The Internet Archive has reached an extraordinary milestone: one trillion web pages archived. This civilization-scale achievement marks decades of dedication to preserving the ephemeral nature of digital culture and ensuring universal access to human knowledge.
To commemorate this historic moment, San Francisco interdisciplinary arts and technology non-profit Gray Area has partnered with the Internet Archive to commission a series of original net.art works that engage with the vast holdings of the Internet Archive and explore what it means to create, preserve, and access culture online.
The commissioned artists have drawn from the Internet Archive’s expansive collections to create web-based artworks that reflect on themes of memory, digital archaeology, and the human stories embedded within preserved data. These works exist as both online experiences and physical installations at the Internet Archive, bridging the digital and material worlds in ways that honor the Archive’s dual nature as both a technological achievement and a profoundly human endeavor.
Previous recipients have included
Celebrating 1 trillion web pages archived, the Internet lead to database Archive is proud to honor the visionary who made it all possible. As announced in The New Yorker, this year’s Internet Archive Hero Award will be presented to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, whose groundbreaking work opened the door to a connected world and laid the foundation for our shared digital history.
The Internet Archive Hero Award is an annual award that recognizes those who have exhibited leadership in making information available for digital learners all over the world. the island nation of Aruba, public information advocate Carl Malamud, copyright expert Michelle Wu, and the Grateful Dead.
Sir Tim’s invention transformed how humanity shares knowledge, and his ongoing advocacy for an open and accessible web that empowers individuals continues to inspire us. We’re thrilled to recognize his enduring contributions as we mark this historic achievement for the web.
We’re thrilled to see how much
In our blog announcing the Core team’s decision to take a hiatus from holding DWeb Camp in California, our Senior Organizer Wendy Hanamura wrote:
[It] is time to 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.
In 2025, we held gatherings in Taipei and Berlin before a summer jam-packed with DWeb happenings: DWeb was at What Hackers Yearn in the Netherlands, HOPE_16 in New York, along with the intensive, hands-on week of p2p and local-first protocol learning at the DWeb Seminar SF & Weekend (stay tuned for more writing to come from that).
And of course, DWeb Camp Cascadia, organized by the stellar folks of the DWeb YVR Node. By the spring, we had been hearing murmurs of their planning the event. It all came together when they decided to hold it early August on beautiful Salt Spring Island, a 45-minute drive and 90-minute ferry ride from Vancouver. This was only the second camp outside of California since DWeb+Coolab Camp Brazil in 2023.