The narrative of the birth of internet culture often focuses on the achievements of American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, but there is an alternative history of European internet pioneers who developed their own model of network culture in the early 1990s. Drawing from their experiences in the leftist and anarchist movements of the ‘80s, they built do-it-yourself (DIY) networks that give us a glimpse into what network culture could have been if it were in the hands of squatters, hackers, punks, artists, and activists. In the Dutch scene the early internet was intimately tied to the aesthetics and politics of squatting. Untethered from profit motives, these artists and activists aimed to create a decentralized tool that would democratize culture and promote open and free exchange of information.

The first publicly accessible Dutch internet service providers—XS4ALL and De Digitale Stad (The Digital City)—were developed in 1993. Hack-tic, the group of anarchist hackers who facilitated the projects, expressed their idealism by naming their service XS4ALL (“access for all”), and, working together with artists and cultural producers, they created the groundbreaking public internet portal De Digitale Stad (launched January 1994). The aim of this book is to construct a pre-history of internet art and theory in the Netherlands leading up until this groundbreaking moment. It explores what happened in the 1980s that allowed an alternative model of the internet to develop, looking at both traditionally-defined artistic practices and political/ spatial practices over the course of the decade.

There is an artistic strategy—or de Certeauian “tactic”—that unites practices as disparate as urban squatting, painting, television, and exhibition/ event curation. Rather than a medium born when the first web browsers were developed in the early ‘90s, this book argues that the practices which have subsequently been labelled “internet art”, particularly European browser-based work, were part of a longer aesthetic development that began before the World Wide Web was invented. The constellation of practices profiled in the following pages are anchored theoretically to the concept of kraken (“squatting” in Dutch), which has the same roots as the English verb “to crack” and is literally translated as “to crack open.”