Join the Dead Link Club! Bring a link to the function. An evening of internet archaeology, collective memory and speculation about digital afterlives.

Bring a defunct website, a deleted subreddit or a service that stopped responding, and let’s run a dead link autopsy together.

Dead Link Club is an event format, a study group and an ongoing research club — a framework for exploring internet histories together.

Rather than inviting experts to lecture about internet history, we want a space where everyone’s amateur expertise matters. The emphasis is on the process itself, on the collective exploration.

Noemi Garay · Tomato Cappelletti · Clusterduck Collective

Digital death and afterlife are topics that surround us everywhere: platform shutdowns, websites disappearing and discontinued services, patents for death bots, zombie and dead internet theories, online memorials or grief rituals for obsolete tech. At the same time, there are demands for the right to be forgotten, for opacity and the need to hide in the dark forests.

We are intrigued by the collectivizing energy of grieving and take seriously the pain and disorientation that can come with lost online connections, but we are not interested in nostalgia. Therefore, we examine the concrete conditions that lead to these deaths: what economic, political and technological contexts make platforms and services come to die? What communities do they leave behind, what do they transform into and what disappears with them?

A dead link can become a way into a much bigger story — platform monopolies, technological shifts, changing business models, internet culture, and the communities that formed around one particular website.

We also kept coming back to the difference between archiving and remembering. While there’s a huge push to preserve everything online, storing information isn’t the same as remembering. Remembering is really processing, which needs time and space.

Free registration. Write us for details at info@panke.gallery.

We structure the events around a small set of tools that we are still developing.

Give us a dead one. A defunct website, a deleted subreddit, a service that stopped responding: it goes into the Morgue as a donated link and waits for a session.