"I miss the internet" has become a familiar refrain online. Referencing a popular meme, it is nonsensical but evocative: the phrase prompts us to ask what, exactly, "the internet" refers to. What is being mourned is something more elusive: is it the "old internet", an imagined internet that never fully materialised, or a projection from a future in which today's internet has already become history?

Rather than accepting this internet nostalgia at face value, I Miss the Internet asks what this longing actually reveals. The idea of a singular lost internet obscures the many histories, infrastructures and unequal power relations that have always shaped networked technologies. Netstalgia often produces a flattened, idealised image of the past, one that can itself become exploitable, mobilised by platforms and companies that profit from our desire for authenticity, community and perceived simplicity.

Bringing together artists, researchers and practitioners, this day-long programme examines and reimagines the uneven distribution of power embedded in internet standards and infrastructures. The invited contributors recover overlooked figures in internet history, expose and subvert deeply rooted hierarchies, investigate the political and material continuities of network technologies, develop alternative tools that account for the environmental costs of digital systems, and question the inherited conservative logics that continue to shape online spaces.

Together, the programme asks how internet histories might move beyond netstalgia to become critical tools for imagining more equitable digital futures. What protocols, archives, infrastructures and forms of collective care are needed to build the webs we actually want?

Programme