In the mid 90s, there was a growing critical Internet culture in Europe that connected both the East and the West of Europe. Major hubs for this dynamic communication and exchange were the mailing lists Nettime and Syndicate. These informal communities consisted of artists, geeks, activists, and theorists who considered the Internet to be a potential platform for expression and freedom. At the same time, these groups were critical of the commodification of the Internet and they were in general critical towards the so-called Californian ideology, an American entrepreneurial model of internet development, that the groups in Europe perceived as potentially threatening to the democratic aspects crucial to them.  

One important narrative among these arts and activist groups in the nineties was the idea of a united Europe. Looking back and considering the problems the EU has now, this artistic drive for a united Europe in the nineties seems quite romantic. The situation in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall has changed a lot, and there were many initiatives that wanted to connect the Eastern European Art scene with the Western one. Mostly, this connectedness meant introducing “undiscovered” Eastern European contemporary art to the Western art market that started to flourish in the nineties. But the case with the net cultures movements was quite different considering their general avoidance of entering the art market, something that these art groups managed to successfully maintain even until recently.