The Confiscation of Digital Memory

This piece is part of our series with Naive Yearly, a conference on the odd, quiet, and poetic web. Naive Yearly’s second edition was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in September 2024, and now we’re now publishing essay versions of the conference talks. Read Kristoffer Tjalve’s foreword to the series here.

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When I was in middle school, I’d rush home from class, sneak onto the family PC, and go straight to Vbox7.com. Known simply as "Vbox" to its users, the video-sharing platform emerged as Bulgaria's answer to YouTube and dominated the country's internet landscape from 2006 to 2014.

On Vbox, I’d watch Bulgarian-dubbed episodes of Naruto and Pokémon, check the Daily Top 40 ranking for funny animal videos, or read the heated comment section under the music videos of local rappers. The platform was home to Bulgaria’s first generation of vloggers and influencers, and served as a repository for countless personal videos from everyday users. While YouTube grew increasingly polished and corporate, Vbox7’s local focus fostered a distinctly Bulgarian digital culture — rawer, more vulgar, yet also startlingly candid. Its content and community reflected an authenticity that could only emerge from a platform that remained stubbornly local.

I stopped frequenting Vbox around 2014, when YouTube launched its Bulgarian version and Facebook embraced video. In the years after, the platform gradually started losing users and removing features, burdened by aging infrastructure and copyright disputes. Unlike YouTube, which manages copyrighted content using its automatic Content ID system (which is expensive and, as any YouTuber can tell you, imperfect), Vbox opted for a simpler approach — the platform simply blocked all international access to its videos. This strategy to focus solely on the Bulgarian market took advantage of the country’s lenient copyright enforcement.

In 2013, after multiple ownership changes, Vbox landed in the hands of one of Bulgaria’s largest media groups. The new owners attempted to reinvent the platform, first through producing original web dramas and reality shows, then by pivoting to cheaper Buzzfeed-style infotainment content. Despite these changes, Vbox’s users in those remaining years were primarily those seeking content that existed in legal gray areas: fans of media that was either unavailable in Bulgaria or lacked official translations — cartoons, anime, Korean and Turkish dramas.

On January 15, 2024, in a last-ditch attempt to clean the platform from all copyrighted content, Vbox7 quietly set every user video to private. Over 10 million clips disappeared overnight, marking what could be considered the largest loss of digital culture in Bulgarian history. Not even the Internet Archive could preserve the videos; Vbox’s region-blocking had impeded international archival efforts.

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The internet knows many stories that sound like this. GeoCities’ vibrant communities vanished after corporate buyouts. Myspace lost years of user data in failed server migrations, and countless Flash-based sites and games became inaccessible when their underlying technology was abandoned. There’s probably a cousin of Vbox7 in every country, a video platform that was a local first mover but couldn’t keep up with YouTube’s rise: Trilulilu.ro in Romania, Videolog.tv in Brazil, Videa.hu in Hungary. Time capsules of local internet culture from the late 2000s and early 2010s, which have either shut down or are nearing their end.

Unlike physical artifacts that can survive neglect — a photo album can be quietly preserved in a drawer for decades — websites require constant care to survive. Their existence depends on a stream of maintenance: server costs must be paid, domain names renewed, legacy code updated. In practice, this makes the web a particularly impermanent medium. Fewer than 200 million out of the 1.1 billion websites online today are active — the rest are what writer Laura Maw, in an essay in the now defunct Real Life Magazine, calls “mostly dead.” Mostly dead websites are accessible to the public, but no longer maintained. Just like decaying shopping malls, Maw says, these websites are victims of capitalism, affected by changing technologies, unsustainable business models and dwindling ad revenue.

But unlike abandoned shopping malls, which remain visible reminders of neglect in our physical landscape, the ruins of the web don’t naturally cross our path. They lurk on the periphery, only discovered through deliberate searches or chance encounters. This invisibility makes them easy to forget, and forgotten websites are only a server payment away from disappearing.

The story of the internet of Bulgaria is mostly a story about dead and forgotten websites. In the early 2000s, our web was a vibrant ecosystem — young programmers offered free subhosting on their servers, sparking an explosion of personal websites, internet art, and alternative culture. There was Bipiem.org, a “zone for hyperculture” that merged forum discussions, image sharing, and an ezine; Experement.org, a “network buffer for contemporary art” that hosted electronic music you still can’t find elsewhere; and net art projects like Schizoid Architecture and Tower Chat, which used architectural concepts to reimagine networked communities.

Many of the sites from the early days of the Bulgarian web, both the mainstream and the countercultural, have faded into oblivion. Their creators have aged, moved on, perhaps exhausted their resources and energy for maintenance. With no successors to document their legacy or mark their decline, the scattered archives are left to tell their own stories.

I often joke that every idea I can think of was likely discussed two decades ago on some subdomain of cult.bg or dir.bg — but fortunately, no one will bother to look. I’ve spent the past five years studying the remains of these sites in the Wayback Machine, and I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. There’s so much to rediscover and reexamine.

It’s easy for me to be a doomer about this — my country is still struggling to come to terms with the complex character of its Balkan, post-communist identity, of the multiplicity of its past. Walking through Sofia, you encounter history discarded as trash everywhere, from partially dismantled monuments to literal archives spilling from garbage bins. In a place where even physical heritage crumbles, who would care about digital memory?

There’s a phrase I like to use when I talk about this: the confiscation of memory. It’s taken from a 1996 essay by Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugrešić, who observed a similar cultural phenomenon in post-war Yugoslavia.

As Yugoslavia fractured, so did its cultural touchstones – communist-era artifacts were discarded in the rush to embrace Western values. Shared jokes, music, and films were erased to make way for new national identities built on ethnic and historical markers. Suddenly, listening to Lepa Brena, a Yugoslav pop singer, felt like an act of defiance. The new authorities labeled this sentiment Yugonostalgia, a term used not just to dismiss longing for the past but to cast suspicion on those who remembered it — being nostalgic for Yugoslavia made you a suspect, a threat to the new democratic order.

For Ugrešić, Yugonostalgia was more than just longing for past stability and prosperity; it was also a symptom of a collective inability to communicate shared memories. “The past must be articulated in order to become memory,” she wrote. But when all traces of that past are erased, articulation becomes impossible.

She contrasts Yugonostalgia with American nostalgia, which functions more as a marketing engine powering endless reboots and revivals: “While in America everything rapidly ‘becomes the past,’ it seems that nothing disappears. Television broadcasts series and films which were watched once by grandfathers and are now watched by their grandsons. The old ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Star Trek, the New Generation,’ the old ‘Superman’ and the ‘Supermen’ of all subsequent generations, are available simultaneously.” (Since she wrote this in ’96, we’ve seen at least a dozen more Star Treks and Supermen!)

Yet I’ve begun to wonder if the internet era might’ve made the confiscation of memory a universal experience. The consolidation of platforms and digital media companies often leaves us powerless, watching as data and culture we thought belonged to us gets deleted at corporate whim. The choice of which parts of our collective memory remain online increasingly feels determined not by communities, but by profit-driven executives.

Just as the confiscation of memory in former Yugoslavia sparked Yugonostalgia, the rapid disappearance of the early internet has triggered its own wave of nostalgia — both from those who experienced it firsthand and those born too late to know it. Independent platforms like Neocities and SpaceHey have emerged as deliberate echoes of GeoCities and Myspace, seeking to recapture the customizability, privacy, and openness that seemed lost when those platforms disappeared. While it’s easy to dismiss this digital nostalgia as superficial — grouping it with TikTok’s shallow embrace of “aesthetics” like frutiger aero and Y2K — in the hands of independent communities, it can become something more radical and productive: a desire to research, preserve and rebuild.

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The morning after Vbox's overnight video purge, word spread through Facebook communities well before any media outlets picked up the story. I found out through a meme from the Facebook page Cartoon Network BG Fans (which actually started as a fan group on Vbox).

The comments under the meme had a mix of reactions: users of the platform expressed rage, begged for help downloading their favorite shows, or made cynical remarks that the site’s demise was long overdue.

But one exchange stood out: the CEO of Vbox’s parent company Netinfo had chimed in from his personal Facebook account to engage with the page admin.

“Nothing has been deleted and there are no plans to delete it soon,” he wrote. “We just had to make the videos private to meet copyright requirements.”

The admin's response was pointed: “You should have given people 1-2 weeks’ notice to save their favorite clips from other users. Yes, they’re not technically deleted from the site, but they are deleted from the public space, which effectively makes them lost.”

“Maybe it's not a bad idea to temporarily make the videos public again,” the CEO conceded. “I’ll discuss it with colleagues. There were reasons for the lack of prior announcement that I can’t comment on. I admit we were focused on the rights of the uploaders — we didn’t anticipate interest in content published by others.”

One week later, the Vbox team announced that they’d restore all videos for exactly a month — as they put it on their blog, “to let the VBOX7 era, in all its familiar and beloved glory, bid farewell to its loyal audience with a final bow.” Though they maintained the region block and there was still no easy way to download others’ videos, I wondered: was there still a way to archive the site?

My first attempts to save Vbox’s content were naive. I focused on preserving what mattered to me personally: middle school cartoons, videos from my hometown, rare songs that existed nowhere else. A friend asked me to rescue a 2009 clip of her playing with her puppy, posted to an account whose password was long forgotten.

I was living in San Francisco, which complicated things — I needed a Bulgarian VPN just to access the content, and standard tools like youtube-dl couldn’t handle Vbox’s player. In the meantime, I was keeping an eye on Reddit to see if anyone was trying to do the same, though I had my doubts. The news had barely made waves in Bulgaria itself — who else would care enough to preserve this corner of the internet?

This is how I came across Archive Team.

Since 2009, Archive Team have helped preserve content from GeoCities, Tumblr, Yahoo Answers, and thousands of smaller sites before they were deleted. Their work is largely anonymous and distributed, they congregate in a wiki and communicate through IRC. They also keep a detailed Deathwatch to track websites that might get deleted soon or are in danger.

I like this quote by founder Jason Scott, “Archive Team was started out of anger and a feeling of powerlessness, this feeling that we were letting companies decide for us what was going to survive and what was going to die,” Scott says. “It’s not our job to figure out what’s valuable, to figure out what’s meaningful… We work by three virtues: rage, paranoia, and kleptomania.”

Archive Team’s approach to backup first, ask questions later is what saved Vbox7. Shortly after the platform restored access to the videos, a user by the name of beastbg8 posted about it in the Archive Team IRC.

Within hours, users bypassed the geo-restriction and extracted direct URLs to many of the videos. They then set up a “Warrior,” a virtual machine environment that allows volunteers to scrape videos without technical expertise. The Warrior distributes work across multiple participants, reducing the risk of IP bans. A central program called the “Tracker” manages coordination by assigning tasks, monitoring uploads, and displaying a leaderboard of contributors.

I ran the Warrior on my old laptop, scraping about one video per minute. Other users had much more advanced setups that ran hundreds of instances in parallel and significantly sped up the progress. With the Warrior, videos first get downloaded to our individual machines, then uploaded to the Tracker, and finally archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Watching the leaderboard move and the numbers go up was exhilarating. But as the February 22 deadline approached, downloads slowed. Many failed as Vbox7’s servers struggled to handle the demand, and the site’s anti-spam defenses rate-limited the scrapers. Since Archive Team often targets mostly dead websites that cannot support the high bandwidth of the downloaders, the Warrior’s activity sometimes mimics a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, an irony the Team embraces by calling their own practice DPoS: “Distributed Preservation of Service.”

In the end, 177 archivists preserved 171.49 TiB of data from Vbox7. Despite leaving my machine running 24/7, I contributed only 22 GiB: a number that really put into perspective how much energy, money, and technical know-how gets invested into these projects by the most dedicated archivists. Most of them weren’t Bulgarian and likely had no idea about the contents of most videos, but they rushed to save the site nonetheless. Even incomplete, the Vbox7 archive will be invaluable to future researchers studying the Bulgarian web.

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Last October, a large-scale security breach crippled the Internet Archive, taking it offline for nearly a month. Despite its critical mission and vast collection, the Archive remains a nonprofit with limited resources, relying largely on philanthropy. With ongoing lawsuits and shrinking funding, it feels like a fragile single point of failure — one with potentially catastrophic consequences.

We need more backups — perhaps smaller, focused archives that can fill knowledge gaps without the burden of archiving everything. Some governments have addressed this by mandating national libraries to archive websites on their country’s domains and content in their languages across popular platforms. If Bulgaria had a national web archive, the loss of Vbox and countless other early websites from the region might have been prevented.

The internet creates history at an unprecedented pace — perhaps we need to keep it within easier reach. Rather than relegating the past to libraries or specialized search tools, we could do a better job at integrating it into our daily digital lives. I love how sites like GifCities and Cameron's World act as visual search engines for the GeoCities archive. The Wayback Machine’s browser extension has transformed how I browse, letting me instantly access older versions of websites and explore their sitemaps. I used to do this by going to their website manually, but the reduced friction has made a massive difference.

I keep wondering: if beastbg8 hadn’t alerted Archive Team's IRC, if Cartoon Network Fans BG hadn’t posted that meme or engaged with the CEO’s comment — would those videos have vanished forever?

It’s comforting to know that institutions like the Internet Archive and groups like Archive Team exist, but it still takes an individual to notice something is wrong, to start the archival process. Few websites can be archived automatically — good preservation requires human attention. What if we watched over our favorite websites as we do our favorite people? Kept personal watchlists of endangered sites? Wrote obituaries for those we’ve lost?

Web preservation extends far beyond mere data collection and archival. Preserving our digital heritage means sharing stories, engaging deeply with existing archives, and advocating for better preservation policies. Though we access the internet on our own — on personal devices, within national borders — its history belongs to all of us.