𰄣𰁁𰆆𰅵𰀁𰄖𰁥𰂇𰀀 Not Acceptable

At the very moment users feel exhausted by algorithmic feeds, AI automation and corporate consolidation, the industry repackages the aesthetics and affect of the “old internet” as a cure. What appears as critique – yearning for smaller, weirder, more human spaces – often functions as brand repair. Netstalgia becomes a strategy: it restores trust without redistributing power, softens anger without changing infrastructures and reframes structural problems as matters of vibe, design or community feeling.

In 2026, our open call for projects Error 406 [Netstalgia] Not Acceptable focuses on the notion of netstalgia: a selective and idealized remembering of earlier phases of the internet. In this mode of recollection, past platforms, interfaces and online practices are recalled more open, creative, or participatory than they actually were. Netstalgia manifests in frequent calls to “bring back the old internet,” in the resurgence of early web aesthetics – lo-fi graphics and the recycling of 1990s and early-2000s visual cultures – or in the revival of platforms like Tumblr and Neocities. More fundamentally, dominant platforms appropriate ideas associated with the early internet when promoting their own restrictive, exploitative systems, while simultaneously deleting memory from their servers or discontinuing services, disregarding their users’ consent.

Rather than treating this phenomenon as harmless sentimentality, Error 406 [Netstalgia] Not Acceptable takes a critical stance. On the user side, we understand netstalgia as a symptom of present constraints: a response to algorithm fatigue, AI anxiety and growing distrust of Big Tech, a longing produced by contemporary platforms that foreclose alternative futures. Nostalgia for the “old internet” often emerges where today’s networked conditions feel extractive, opaque, and disempowering. In this sense, netstalgia can function as a form of critique, an affective signal of dissatisfaction with the present, but it can also be mobilized to neutralize that same critique.

This dynamic is increasingly visible in contemporary platform culture. New startups and social apps deliberately revive the aesthetics and rhetoric of the earlier internet, presenting restrictive functions, anti-algorithm messaging and appeals to community as signs of renewal.[2] Yet beneath this nostalgic framing, these platforms continue to operate within familiar growth-driven, data-extractive and profit-oriented models. Netstalgia here definitely does not mark a structural break, but a perceptual reset: a way to soften critique, to reinforce platform loyalty through affect, restore trust, and rebrand tech without fundamentally transforming it.[3]

As Anielek Niemyjski writes in her recent essay for the Institute of Network Cultures, “Longing for Locality: Nostalgia and Resistance in the Age of Platforms,” the experience of the early internet for many users today is less a lived memory than an algorithmically mediated reconstruction:

The notion of netstalgia therefore demands careful examination, particularly when it replaces political engagement. "Nostalgia, if left unchecked, can flatten these [historical, social and technological] complexities into myth," Niemyjski concludes in her text.[5] As Olia Lialina reminds us, there was never a singular “golden age” of the web waiting to be recovered. The so-called “personal web” was uneven, exclusionary and constrained in its own ways. Nostalgia can obscure these realities, turning glittering GIFs and glitchy visuals into symbols of a lost utopia rather than markers of specific cultural, economic, and political conditions. [6][7]

Even where early experiences of online freedom may have been real for some, nostalgia is deeply entangled with questions of privilege, visibility, and power. When we say the internet was “better” before, we must ask: for whom was it better? Whose experiences are remembered, archived and aestheticized, and whose were excluded, marginalized, or erased? Nostalgic narratives often privilege those whose ways of inhabiting the internet were historically centered, while rendering other experiences invisible. Selective memory is at work not only aesthetically, but politically. This tension is central to netstalgia. Early web cultures are often framed as more open, playful, and participatory, yet access to these spaces is unevenly distributed along lines of geography, race, class, gender, language, and ability. Treating early web practices as inherently emancipatory risks obscuring the power structures that shaped them and that continue to shape platform politics today.

At the same time, contemporary platforms actively manufacture and monetize nostalgia. Memory is curated, packaged and returned to users through “On This Day” reminders, year-in-review summaries and automated montages optimized for attention and retention rather than reflection. What is presented is a managed simulation of the past, one that reinforces platform legitimacy while deflecting attention from structural issues such as data extraction, corporate power, governance and regulation.

There is no hope without reflection and no future without retrospection. Utopian thinking requires engagement with what has been, but nostalgia becomes harmful when it hardens into fixation or myth. What matters is not holding on to the past, but processing it without flattening its contradictions or reproducing its exclusions. And at times, “forgetting is also a form of care,” as Cade Diehm writes in the context of the misguided campaign to archive sensitive Tumblr content before the ban of adult content on the platform in 2018:

This open call also wants to make space for marginalized communities to actively reimagine the past as a way of claiming presents and futures in which they feel seen, valued and empowered, following the example set by Afrofuturist and Yugofuturist practices. We are looking for works that do not seek a return, but use history as a tool to reveal what was excluded or silenced and to imagine what could still be possible. We support artworks that cultivate a clear-eyed view of the past: works that challenge a netstalgia that merely softens critique or reinforces existing platform politics, while also exploring how revisiting history can open pathways to more equitable and inclusive future.

This open call therefore moves beyond aesthetics and remembrance toward questions of agency and infrastructure. It asks what protocols, networks, and shared conditions are necessary to build an internet worth inhabiting today; how governance, moderation, and sustainability can be addressed in calls for decentralization; how migration toward already existing alternatives might be mobilized; and where spaces exist that enable experimentation, participation, and collective agency.

In this sense, Error 406 [Netstalgia] Not Acceptable ultimately asks a forward-facing question:

What internet do we want?

We invite artworks that critically probe inherited memories, interrogate power structures 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.