The Digital City (De Digitale Stad) and the legacy of public domain: In conversation with Geert Lovink

Launched in 1993 as an internet initiative, the digital city – De Digitale Stad (DDS) – quickly grew into a cultural phenomenon, marking the first time internet access was available for a large number of Amsterdam citizens. Based on the metaphor of the city, DDS provided a free and open cyberspace where users could collaboratively build digital infrastructure and online communities in a democratic way. However, as the internet became increasingly commercialized during the dot-com boom, DDS struggled to sustain its original vision and came to an end in 2001.

What remains of its legacy, what takes its place, and what can it teach us about reclaiming digital public space today? In this interview with Geert Lovink - a media theorist, professor, and the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures in Hogeschool van Amsterdam - let us take a glimpse into the rise and fall of DDS and how it opens new possibilities for (re)imagining a free digital Amsterdam. 

AA: What is the original vision behind the DDS and how was it executed in the first place? Can you tell me a bit more about the context back then?

Geert: To go back to that, the idea of the public domain is important. Without that idea, you probably wouldn’t understand why we wanted to have Internet access to the public since that idea is not around anymore today. Everything is privatized and commercialized. It was in 1993 when the digital city was perceived as an idea we could realize. The idea of media as a public domain is different from the media owned by the state and the media owned by corporations, it is something in between – owned by citizens, a foundation, or a nonprofit organization.

Already in the eighties, we had public access television, the public cable was rolled out and becoming accessible for all households in Amsterdam, making a very lively culture. When the Internet arrived in the early 90s, there were people having computers, but they didn’t have a modem, so they couldn’t connect to other computers. The computer networks at the time were owned by multinationals and primarily in academia.  From 1993 onwards, HackTic – a group of computer hackers and their magazine started their own Internet service provider called Hack-tic.nl. So I joined Hack-Tic. Very soon after that, we started to think about how we can give more people access to the Internet – this is how the digital city was envisioned at the time, starting in January as an experiment. Very early on, it was still text only with a UNIX programming interface – only black and green and text. But during that time, simultaneously, the World Wide Web was introduced. Half a year after the introduction of the digital city, for the first time, people could also access it using graphic user interfaces where you didn’t have to use a menu or some programming language to find out the functionalities and to get in contact with others or to upload something. It was a tremendous success from very early on, primarily because people wanted to use something like this to see what the computer networks could do. And we decided that something local would really be good because it was close to local people’s concerns – it was in Dutch. The World Wide Web gave access to the Internet, worldwide, it could be done also in other languages, primarily English; the strength of the digital city was the fact that it was local, and in Dutch.

AA: How was the digital landscape different back then, especially in terms of privacy, online marketing, and business model back then?

Geert: Oh, there was no business model. The only companies that were there were telecom providers. The second commercial wave was the creation of this genre called web design. So once people were able to create web pages using HTML, the question was, what should it look like? The first question was the creation of web design as a profession and as a field of expertise. Designers and artists got it but also computer programmers saw and took this opportunity to sell and to democratize the knowledge of HTML and how it should look like, which soon followed the corporate consultants world.

We started to become active in ‘93 and they were doing similar work but for the corporate world – the companies that wanted to establish a presence on the Internet. This period went on until ‘96-’97. This was a really big shift because since then the really big money started to float into the Internet, and this is called the dot-com phase or dot-com mania. Dot-com mania meant that billions and billions of dollars and euros were poured into the startups. This type of so-called risk money where you invest a lot in an idea was introduced here earliest in ‘95 or ‘96. But then in ‘97, the whole culture changed and this enormous dot-com investment boom started to happen. This was also the first time when we saw that the idea of the Internet as a public domain was in danger and was about to be marginalized by this enormous investment wave that was coming to us. And then by 1998, in response to this, something really important happened: the provider and the people we worked with closely together, sharing the infrastructure, the data racks, the telecom infrastructure – they sold their company to KPN.

Then the Digital City wasn’t certain about where it should head, whether it should become a company itself. And eventually, in 02/2001, the dot-com crash1 happened – all the money disappeared into nothing. We had the first Internet recession, and that moment was also more or less, the end of the digital city as a public infrastructure.

AA: So what remains of the digital city today and what took its place?

Geert: Let me first start with the legacy because early on, people recognized that this was a very valuable and very interesting free experiment happening in Amsterdam in the nineties, which was a very kind of free and open and wild period in the history of the city. The seventies and eighties were very dark years of recession, budget cuts with a lot of empty buildings. Of course we squatted most of them, but the city was in a very difficult period of economic transition with poverty and changes in terms of social housing and privatization of so many different sectors. So the nineties was quite a wild and blossoming period. People thus recognized that the digital city should somehow be preserved. A whole group started to build a reconstruction of this computer network, which now is functional. It is part of the Amsterdam Historical Museum, you can visit it and see most of the content and discussions and all the home pages of individual people and so on.2 That is a whole history in itself of how this copy of the Internet of the digital city was preserved and reconstructed. This year also has another part – some of the public terminals have been reconstructed as well. There were beautiful pieces of furniture where you could go. We had an idea that the Internet should be a public infrastructure so that anyone could go to a cafe or a public space like a library or neighborhood center and that there would be a computer and that you could just freely access it and contribute to it.

The other part of the legacy is the idea that there should be a renaissance of the idea of the Internet as a public infrastructure against state censorship and the control by a very small group of social media, platforms and corporations. Altogether we have been advocating for that idea with Marleen Stikker of de Waag,3 Bits of Freedom4 and other NGOs in this field who believe that a part of the Internet that we should define and defend should be claimed or reclaimed as a public infrastructure.

AA: So after the end of DDS, what took its place in the digital landscape?

Geert: Nothing. There were just websites. And then there was no comparable initiative like this. What we see when we look at the history, after the dot-com crash, is Silicon Valley trying to reinvent the Internet, which happened around 02/2003 – now called web 2.0. This is the era in which Facebook, YouTube, and all the rest of what we now know as social media were founded. Here in Amsterdam, we were not really able to respond well to this enormous amount of money they had to scale up infrastructure and access. The nineteen nineties were the period which was all about access but ten years later, people had access – the question became access to what? We always thought that they would have access to a variety of websites and that they would create their own blogs or websites or channels, whatever they wanted. But this never happened. Instead, people started using a very limited amount of social media services. Instead of seeing the Internet as a vast space of opportunity, people just started using the Internet on their phones with a very limited amount of apps there. They spent 99% of their time on three or four apps. If you can visit a million different places, why would you go back to one or two of them? This is completely inconceivable from the nineties perspective.

Instead of seeing the Internet as a vast space of opportunity, people just started using the Internet on their phones with a very limited amount of apps there. They spent 99% of their time on three or four apps.

AA: So if we were to bring back something like the digital city today, what would it need to stay relevant for the public? And also what kind of technological, political, and cultural conditions would we have to change in order to achieve that?

Geert: I think the question of public infrastructure can be answered straightforwardly. What we envision are the free software open source alternatives that are decentralized. And so you have Signal as an alternative to WhatsApp. You have PeerTube, which is the alternative to YouTube and so on. Everywhere we publish long lists of possibilities: please don’t use the centralized platforms, use the decentralized alternatives.5 We should further work on this. And now with the regime of Elon Musk and Trump, a lot of people have woken up and realized that they are using a version of the Internet highly controlled by this mafia in the United States. But we have been telling this story already for fifteen years and we have started working on these social media alternatives a long, long time ago. So we are absolutely ready to finally scale up this alternative public infrastructure. That is one side of the story.

The other side is the question of what is public access or infrastructure in Amsterdam today? Because the digital city was always a local initiative in Dutch in Amsterdam. So the question is can we also re envision something that is unique to Amsterdam? And that is in Dutch or at least, you know, at least bilingual – but not in English. The question is really one that should address the situation of the local initiatives here in the city. Since the COVID times, we can see that the local debates have been often happening just on the social media platforms. But funny enough, they are Silicon Valley platforms. That contradiction is something that a lot of people will start to question in the next months and years to come. So that we can only expect that more local debates and initiatives and forms of organization will eventually leave those social media platforms and start something similar, something local.

1) The dot-com crash (also known as the dot-com bubble burst) is a financial collapse that occurred between 2000 and 2002 when many internet-based companies failed and shut down due to the bursting of the speculative bubble. See more at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

2) This is the re:DDS project, founded by Amsterdam Museum, de Waag Society and DDS web archaeologists to preserve the DDS for Amsterdam. You can visit it here: https://hart.amsterdam/nl/page/521/re-dds

3) Marleen Stikker is the founder of DDS and the co-founder of de Waag. See more about de Waag here: https://waag.org/nl/gebouw-de-waag/

4) Bits of Freedom is an independent Dutch digital rights foundation that promotes privacy and communications freedom in the digital age. See more at: https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/

5) To know more about what types of social tech alternatives already exist that can fit your needs, check out Waag Futurelab’s helpdesk on every Thursday of the month. See more at: https://waag.org/en/event/helpdesk-social-socials-0/