eindhoven through September 2027, and the Internet Archive Europe looks forward to a continued partnership with SETUP Media Lab.

Internet Archive Europe Program Manager Beatrice Murch will speak at the Cultural Heritage Under Attack: Saving Cultural Data in Times of Crisis webinar on 31 March 2026, hosted by the Digital Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Event Details

📅 Date: Tuesday, 31 March 2026 
⏰ Time: 16:00-17:30 GMT / 17.00-18.30 CEST
📍 Location: Online 
🎟 Register: sas.ac.uk

This session is the third in the Research Hub’s flagship seminar series, The Fragile Record: Incompleteness and Loss in Digital Cultural Heritage Collections. It brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners to examine what happens when cultural heritage collections, archives, and digital infrastructures come under threat, whether from armed conflict, political instability, climate emergencies, cyberattacks, or the slower erosion of technological obsolescence.

The question posed by the session is not abstract. Archives and cultural datasets are increasingly emerging as targets for attack, exploitation, and control. Institutions long conceived as spaces of permanence and security are having to reckon with a different reality. The session will assess both institutional preparedness and community-led responses, and ask what forms of stewardship and crisis management are needed to build genuine resilience. Beatrice will be joined by Kalle Westerling, Fattori McKenna, Michael Weinberg, Pakhee Kumar, and Quinn Daedal, hosted by Anna-Maria Sichani and Kaspar Beelen.

This conversation sits at the heart of what Internet Archive Europe works toward every day. Preservation is not a passive act. It requires political will, sustained resources, and the right legal frameworks, which is why we continue to call on individuals, institutions, and organisations across Europe to sign the Our Future Memory Statement. The Statement is a public commitment to protecting our collective digital memory, ensuring continued access, and building the legal infrastructure our archives need to meet the crises we now face. If your organisation has not yet signed, encourage them to do so.

Register for the session and share it widely. This is an important conversation.