NCM 2026: A new network is forming...

The World Wide Web was pronounced dead in August 2010 by Wired. As Capitalism took hold, apps exploded and community moderation gave way to sleek products in search of profit. This was later revised to 2016-2017 when The Dead Internet Theory was coined, asserting that bot activity and automatically generated content guided by algorithms had saturated the internet, prohibiting genuine human interaction (IlluminatiPirate, 2021).

Fast forward to 2024 and the Oxford word of the year was "brain rot". Used to describe the low-quality, low-value content or ‘AI soup' flooding social media and the internet. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024. In 2025, things haven’t improved with the Oxford word of the year being "rage bait", describing online content created to deliberately provoke anger or outrage to increase engagement.

Yet resistance from creative communities has been taking shape. Last year the National Communication Museum (NCM)'s exhibition Signal to Noise, profiled Spawning. Jordan Meyer and Mat Dryhurst’s ethical AI dataset, seeded with almost 40 million public domain images under the Creative Commons’ license. Spawning is helping artists have more control over how their artworks are used online. Metalabel, launched in 2024 by co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter Yancey Strickler, creates a platform for a new creative era of collective power, sharing revenue among multiple collaborators and promoting cooperation not competition. NCM's current exhibition, FRIEND, recycles obsolete and aging robots through the work of NCM Studio, where they took a discarded Pepper service robot and refitted it with an external AI brain. These efforts represent a growing movement: creative communities taking infrastructure into their own hands.

In Australia, the government banned access to social media for under 16s, preventing access to major platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch and Reddit, among others. It’s a move that prioritises protection over connection, but what are we protecting young people from, and what are we denying them access to? Speaking with a colleague recently, he revealed just how important the internet was to him in the 90s growing up in regional Victoria. As a young Queer man it gave him hope, connected him to a community and propelled him into a successful career in technology. With this ban it feels like something fundamental that Gen X and Millennials enjoyed in their formative years has been lost.

How does humanity get inserted back into this equation, how do communities form and how are meaningful connections created online?

This year NCM asks, how do creative communities build and use digital infrastructure? What does community-driven, non-extractive platform design look like in practice? And are there viable alternatives through community driven digital frameworks?

We'll explore this through NCM's first major exhibition commission by Naarm-based new media studio, Pseudo. Reacting to the extractive networks built by Big Tech: maximise attention, maximise interaction, maximise time-on-screen. Pseudo's exhibition explores the value systems encoded in protocols.

The advertising value system rooted in our contemporary internet infrastructure is producing the slop shock, rage bait, doom scroll flattening of our online connections into exploitative interactions. A code which servers capital over communities.

From late June, Pseudo will question what happens when artists build their own networks, free of these monopolies. How does intentional protocol design seed different relationships within a network? Bringing together a nodal curation method and realtime mutation engine, the exhibition connects to artistic communities across Australia and internationally – asking how agentic infrastructure can be in artistic practices and what authorship is in an era of remixing.

If Pseudo asks us to imagine new protocols for the future, our October exhibition looks back to recover the radical spirit that made alternative futures feel possible in the first place. When the countercultural spirit of the internet was alive with possibilities, before all the failed promises.

Radical Computing, guest curated by Mel Huang is a love letter to the personal computer and all those who tinker, mould, extend, stretch, hack, subvert and make, with the materiality of code. The show will be a living, breathing, maximalist feast of artists, designers and engineers, who push, pull and reimagine what computation can do and can be.

From the raw energy of the Demoscene, Australia’s early rave and hacker underground, to global creative coding and open source software movements, this exhibition celebrates those who have shaped, challenged, and reimagined our world via code as a medium.

This year NCM wants everyone to be involved, not as passive consumers of content, but as active builders of infrastructure. Because those who build can imagine something better and can imagine what comes next. Join the exploration of not just what the internet is, but what it could be when communities write the code.

Dr Emily Siddons is the Co-CEO and Artistic Director of the National Communication Museum (NCM), leading the strategic vision and development of this significant new museum that opened in September 2024. Previously, Emily was Producer of Exhibitions at Museums Victoria, where she led the creative development and production of major exhibitions and experiences across the museum’s three sites. She has also held positions as Producer at The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Public Programmer at The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and Associate Curator for Liquid Architecture. She is currently a Peer Assessor for Creative Australia, Chair of the Creative Infrastructure Committee and Arts Advisory Board Member for the City of Great Dandenong. She recently completed a PhD at The University of Melbourne's Victorian College of the Arts, exploring new models of engagement for museums in contemporaneity.