From 26 July to 31 August 2013, Goldsmith curated a conceptual art project called Printing out the Internet in collaboration with LABOR and UbuWeb, that invited the public to print and send pages from the Internet to an art gallery in Mexico City, with the intention to literally print out the entire Internet.

Goldsmith dedicated the exhibition to Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide while facing federal charges of illegally downloading and disseminating millions of files from the digital library JSTOR. As Goldsmith said in an interview, "The amount of what he liberated was enormous — we can’t begin to understand the magnitude of his action until we begin to materialize and actualize it. This project tries to bring that point home." By the end of the project, Goldsmith had accumulated over 10 tonnes of paper from more than 20,000 contributors.

Although Goldsmith said that all the paper would be recycled at the end of the project, bloggers and journalists criticized the project for its alleged environmental impact. Goldsmith and his supporters, however, argued that the conversation generated by the piece becomes just as important as the work itself. As one art critic wrote, "Perhaps we should see Goldsmith’s project not as one of triviality, spectacle, or waste, but rather as a vital (even if temporary) documentation and as a form of protest to keep the internet free, in so much that it is. Why print out the internet? Because we can, for now, and because maybe we should."

http://printingtheinternet.tumblr.com