Towards a distributed cultural sector
What if digital cultures showed us how to build the commons through distribution rather than centralization? This hypothesis invites us to rethink cultural fragmentation not as a threat but as an opportunity.
Digital technology as a laboratory for a new grammar of the commons
Digital platforms seem to have succeeded in an audacious bet: creating shared meaning from dizzying diversity. YouTube hosts billions of videos in all languages, on every imaginable subject. TikTok sees traditional African dance coexist with quantum physics, grandmother’s recipes with political activism. Yet this apparent cacophony produces vibrant communities, deep learning, effective transmission.
Could we see a lesson here? These spaces suggest that diversity may not be the enemy of the commons but its very condition. The more different content there is, the more everyone can find their place, their path, their peers. The commons would then emerge not from top-down standardization but from a multitude of horizontal connections between heterogeneous elements.
This hypothesis questions the traditional approach of the public cultural sector, inherited from a vision where the people had to be “elevated” toward a single legitimate culture. What if digital technology showed us that the commons could be built through aggregation of singularities, not through imposition of a model? Wikipedia doesn’t have a unique style but millions of voices that converge thanks to shared protocols - perhaps a path to explore for the cultural sector.
Interoperability as a potential philosophy
Interoperability could be more than a technical issue. We could see it as a philosophy allowing different systems to communicate without losing their specificity. In the digital world, it’s embodied in open standards, public APIs, free formats that enable circulation without standardization.
What if the cultural sector adopted this philosophy? This could mean abandoning the temptation of the centralized system, of the single platform that would manage everything. Experience suggests that these digital cathedrals often become problematic spaces of power. Wouldn’t it be more relevant to think archipelago: autonomous islands connected by light bridges?
This approach could take concrete forms:
- Shared documentation protocols allowing each cultural project to tell its story in a reusable format
- Systematic open licenses for all productions funded by public money
- Metadata standards facilitating cross-cutting discoverability of content
- Open APIs so that public cultural data can irrigate other spaces
Creating commons through method: a hypothesis to explore
Digital commons seem to have grasped something essential: unity could come not from content but from method. Wikipedia doesn’t prescribe what to write but how to write together. Free software doesn’t dictate functionalities but contribution processes.
Could this approach resolve the apparent contradiction between diversity and coherence? We could imagine an explosion of cultural projects in companies, hospitals, transport systems, while building commons if these projects shared certain methods:
- Open documentation as a founding practice? Each project, wherever it emerges, could publicly document its processes, its learnings, its failures. Not in a logic of control but of sharing. This documentation could itself become cultural work, sensitive testimony as much as practical transmission. It could use web tools (blogs, wikis, social networks) to create a distributed collective memory.
- Experience narratives as new artistic formats? Digital technology has popularized hybrid narrative forms that could inspire us. These short, modular, shareable formats could tell the story of culture in the making. They could transform each participant into a potential narrator.
- Communities of practice as new fluid institutions? Rather than rigid structures, we could imagine flexible networks of practitioners who exchange, help each other, co-create. These communities could practice what we might call digital hospitality: welcoming newcomers, documenting for those absent, archiving for future ones.
Sketches for a distributed cultural sector
- “Distributed residencies” to experiment with?
We could imagine light formats where an artist becomes a “distributed resident” not of a place but of a territory, with a mission to reveal and document the cultures already present there. The deliverable wouldn’t be an overarching work but perhaps a sensitive cartography, published online, of existing cultural practices. The artist could become a facilitator of the inhabitants’ own cultural expression. - “Territorial cultural APIs” to build?
Each territory could perhaps develop an open API listing all cultural projects, whether institutional, associative, entrepreneurial or citizen-led. This API wouldn’t be a simple directory but could become a living stream, directly fed by actors. It could perhaps enable unprecedented crossovers, fortuitous discoveries, improbable collaborations. - “Link weavers” to train?
We could envision new professional profiles, neither pure artists nor pure technicians, but intermediaries capable of creating bridges between separate worlds. These professionals could support distributed documentation, facilitate horizontal connections, animate hybrid communities of practice. - A “right to shared memory” to establish?
Any project funded by public money could include not only a right but perhaps an invitation to shared documentation. This documentation would no longer be seen as an administrative constraint but could become an essential part of the project, funded and valued as such. Participants would have access to traces of their participation, could contribute to the collective narrative, reuse the content produced. - “Distributed narrative factories” to imagine?
Light devices could go capture cultural narratives where they are lived without being spoken. These narratives, assembled on open platforms, could perhaps progressively build another cultural geography, more inclusive and vibrant.
Antifragility through distribution: a path to explore?
Could distribution make the cultural sector more antifragile, in the sense Nassim Nicholas Taleb means it? A distributed system could have this remarkable property: shocks that weaken certain nodes strengthen the whole through collective learning. If a project fails, its documentation allows others to learn. If a crisis occurs, the diversity of approaches increases the chances that a solution will emerge.
This antifragility might involve:
- Accepting error as learning material
- Documenting failures as much as successes
- Multiplying small experiments rather than grand plans
- Building redundant networks rather than unique structures
Trust in collective intelligence: a necessary bet?
The most difficult part of this transformation might be accepting to let go. Cultural institutions were built on the idea that they knew what was good for the public. What if digital technology invited us to bet on distributed intelligence, on knowledge that emerges from interactions rather than prescriptions?
This trust wouldn’t mean abandoning all requirements. The most successful digital commons have rules, but these rules are collectively negotiated, evolving, transparent. They aim to enable productive coexistence of differences rather than imposing a single norm.
An open proposal to continue thinking together
These hypotheses don’t claim to propose a truth but to open paths. The mistake might be wanting to define a priori what the cultural commons should be. Digital cultures suggest that the commons emerges, it isn’t decreed. It’s born from connecting diversities that find, along the way, their resonances and complementarities.
The fragmentation of the cultural sector could only be virtuous under certain conditions: documenting our experiences with generosity, opening our methods to discussion, weaving horizontal links without pre-established hierarchy, welcoming the unexpected as wealth. It’s perhaps by cultivating these practices that we’ll build a truly common culture.
Digital technology is neither the solution nor the model to copy. It perhaps simply offers us inspiration: we could make society differently, diversity could be a strength when accompanied by tools for connection, culture might not need cathedrals but living networks. It’s up to us to invent, experiment, learn together the concrete forms of this new cultural deal.
This transformation would invite a form of creative humility: accepting not to control everything, trusting emergent processes, carefully documenting our tentative steps. It’s perhaps at this price that the distributed cultural sector could become not a dilution but an enrichment of the commons, that is, the emancipation of each individual, going hand in hand with a refoundation of democracy in our new reality.
My multidisciplinary practices—spanning creation, cultural action, training, and support in a wide range of cultural, social, and educational contexts across France—provide me with a privileged, subjective, and in-depth observatory of the cultural sector in France.
This sector is weakened by its position, often deemed “non-essential” by many political leaders, by the competition from digital platforms in cultural practices, as well as by challenges and obstacles related to the difficulty of establishing interdisciplinary collaborations and the scarcity of evaluations, which are often poorly conducted and instrumentalized.
My observatory allows me to identify dynamics that work, as well as difficulties I observe. Here, I propose to share my analyses, methods, and suggestions, hoping they may prove useful. My goal is to contribute to a stronger cultural sector in the future, as I believe that defending a cultural sector funded by taxpayers’ money holds the potential for emancipation, the development of freedoms, democracy, and the capacity to act—in a way that is fundamentally different from what private actors produce.
This is possible if there is no hypocrisy, and in my view, it comes at the cost of a commitment to lucidity and self-questioning, a choice to deconstruct representations, and perhaps to challenge certain privileges and systems of domination.
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The Fertile Margin
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The Hypocrisy of Cultural Actors’ Independence
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The Free Institution
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Why Are Cultural Actors So Fragile?
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Social Networks and Cultural Institutions: Breaking the Strategic Deadlock
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Beyond Mobilizing Audiences: Building Democratic Narratives
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On the Fragility of Corporatism
When the defense of cultural privileges masquerades as freedom of expression.
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The connected audience
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Rethinking the digital content strategy of cultural institutions
For a web presence that prioritizes editorial authority over social media dispersion.
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The artistic relationship with the audience
The paradoxical intimacy of live streams on social media.
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The Non-Institutional Cultural Institution
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The Accelerated Eye
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The myth of recognition through cultural democratization
Rethinking artistic value beyond systems of domination.
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The Misguided Debate on Funding Cuts for Culture
Rethinking the Role of Public Funding Beyond the Numbers
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For a narrative revolution of territories
The urgency of a horizontal cultural democracy.
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Implementing cultural dissemination
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A critical approach to cultural policies through the lens of cultural rights.
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Dilapidation of resources in supply logic
For a democratic revolution of cultural practices.
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Formalizing the informal
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Towards a distributed cultural sector
Hypotheses on the commons and digital diversity.
What if digital cultures showed us how to build the commons through distribution rather than centralization? This hypothesis invites us to rethink (…) -
France’s cultural sector faces the urgent need for a rethink
From 1959 to 2025, history repeats itself... in reverse.
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Cultivating digital sovereignty
For a democratic reclaiming of our digital spaces.
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Cultural investigation with artificial intelligence
Towards an open, non-directive methodology for revealing the unexpected.
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Corporate memory at the service of cultural rights
Rethinking the relationship between cultural venues and people.
Cultural institutions, through their failure to collect and care for data, forget those they welcome, denying their dignity. This amnesia (…) -
Towards voluntary evaluation of cultural projects
For “cultural prevention” policies.
The subsidized cultural sector is going through a crisis of legitimacy after betraying its democratic values. I believe that a refoundation (…) -
Welcoming radicalized people to cultural venues
For a truly inclusive cultural democracy.
Do cultural venues filter their audiences, consciously or unconsciously, according to criteria of radicalism? This question reveals our (…) -
Cultural venues and social networks
How to turn audiences into ambassadors rather than chasing followers.
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Documentation and artificial intelligence
Rethinking professional practices.
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For a virtuous dispersal of the cultural sector
The end of traditional cultural influence.
The cultural sector is going through a major crisis that reveals a paradigm shift. In my opinion, we must now cultivate culture everywhere, in all (…) -
The marginality of cultural institutions
Lucidity of a paradigm shift.
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On the role of artists
For a politics of the artist.
The political role of the artist is never neutral. Whether they want it or not, their social position and aesthetic choices reflect an engagement, (…) -
Primary and secondary cultural practices
For a cultural dialectic of public proposals.
Daily cultural practices (internal) are underestimated compared to external cultural offerings, yet the latter are secondary in people’s lives. (…) -
Re-engaging France’s public cultural sector as a good corporate citizen
Avenues of action for a permanent future.
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Evolving forms of artistic creation
An anthropological reflection on the forms of subsidized artistic creation.
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Beyond walls: video as a vehicle for cultural democracy
When digital mediation transforms the relationship between citizens and heritage.
Video in museums represents a challenge of cultural mediation and the democratization of heritage. In the digital age, it transforms the (…) -
Legitimizing unfamiliar cultural practices
Anthropology of the future.
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Putting Artificial Intelligence to good use in the cultural sector
Methodological approaches.
By 2025, it seems essential to enable employees and stakeholders in the cultural sector to share the challenges of AI within their professional (…) -
Overcoming the fragility of public funding for culture
Anthropological point of view, to sketch out future paths.
Public funding for culture is currently perceived as being under considerable threat, and so the cultural sector seems to be in an extremely (…) -
Systematize mutual discoveries between cultural players
Removing obstacles to cooperation.
Common-sense proposal for better mutual understanding among cultural actors in the same territory. Why don’t we know each other well enough?In (…) -
Pour une robustesse coopérative des projets culturels
Réflexion sur les modalités de coopération territoriale et d’évaluation.
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“Donotdo”
Methodological concept of setting the world in motion.
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New directions
A film by Emmanuel Vergès and Benoît Labourdette (1’25s, 2021).
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Balance and supports
A method for the sustainability of projects.
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Build antifragility for cultural projects
Methodological proposal.
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Systematize mutual discoveries between cultural players Removing obstacles to cooperation.
Common-sense proposal for better mutual understanding among cultural actors in the same territory. Why don’t we know each other well enough?In (…) -
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Participatory design and Artificial Intelligence Protocols and precautions for controlled innovation.
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Autumn Festival in Normandy Hybridations # 2 - New creative ways (web conference) Conferences
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