The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the World Wide Web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time, the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship seriously, and built homepages about themselves and subjects in which they were experts. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free web hosting provider that was modeled after a city, where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighborhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was, as a neighborhood for all things rural, by far the largest, but there were neighborhoods for fashion, arts, and Far East related topics, to name just a few. Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of "homesteaders," as the digital tenants were called, and was bought by Yahoo for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later, in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shut down and deleted. In a heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650-gigabyte BitTorrent file is a digital Pompeii, serving as the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.