The Museum of the Fossilized Internet

Welcome to the Museum of the Fossilized Internet. This museum was founded in 2050 to commemorate two decades of a fossil-free internet and to invite museum visitors to experience what the coal and oil-powered internet of 2020 was like.

Gasp at the horrors of surveillance capitalism. Nod knowingly at the plague of spam. Be baffled at the size of AI training data and lament the binge culture of video streaming.

Built at an accessible scale by the amazing Gabi Ivens, this miniature museum is a research object to explore the major contributors to the internet’s pollution and spark conversation about the climate crisis.

Nine exhibition pieces invite visitors to consider the impact of online advertising, streaming, legacy code, AI training data, and more. You can read more about each object on the museum’s wiki page.

This work was commissioned by Mozilla, and we plan to keep iterating on the research, backing up the numbers, and working across our networks to make our findings more relevant and tangible as part of Mozilla’s new Sustainability initiative and beyond.

Thank you to the museum’s creator, Gabi Ivens, to Joana Moll for her expertise, to Nina Zimmermann for the photography, and to Cathleen Berger for making this project possible.

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