Celebrate the Grateful Dead with the Internet Archive

This weekend, the Grateful Dead will be celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors, recognizing their impact on music and culture. You can join in the celebration by listening to one of the 17,000 Grateful Dead concert recordings preserved at the Internet Archive.

The Grateful Dead Collection, part of the Live Music Archive, features more than 17,000 concert recordings spanning decades of the band’s live shows. The collection is a result of the Grateful Dead’s longstanding collaboration with their fans and the taper community, supporting non-commercial recording and sharing of music taped at their shows, creating an unparalleled archive of live music.

What’s the most popular Grateful Dead recording in the collection? No surprise to Dead fans, the legendary concert at Barton Hall, Cornell University, on May 8, 1977, has the most views. Listen below or here.

Whether you’re reliving a classic show or discovering their music for the first time, explore the Grateful Dead Collection to experience the sound and spirit of a band that continues to inspire. 🌹💀

End of Hachette v. Internet Archive

While we are deeply disappointed with the Second Circuit’s opinion in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Internet Archive has decided not to pursue Supreme Court review. We will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at their member publishers’ requests. 

We thank the many readers, authors and publishers who have stood with us throughout this fight. Together, we will continue to advocate for a future where libraries can purchase, own, lend and preserve digital books.

Vanishing Culture: Preserving Forgotten Music

The following interview with singer-songwriter Elliott Adkins is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Elliott Adkins has a passion for recording old songs that have largely been forgotten. The 23-year-old musician was inspired after finding boxes of sheet music in his parents’ basement when they moved from his childhood home in Atlanta last year. 

“I thought it would be cool if somebody took the time to record these obscure pieces of music that had never been recorded…so I did,” Adkins said. “I put it online really not expecting much of it, but it took on a life of its own.”

Most of the collection of more than 1,000 pieces of music, which were his late grandmother’s, are old enough to be in the public domain. That allows him to remix, record and share the music. Adkins records himself singing and playing the songs on guitar, posting the never-before recordings online. His video of the 1927 song, “Yesterday,” went viral on Instagram and propelled his social media presence.

“I feel like the public domain is often overlooked. It’s a great way to preserve our cultural legacy,” Adkins said. “There are people who had great ideas in the past, but the way our copyright system is set up, it’s hard to expand on those ideas. The public domain allows you to have a certain amount of time to make as much money as possible…then it becomes something greater than yourself. It removes the ego from art.”

Adkins said he’s drawn to these vintage tunes, in part, because he “naturally craves mystery” and likes the challenge. It’s a stretch to figure out the music, understand the lyrics, and put his own twist on the songs, he said. He unpacks the history of the songs and often shares some of their backstory in his videos. 

“I feel like the public domain is often overlooked. It’s a great way to preserve our cultural legacy.”

Elliott Adkins, singer-songwriter

“I find the [old] songs to be a lot more sophisticated than popular music today, with their chord progressions and harmony,” Adkins said. “There’s a blend of genres – early jazz and forms of classical music – that’s very interesting.”

In October, Adkins was invited to perform at the Internet Archive’s annual celebration in San Francisco. He made musical history singing “Tell Her I’ll Love Her,” an English sea song from the early 1800s. It was the first time the song had ever been recorded. Adkins was the closing act for the event, playing his guitar and singing before a live audience—and getting the crowd, which surpassed 400 people, to sing along.

“It was great. I could tell the audience was primed for anything I was going to throw at them,” said Adkins. “It was nice to have such an attentive audience. There was an ideology attached to what I was performing, a mission behind it, and those people were very much ready for that.”

Tell Her I’ll Love Her (audio)
The audio version of “Tell Her I’ll Love Her” is available under CC0, meaning you can “copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.” DOWNLOAD NOW

Adkins, who also writes original alternative country and Americana music, said he’s become fascinated with the community of music preservationists he’s encountered since venturing into this niche of music. He’s met people old and young, online and in the Atlanta area who are committed to reviving forgotten songs.

To research music, Adkins uses the Internet Archive and the Discography of American Historical Recordings Database from UC Santa Barbara.

Staff at the Internet Archive spotted Adkins on Instagram and reached out to invite him to participate in the October event. Since much of his material he uses is in the public domain, he’s said he’s a “big fan” of the Archive and was happy to collaborate on the project.

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

A few songs were considered before the decision was made to go with, “Tell Her I’ll Love Her.” Adkins worked on the arrangement, wrote new lyrics, and said he practiced it for 30 minutes every day leading up to the performance in San Francisco.

The feedback after the performance has been overwhelmingly positive and Adkins said he’s picked up new followers on social media as a result of the event. 

“It’s a way to get in touch with the past,” Adkins said. “Most people, especially my age, are so unaware of what music sounded like 100 years ago. It’s really cool to see what songs did make it, what songs didn’t.”

Adkins said he enjoys thinking of new ways to present the old tunes.

“I see music as something that is constantly trying to be pushed forward,” he said. “I think you can grab a lot more people if you adjust it for the modern audience.”

At the end of his Internet Archive performance, Adkins led the audience in singing additional verses to the sea song that he wrote just for the event:

Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song
A song that may be old, but is not yet gone
The past isn’t dead ‘til it can’t be read
So, celebrate with us, speak of days of yore
Here we all are gathered to maintain what came before
So, it isn’t just my ghost that can visit this sweet shore

Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song
A song that may be old, but is not yet gone
The past isn’t dead ‘til it can’t be read
‘cause some will remember though the world may forget
Here we all are gathered to sing the same sea song
(So, thank y’all very much for singing right along)

Archive Staff Favorites 2024: Things We Think You’ll Love This Holiday Season

As deep-cuts in the Archive go, these staff-recommended resources are ones you won’t want to miss!

Time off over the holidays? Need a little break while visiting family? Sourcing recommendations for movie night? The Internet Archive has you covered.  We’ve gathered some of our staff’s favorite items (holiday-themed and otherwise) in our collections to share with you—enjoy this selection of publicly available movies, books, games, and more!

Movies

“We have a number of movies in the public domain within our collections, many of which we play in our HQ during Public Domain movie nights. Now, you can bring the public domain movie nights to your own home

The Haunted House (1921): A silent film starring Buster Keaton
Malice in the Palace (1949): A comedy short starring the Three Stooges
Charade (1963): A classic romance starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn”
-Internet Archive Admin Team

Books

My favorite collection is the Biodiversity Heritage Library.”
-Joy Chesbrough, Director of Philanthropy

“I’m a big fan of Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts Collection, particularly this book on herbs from 15th century Italy. The illustrations are super well-preserved and mix realism and fantasy to depict herbs and their qualities.”
-Tanya Zeif, Patron Services 

“Enjoy over 19,000 public domain audiobooks read by Librivox volunteers. The collection has novels (Jane Eyre, Peter Pan, Moby Dick, etc.) + short stories and poetry read in over forty different languages. Pretty neat. I recommend The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”
-Tom Mayer, Development Coordinator

“One of my favorites is The Woman and the Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for All Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor. It’s a guide to learning to drive from a woman who was a professional racecar driver in 1909. She briefly held the world land speed record (a blistering 79 miles per hour) and is credited with inventing the rearview mirror–she recommended that women bring their makeup compact along with them while driving so that they could hold up the mirror and see what was behind them without having to take their eyes off the road. A few years later, car manufacturers started including these mirrors in the vehicle by default.”
-Jenica Jessen, Marketing Manager

Software/Games

“One of my favorite items in the Archive is the Sierra On-Line Christmas Card from 1986. If you haven’t ever seen a DOS-based holiday card, we also have the 1990 and 1992 versions for even more animated computer card fun.”
-Chris Freeland, Director of Open Library

“I love the Malware Museum! It’s a collection of all these cool animations that would show up when a computer in the early aughts would have a virus. It’s a) So cool to look at, a vibe I think a lot of modern design tries to emulate, and b) so reminiscent of a specific time. Reminding me of some of my fave movies and shows from the 2000’s.”
-Amandari Karaca, Digital Engagement Specialist

Music

“I recently discovered Air in Resort. For skincare aficionados, it is a 1984 album commissioned by Shiseido to promote their new fragrance.”
-Andrea Mills, Executive Director, Internet Archive Canada. 

“I’ve been loving these recordings of a Bay Area radio station from the 60s. KYA San Francisco was playing early rock radio in the Bay until it was sold in 1983″
– Jeff Klein, Senior Software Engineer (Archiving and Data Services)

Here’s to a happy and safe holiday season from all of us at the Internet Archive. 

Vanishing Culture: Preserving Gaming History

The following guest post from legendary software designer Jordan Mechner is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

In 1993, I was trying to learn everything I could about the 1914 Orient Express, to help our team recreate it accurately in The Last Express (the game I did after Prince of Persia). We were dumbfounded when the French railway company SNCF told us they’d dumped most of their pre-war archives for lack of warehouse space in the 1970s. The train timetables, floor plans and photographs we coveted had gone to landfill.

Watch a demo trailer for The Last Express

Like most kids of my generation, I grew up assuming that things like books, video games, music and movies, newspapers and magazines, once published, wouldn’t just disappear. If I ever wanted to revisit that 1981 issue of Softalk magazine, or read The Manchester Guardian‘s front page the day World War I broke out, surely some library somewhere would have a copy?

In reality, cultural artifacts are findable only so long as someone takes on the active responsibility to preserve, catalog and share them. Once gone, they’re gone forever. Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception.

That summer of 1993, as a last resort, we placed a classified ad in a French railway enthusiasts magazine: “Seeking information about 1914 Orient Express.” One issue later, our phone rang.

The voice on the other end proposed that we meet in their club, in the basement of Paris Gare de l’Est. We passed through a glass door marked “No Access” to discover a cavern of rooms filled with vintage railway posters, books, and the biggest working model train set I’ve ever seen. Our informants—a pair of retired French railway employees—were waiting. 

We explained what we were looking for, and what SNCF had told us. A glint appeared in the two gentlemen’s eyes. The elder of the pair leaned forward. “They think they destroyed the archives,” he said. “We took ‘em home. We’ve got ‘em.”

Resources
Play The Last Express, preserved at Internet Archive and emulated in the browser.
Play Prince of Persia, preserved at Internet Archive and emulated in the browser.
Learn more about Mechner and his body of work at https://www.jordanmechner.com/

If you’ve played The Last Express, you know that they came through for us. Our Smoking Car Productions team in San Francisco was able to spend the next four years creating a faithful interactive 3D recreation of the historic luxury train, thanks to two trainmen in Paris who’d preserved a part of their company’s legacy that management didn’t consider worth saving.

Thirty years later, The Last Express has in its turn become a relic. The cutting-edge 1990s technology we used to model and render the train is now antiquated, like 1890s steam engines. Today, retro-computing enthusiasts, academics, online libraries and archives volunteer their resources to curate and preserve games like The Last Express, and the documents and artifacts that contain the behind-the-scenes stories of how they were made.

Sadly (but unsurprisingly), it’s rare for game development studios and media companies who own the underlying materials to prioritize preservation of their legacies any more than the SNCF did in the 1970s. Old server backups are routinely deleted. Internal information about a title’s development is often unfindable a decade later even if management asks for it.

As a game developer, I’ve been in the rare and fortunate position of being able to archive and share source code, assets and development materials from many of my games. One reason is that my publishing contracts let me keep the copyrights (unusual even in the 1980s, almost unheard of today). In 2012, the Strong National Museum of Play agreed to receive a large pile of cartons that were taking up significant shelf space in my garage. When I turned up a long-lost box of 3.5” floppy disks containing Prince of Persia’s 1989 source code, a team of experts descended on my house with a carful of vintage hardware to extract and upload it to github. Wired magazine sent a reporter and photographer to cover the event. Few game studio employees can expect such privileged treatment.

Play Prince of Persia

A more ordinary course of events is exemplified by the abrupt closure of Game Informer magazine in August 2024. Its website with three decades’ worth of industry coverage disappeared overnight from the internet—removed by its parent company, GameStop, with no advance warning to the magazine’s subscribers or even to its staff. In this case, a robust network of game fans and journalists (and the Wayback Machine) quickly sprang into action to archive past issues. But similar erasures happen constantly around the world, largely unnoticed by the public. Game studios, local newspapers, and other companies disappear every week, taking their history with them.

As a lifelong author, game developer and graphic novelist who makes my living primarily from royalties, I understand publishers’ desire to control and profit from content they own. But all of the games and books I’ve created were made possible by what came before—including other games, books, movies, and history I could access when I needed it, thanks to archivists and librarians. Their work is unsung, and often unpaid. I’d like to see it unpunished. Having benefited so much from their efforts, it’s painful to me as a creator to see them under attack.

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

The Internet Archive’s recent removal of 500,000 books from its online library, after being sued by a group of big publishers who called scanning and lending their books piracy, is now the subject of an ongoing court case. The decision (which may come down to the U.S. Supreme Court) will have a major rippling impact on future preservation efforts and online archiving, including within the video game industry. 

I believe in fair use, and I fear for a society in which our ability to document and preserve our history (including books and games we’ve purchased) is effectively hamstrung and blocked by large companies seeking to expand their control of digital platforms. For these reasons, I’m firmly on the archivists’ side. 

I can’t help thinking that if the SNCF employees who took home those file boxes of train floor plans and route maps in the 1970s were to do the equivalent today—scan and upload them to a vintage railway enthusiasts’ website, say—they might well find themselves hit with a takedown notice and legal threats. Theft of intellectual property, violation of non-disclosure agreements, conspiracy to commit piracy. In today’s climate, I wouldn’t blame them for hesitating, or for letting their employer consign that history to oblivion.

The little corner of our world to which I’ve dedicated my working life—making video games, books and graphic novels—is just one small niche. But it depends on, and is connected to, all the rest. I hope that the French railway enthusiasts’ club still exists. I hope GameStop allows the readers and former staff who treasured their magazine to preserve its legacy without interference. And I hope the Internet Archive wins their case.

About the author

Jordan Mechner is an American video game designer, graphic novelist, and screenwriter. He created Prince of Persia, one of the world’s most beloved and enduring video game franchises, and became the first game creator to successfully adapt his own work as a feature film screenwriter with Disney’s Prince of Persia (2010). With game credits including Karateka, The Last Express, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, he is considered a pioneer of cinematic storytelling in the video game industry. Jordan made his debut as a graphic novel writer/artist with the autobiographical Replay: Memoir of an Uprooted Family (recipient of the 2023 Chateau de Cheverny prize). His graphic novels as writer include the New York Times best-selling Templar (with LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland), Monte Cristo (with Mario Alberti), and Liberty (with Etienne Le Roux).

Congratulations to Nick Norman for Award Recognizing Digitization Work

Nick Norman

The Internet Archive’s Nick Norman has won a 2024 Anthem Community Voice Award in the category for Best Use of Technology. The Anthem Awards honor mission-driven individuals, companies and organizations worldwide, inspiring global change.

Read Norman’s submission essay, Scanning the Past to Empower the Future.” Learn more about the award.

Norman began volunteering with Internet Archive’s Open Library in 2019, where the Tennessee native took on a variety of responsibilities, including the communications lead in Open Library’s Fellowship program. Now he is a digital technician, assisting on a variety of digitization projects. He has scanned documents from the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies Library, the Graduate Theological Union and others.

Making vital documents available to the public is a privilege, he said, and provides important clues about the past that can inform future decisions.

“It’s like breadcrumbs,” Norman said of the knowledge he helps share with users. “Each piece we scan is a breadcrumb, a fragment of a story. People can pick them up, follow the trail, and discover something meaningful — and that’s what I want to do: help people pick them up and see where they lead.”

Norman, whose parents are both librarians, said he was drawn to the work because of his interest in learning and commitment to accessibility of knowledge for all.

“I think about all the materials out there that we get to touch through digitization,” Norman said. “The ability to make significant change or have a profound impact is right at our fingertips.”

Norman considers the documents he has digitized through the course of his work. Some of the materials were given out at meetings or in boardrooms and filed away for safekeeping in places out of reach. He says digitization cracks the knowledge in these materials open again and ushers in new potential.  

“It simply takes pulling up a chair at the computer, looking at [the materials] and seeing how I can harness or leverage this to fill in gaps of information that people didn’t even know was out there,” Norman said. “We’re doing something that can make the world a better place.”

Norman hopes the award shines a spotlight on the Internet Archive’s mission to make knowledge accessible to all, adding: “My goal is to use my expertise in community engagement and building partnerships to draw attention to meaningful work, such as what we’re doing here.”

Learning from Cyberattacks

The Wayback Machine, Archive.org, Archive-it.org, and OpenLibrary.org came up in stages over the week after cyberattacks with some of the contributor features coming up over the last couple of weeks.  A few to go.  Much of the development during this time has been focused on securing the services so they can still run while attacks continue.  

The Internet Archive is adapting to a more hostile world, where DDOS attacks are recurring periodically (such as yesterday and today), and more severe attacks might happen. Our response has been to harden our services and learn from friends. This note is to share some high level findings, without being so detailed as to help those that are still attacking archive.org.

By tightening firewall technologies, we have changed how data flows through our systems to improve monitoring and control. The downside is these upgrades have forced changes to software, some of it quite old. 

The bright side is this is forcing upgrades that we have long planned or hoped for.  We are greatly helped by the free and open source community’s improving tools that can be used by large corporations as well as non-profit libraries because they are freely available.

Also, some commercial companies have offered assistance that would generally be prohibitively expensive.  We are grateful for the support.

Where the Internet Archive has always focused on building collections and preserving them, we have been starkly reminded how important reliable access is to researchers, journalists, and readers. This is leading us to install technical defenses and increase staff to improve service availability.

Libraries in general, and the Internet Archive in specific, have been under attack for many years now.  For us it started with the book publishers suing (about lending books), and now the recording industry (about 78rpm records), which is a drain on our staff and financial resources. Now recurring DDOS attacks distract us from the goals of preservation and access to our digital heritage.

We don’t know why these attacks have started recently and if they are coordinated, but we are building defenses.

We are grateful for the support from our patrons, through social media, through donations, and through offers of help, which frankly, makes it worthwhile to keep building a library for all of us.

– Brewster Kahle

Vanishing Culture: Archiving Community Care Work Online

The following guest post from researcher Amanda Gray Rendón is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

When asked to consider women’s care labor, people likely think about feminized gender roles within “the domestic sphere” where labor has historically been invisible and undervalued. For women of color, the lines between public and private have often been blurred, as evidenced by the family photo of my great-grandmother picking beets in a field while caring for my two-year-old grandmother. Sixty years later the roles would reverse and my grandmother would serve as the primary caregiver for her mother with Alzheimer’s dementia. I could not begin to quantify in dollars the thirteen years of 24/7 care she provided our family.

In U.S. culture, women have historically been thought of as “natural” caregivers or predisposed to caring for others, so little to no concern has been given to assigning monetary value to the labor that women are expected to perform.

This begs the question: how can we adequately archive a history that is designed to be hidden and undervalued precisely because of how invaluable it is to our social, cultural, and economic fabric? 

Download the complete Vanishing Culture report.

Women’s care work—both paid and unpaid—serves as the foundation on which the world’s postindustrial economies have functioned. Working mothers and caregivers often participate in what scholars refer to as the “double-day,” or the “double shift.” This is when (predominantly) women have an income-earning day job followed by unpaid caregiving labor they provide their families when they get home in the evening after “work.” Some have argued women’s care work has expanded into a triple shift whereby women have taken on more caregiving roles within their communities, adding significantly to gendered burdens of care.

The invisible, and at times isolating, nature of care work contributes to the precarity of archiving women’s care labor history. To preserve this aspect of our cultural history, it’s vital to engage with those performing care work, as well as to understand the different ways that community care work is performed. Documenting caregiver culture on social media allows us to identify the contributions that caregivers and care communities make, along with the barriers they face.

No one has helped me to understand this more than Cynthia “Cindy Ann” Espinoza. Cindy Ann and I met when we both attended Metropolitan Community Church in San Antonio. She graciously offered to participate in my research when I spoke at a community education session on Alzheimer’s disease that the church sponsored in collaboration with the local chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association. We became Facebook friends shortly thereafter and I observed firsthand the virtual care work in which Cindy Ann participated, as well as the archive she had created of the “real world” care she provided her mother who passed from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia several years earlier.

On January 17, 2017, about a week before PBS aired the documentary Alzheimer’s: Every Minute Counts, Cindy Ann posted a video excerpt from the film to her wall on Facebook. The three-minute video, with 4.4 million views and over 5,000 comments, was originally posted to Facebook by Next Avenue, a PBS digital publication dedicated to issues facing individuals over 50 years old in the United States. The documentary follows Daisy Duarte, a Latina in Minneapolis, as she cares for her mother, Sonja, who is living with early-onset Alzheimer’s dementia.

Next Avenue’s original post reads, “Millions of Americans will be able to relate to this story.” Cindy Ann identified herself as one of those millions of Americans almost five years after her mother’s passing from complications of Alzheimer’s dementia. Her post included the message, “I can relate to this woman in this story. Its the hardest thing to see ur parent dealing with Alzheimer”s ..but i did it for 9 yrs caring for my Mom i have no regrets. I would do it all again even if she didn’t remember who i was. I love & miss you dearly Mommy..” Cindy Ann watched Daisy wash her mother’s clothes, brush her teeth, apply her makeup, do her hair, show her how to hold a spoon, sit her in a recliner to watch television—all while exclusively speaking Spanish. The invisible care work Cindy Ann provided her mother nearly a decade before was publicly visible for the world to see.

I also related to the family portrayed in the film. As I viewed the video, I was reminded of my own experience helping my grandmother care for my great-grandmother when the three of us lived together in San Antonio. This personal connection prompted me to comment with a note of: “thanks for sharing.” I appreciated the connection Cindy Ann created in that moment.

Several of her other Facebook friends left comments in response to her post. There was one from an employee at a local adult daycare facility: “Yup and ur mama was a beautiful blessing for us at seniors 2000! I loved her so much <3;” and another from a current caregiver, “Aww I’m doing it right now. My heart aches every time I leave my mom. I pray for her mind to heal. It’s one of the ugliest diseases ever encountered! I pray they find a cure very soon.” Others were comments of support, such as: “Super hard, girl.” and “Amen.” 

The commenters were all women who either acknowledged Cindy Ann’s experience as their own or validated it with words of empathy and support. That winter morning, Cindy Ann’s public Facebook page was a place where women came together to share a commonality of experience in an online space.  The care community helped to make visible their friend’s caregiving labor, as well as their own—in effect becoming a part of care labor history.

Though the internet seems to be “forever”, the ephemeral nature of certain online spaces—such as social media pages and posts that can be deleted or websites that are no longer supported—necessitates an archival space such as the Internet Archive, which on May 9, 2017 captured the full-length documentary Cindy Ann posted about. Nowhere else on the internet can I access this film without a subscription, rental, or purchase. As a researcher, the Wayback Machine is an invaluable archival research tool that I rely on to provide accurate records of historical online spaces I can no longer access. However, we must find a way to better preserve social media pages such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and others where caregivers post and provide community care. The sheer volume of pages and posts may have made this a challenging task previously, but with new AI language learning models, we can begin to conceive of ways to more pointedly target and capture the rich history of online care communities and women’s virtual care work.

To preserve a more complete and inclusive history of women’s caregiving labor, digital archivists must seek out the spaces where women are performing the work. The Internet Archive serves as a record that women’s care communities exist, have always existed, and will continue to exist. Documenting the challenges women caregivers face, the support they need, and their shared spaces of communal experience helps to create a more complete historical record of their cultural impact for future generations.

About the author

Amanda Gray Rendón is a community-based researcher, writer, oral historian, and documentary filmmaker. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Narrative Medicine and Digital Health Humanities at Wheaton College. She received her PhD in American Studies with concentrations in Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to her work in academia, Gray Rendón was a project manager in implementation services for a medical software company followed by several years in case management for a mediation and arbitration firm in Washington, D.C. She is the recipient of fellowships and appointments at several institutions, including the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, Earlham College, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and Saint Louis University. Her scholarship centers the lived experiences of Latina professional and family caregivers. Her commitment to social justice and accessible community-based knowledge production is a core principle of her scholarship and pedagogy.

We Want to Decentralize the DWeb Movement

From the 2019 brainstorming session for the first DWeb Camp

I remember back in 2019, when the handful of dreamers organizing “DWeb Camp” were imagining the potential impact of this event. We dreamed big: to inspire and re-energize people around the world, moving our community to take the actions needed for our times; building an archive of open-source knowledge about decentralized technologies, translating and transmitting our knowledge to many sectors beyond tech; and above all, we dreamed of supporting new global networks, building local capacities around the world through a truly decentralized approach.

Fast forward to today, and our community has come together for DWeb Camps in 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Over the years, more than 2000 campers have journeyed to Northern California to connect, learn, share, and play as we build better, more decentralized network technologies. What started as an event has formed an emerging movement — informed by a set of shared principles about how we shape the web. A web that actualizes principles of trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness.

DWeb Camp 2024 at Camp Navarro, California; photo by Brad Shirakawa

But, what’s next? Where should we put our energies in 2025?

After community surveys, consultations, and much deep thought, the core organizers of DWeb Camp (myself, mai ishikawa sutton, Ese Ojo, Kev Nguyễn, ngoc trieu, Ian Davis, Iryna Nezhynska, Andi Wong, and Arkadiy Kukarkin, with input from Boris Mann and Will Howes) have decided that it is time to put put our energy into truly decentralizing DWeb. We want to nurture this movement in a way that empowers nodes around the world, especially those outside of the United States. We want to focus our energies in 2025 on helping local networks build capacity and grow.

From the 2024 DWeb Camp Survey

So rather than host a DWeb Camp in Northern California in 2025, we will be using our resources to support regional events hosted by our DWeb partners.  Some of our early ideas and plans:

  • RightsCon: February 24-27, 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan — A one-day DWeb event before the main conference, 50+ people with an Internet freedom focus. 
  • DWeb Institute: Summer 2025 in San Francisco — A 5-day intensive workshop to bring together researchers and software developers to share insights and collaborate towards the sound and sustainable development of efficient eventually-consistent (offline-first) peer-to-peer systems. Led by the team that runs P2P Basel.
  • Branding Workshop: Summer 2025, location TBD — A 5-day intensive on communications, branding, fundraising, and UX to help startups and bootstrappers reach the next level with their ready-to-use tech.
  • DWeb Camp Brazil: November 2025 in Brazil, location TBD — a 5-day Camp for 100-200 people, primarily in Portuguese with a focus on regenerative agriculture.

And we want to hear from you. How can the DWeb community help you reach the next level? What are your dreams, goals, and needs? What ideas do you have that need support? Come join us at our next virtual DWeb MeetupWhat’s Next? An interactive discussion on Thursday, November 14 at 5 PM PT / 8pm ET, to discuss where the DWeb community should focus in the coming, surely tumultuous year. REGISTER HERE.

Thanks for caring, contributing, and helping us chart the course of the DWeb community.

And mark your calendars: We’ll be back with another DWeb Camp in 2026!

New Installation from Swilk, Artist in Residence, Opens November 9

When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love” by Swilk

Swilk, a queer Oakland-based weaver and installation artist, invites the community to the Internet Archive for a special show: an immersive art exhibit that breathes life into historic HIV artifacts. The piece, titled When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love, invites the public to connect the modern world to a history that was almost lost.

The Archive hosts thousands of historic HIV/AIDS documents and web resources in its collection. These weavings are programmed to respond whenever one of the resources compiled for this project are uploaded, downloaded, or saved. As the public interacts with this history, the motors fire, making the weaving breathe and pulse. Most of these resources, and the voices that filled them, have since been scrubbed, or altered off the internet.

The 80s and 90s were fraught with the suppression of lifesaving AIDS resources. When the internet became public, this all changed. Activists for the first time could distribute information without needing permission from distributors. Those isolated could find other people with a positive diagnosis and cope in community with one another. The internet played a critical role in HIV/AIDS activism, and as it slowly disappears from the world and the web, the Internet Archive has been instrumental in holding onto this history.

Swilk’s work highlights the importance of the modern world connecting with our queer history, and invites the audience to reflect on its relevance today. 

“I grew up queer in an environment that taught me that to have HIV was a death sentence. It took me years to find the queer history of the HIV epidemic. It took me longer to learn about options like PreP. The more I learned about my history, and those that came before me, the more at home I felt in myself. This history, and the actions of those that made it, have bolstered my safety in the world at large.”

When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love will be shown in the Great Room, the Internet Archive’s repurposed chapel space, on November 9, 2024 from 7pm-9pm. The event is free and open to the public. Music and food provided.  Limited edition screen prints will be made at the reception, people are invited to bring paper and fabrics to print on.

About Swilk: 

Swilk is an Oakland-based weaver who has exhibited work around the world. They are a Genderqueer artist whose work centers queer history and the emotional experience of home. Their work has been exhibited and awarded in a number of spaces, including the CICA Museum in South Korea, Barcelona’s El Poblenou District, and a number of international artist residencies. They are the winner of the Featured Public Project grant for the world’s largest open arts competition (ArtPrize 2022).