Exploring the Richness of Culture and Technology

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.

Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle will appear at the opening of the Facebook Museum on 10 April 2026, hosted at the Next Nature Museum (Evoluon) in Eindhoven.

Event Details

📅 Date: Friday, 10 April 2026 
⏰ Time: 17:30 – 21:00 CET 
📍 Location: Next Nature Museum (Evoluon), Eindhoven 
🎟 Tickets: nextnature.org 

The Facebook Museum is a project by Utrecht-based arts and technology organisation SETUP. It asks a deceptively simple question: why can’t we let Facebook go? Rather than leading with guilt or pushing alternatives, it invites visitors to sit with the emotional reality of digital attachment: the memories, the connections, the years of life stored on someone else’s servers. The museum runs at the Next Nature Museum in Eindhoven from April through September 2026.

The opening evening brings together three speakers. Marissa Memelink, the researcher behind the Facebook Museum, will share what the project has revealed about our relationship with the platform. Siri Beerends, cultural sociologist at SETUP, will explore why we are not simply passive victims of big tech, but active participants in the systems that hold us. Brewster will speak about the values and vision behind the Internet Archive: why archiving matters, who it serves, and what is at stake when the memory of the web depends on infrastructure that most people never see or think about. A panel discussion and audience conversation will follow.

After the programme, the museum opens for a self-guided visit, a Digital Wellness Center, and a workshop where visitors can create a scrapbook “obituary” for their Facebook account.

This is exactly the kind of conversation the Internet Archive exists to support. Digital memory is not just about institutions and servers. It is about what we as individuals and communities have built online, and whether we retain any meaningful relationship to it.

Next week, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle will take the main stage at CloudFest 2026, the world’s largest cloud industry conference, held at Europa-Park in Rust, Germany.

Event Details

📅 Date: Thursday, 26 March 2026 
⏰ Time: 4:20 PM CET 
📍 Location: Main Stage, Europa-Park, Rust, Germany 
🎟 Registration: cloudfest.com

In 2025, the Internet Archive preserved its one trillionth webpage, one of the most significant milestones in the history of public digital infrastructure. Kahle’s fireside chat, moderated by Christian Dawson of the i2Coalition, will celebrate that achievement while looking squarely at what comes next.

The conversation will cover the unexpected challenges of archiving the internet at scale, the legal and regulatory pressures reshaping how information flows online, and what the rise of AI means for the future of public knowledge. At the heart of it all is a question that matters to everyone working in the open web: will the next era of the internet remain a public resource, or will it become something far more closed?

These are not abstract concerns. The Internet Archive has spent nearly three decades demonstrating that preservation is a political act, not just a technical one. In an era when centralisation is accelerating and legal battles over digital memory are intensifying, the case for open, public infrastructure has never been more urgent.

For the internet infrastructure community gathered at CloudFest, this is a session that speaks directly to the stakes of the work they do every day.