error 406 [netstalgia] not acceptable

Error 417 Expectation Failed is looking for projects that reject the longing for a mythic “old internet” and confront the politics of net nostalgia head-on.

The internet is broken, but was it ever whole? We invite artists, curators and collectives from around the world to propose projects that take a clear-eyed view of the past, while exploring how internet histories can open pathways toward more equitable futures. This open call asks: what protocols, networks, archives and shared conditions are needed to build the internet we actually want? Respond to netstalgia with error 406 not acceptable.

What we are looking for

The aim of this call for projects is to push back against forms of netstalgia that soften structural critique and reinforce existing platform politics. We are especially interested in projects that work on the protocols, networks, archives and shared infrastructures necessary to build such internets; that ask how governance, moderation and sustainability might be addressed within calls for decentralization; that carve out spaces on restrictive platforms to extend users’ scope of action; and that mobilize migration toward already existing alternatives.

We invite artworks that critically probe inherited memories, interrogate power structures, reveal what was excluded or silenced and open up new imaginaries for networked life – not as a return, but as a reconfiguration that insists on participation, responsibility and possibility in the present.

Netstalgia Not Acceptable

We reject netstalgia as a form of crisis management for platform capitalism – repackaging nostalgia as critique while leaving data extraction, corporate control and structural inequalities untouched. When claiming the internet was better before, we have to ask: for whom? Whose histories are remembered, amplified and aestheticized – and whose are erased or marginalized?