Digital Heritage and Sovereignty
In the 21st century, the vast majority of human production is made with digital tools and circulates in digital form: writing, photography, sound, video, multimedia. Our memories, our works, our social and institutional archives have become data, almost always stored somewhere other than with us, by companies to which we have entrusted their keeping.
I use the word “heritage” for lack of a better one, aware of what it carries of patrimony and transmission through the fathers. What is at stake here is something broader and more alive: access to human production, past and present — cultural, artistic, social, intimate. Heritage has a cultural, political, economic and historical value; without it, societies have no history.
The digital world arrived very fast, and we have not had the time to take its measure. We believe it to be immaterial, when in fact it rests on physical supports — fragile, located somewhere, under a given jurisdiction. Preserving our data is not merely a technical matter: it is a new responsibility, one we are only beginning to grasp. And it touches our very identity, for what we entrust to infrastructures we do not understand — subject to foreign laws, or exposed to failure and political pressure — is the memory of who we are.
This is where heritage and sovereignty meet: it is by taking care of our heritage that we become sovereign, and we can be sovereign only on the condition that we take care of our heritage. One does not go without the other. This plays out at every level—from the national level and the government’s infrastructure decisions, to organizations and local communities, all the way down to the more everyday level of our own actions.
How, then, are we to identify, preserve and transmit this digital heritage without giving up our sovereignty? This section offers food for thought, along with methodological, technical and strategic markers for taking hold of these questions concretely.
