HASTAC Goes Offline After 25 Years

After more than a quarter century of community building, the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC, pronounced “Haystack) will go offline. Dubbed “the world’s first and oldest academic social network,” the organization will no longer support interactive posting or commenting or register members. 

The interactive HASTAC social network will be turned into an archive on the Knowledge Commons, while the organization will shutter its biannual newsletter. This will be the final year of the HASTAC Scholars program. 

In a message on Wednesday, HASTAC co-founders Cathy N. Davidson, distinguished professor emerita at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Duke University, and Shelly Eversley, a professor at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, said the high costs of maintaining the platform motivated their decision. 

“A social network is costly and tremendously complex to run and, after more than 25 years, is no longer sustainable,” they said. “Rather than let HASTAC dwindle and die, we are sunsetting it with dignity and enormous pride in a quarter century of thinking together about, through, with, and sometimes against new technologies and their application in society.” 

Founded in 2000 as an online, interactive, international network “to address the vast social and technological issues of the interactive World Wide Web,” the network has grown to over 18,000 individual members and 400 institutional affiliates, including Arizona State University. Users can create blog posts and start discussions, as well as post job ads and opportunities. 

“HASTAC has never had a singular mission but, rather, has grappled with the many different technological and educational twists and turns of the last quarter century, always with a joint and balanced emphasis on equality and innovation,” Davidson and Eversley said. 

The Knowledge Commons tech team has begun archiving HASTAC’s content from 2017 to the present. HASTAC content from 2004 to 2017 is already preserved on a physical computer at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University.