Our fragile memory
Our lives are now inscribed in digital form: emails, photos, documents, etc. But this collective memory is excessively fragile. Without active archiving, our heritage disappears completely, threatening our history and our democracy.
The new sites of our memories
The importance of archives and documentation in political and democratic terms is much greater than we think. We have documented this well as part of the Participatory Creation Biennial in 2025.
The vast majority of traces of human activities today, intellectual, political, community, personal traces, are stored in digital objects: hard drives, memory cards, mobile phones, cameras and above all, mainly, in the cloud (that is, in data centers to which we pay for access, but without physical possession of our data).
Whether it’s our emails, messages, photographs, documents or romantic encounters, these “contents” are stored on the servers of Google, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and others. These contents are personal or collective: the data of the vast majority of local and territorial authorities today (cities, departments, regions), as well as a very large number of companies and associations, are stored on servers and under the responsibility of Microsoft, for which individuals and communities pay for the function of accessing all this data in the present.
Websites, likewise, are stored with hosting providers that we pay during their operation. After operation, where, before digital technology, material traces consisted of paper or objects, with digital technology, material traces have not become immaterial, because digital is not immaterial. We access it fluidly from various devices, but digital is no less material than paper. Simply, to be able to access digital data, machines are needed; we cannot access it directly as we do with paper.
Active care to be invented
Let’s take a music festival as an example. During the festival’s existence, it will be possible to find enormous amounts of information, watch videos, read interviews, etc. Access is much greater than in the past, it’s absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented. But if one day the festival is no longer funded by the communities that allow it to exist and the website disappears, insofar as the vast majority of information was in digital form, and the closure of the website will be effective, since no one will be there to pay for the conservation of this data, well, extremely few traces will remain. Even communication documents, meeting minutes, etc., which previously could have been kept in boxes and perhaps found one day, will disappear with the termination of the Microsoft 365 or Google Documents subscription, because the association will no longer exist. And if the association organizing the festival no longer exists and the communities have withdrawn, who would pay to take care of this data?
The big difference between preserving non-digital data and preserving digital data is that non-digital data only takes up space in an attic, in a cellar... Obviously, data can deteriorate over time, but it can be preserved without any care in abandoned houses, garages, barns, which one day, before rehabilitating them, are emptied. And there, documents are discovered. We can have heritage that no one has taken care of, even for hundreds of years, and which becomes accessible again when some discover and value them.
Regarding digital heritage, it’s completely different: if no one takes care of it, if we don’t care for it in the present (which represents a relatively low cost, but requires strong attention), well, this heritage will disappear completely and irremediably.
We have all experienced this personally. If in the past we had written a text in a notebook, we could lose this notebook, have it stolen, or it could be destroyed in a fire. The change of status between presence and absence was linked to important physical events: fire, flood, theft, etc. I’m not saying we didn’t lose many things before digital, but the loss was felt, was linked to strong events, inattention, malice, a natural disaster... Whereas today, it has happened to all of us to have written a text on our computer and, due to a bug, a small human error in saving, a small USB key malfunction, etc., the text has disappeared absolutely, irremediably. Whereas even if the notebook fell into water, if we went to retrieve it, we could find fragments of text. In the digital domain, when something disappears, it most often disappears totally and irremediably.
We experienced this during the fire at an OVH hosting building in Strasbourg in 2020: 400,000 websites disappeared totally and irremediably from the hard drives in this location, because the fire had destroyed them. The only ones who were able to recover all or part of their data were those who had taken care to back it up, that is, they had duplicated it preventively. Neither insurance nor lawsuits served any purpose in repairing these losses.
Another example: in Île-de-France, for 25 years, there was an agency supporting the distribution and production of performing arts called Arcadi, closely linked to the previous left-wing presidency of the Île-de-France region. Relatively shortly after its arrival, the new right-wing presidency of the Region decided to eliminate this agency. It was a political choice of the present, but the irremediable disappearance of the agency’s website, which can be understood in political terms from the Region’s point of view, has resulted, for anyone doing internet research on the history of distribution and performing arts in Île-de-France, in the pure and simple disappearance of traces of this history at the regional level. The memory is largely erased.
For a digital preservation policy
We can clearly see that this example is eminently political and we know that the effects of erasing traces of history can have immense impacts on human beings. It seems very important to me to recall this and to make it conscious with digital technology. We see this with the African continent, whose current living conditions and political regimes were produced by the erasure of traces of the histories of these cultures. This was well before digital and it’s what allowed the fabrication of a colonial narrative that could never have been pronounced if there had been traces and possible narratives for these cultures. The cancellation of entire sections of history is today in a phase of multiplication due to digital technologies. That is to say, much worse future dominations could occur than what has been happening to Africa for several centuries.
This represents real work, a real skill-building that concerns, in my opinion, every citizen: the exercise of democracy today passes, among other things but it’s a very important part, through the care taken with digital heritage: its conservation, its organization, its transmission.
The issue is not only political in the sense that it would only concern certain people who have commitments in party politics. No, the issue is human, it is civilizational, it is familial, it is psychic. It’s the issue of who am I, where do I come from and why am I here.
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.
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Taking back control of our data
A cultural path, not just a technical and legal one.
When American law reigns over European data, the only response is to rebuild a culture of digital sovereignty, piece by piece, NAS by NAS, one (…) -
Sovereign Digital, a Micropolitical Choice
Escaping the Hegemonic Imaginary of Digital Tools.
Our daily choices of digital tools lock us into a capitalist imaginary. Moving from Microsoft to Free Software is not just a technical issue: it (…) -
Digital sovereignty, a democratic emergency
When our public institutions jeopardize our collective autonomy.
The loss of our digital sovereignty does not result from the thoughtlessness of citizen-users, but from a form of political unconsciousness (…) -
Sovereignty or Security?
Digital responsibility put to the test of reality.
The fire at a state data center in South Korea in September 2025 proves human fragility in the face of digital storage. Between risky sovereignty (…) -
Reflection on the Evolution of Audiovisual Media in Libraries
For a citizen-driven heritage preservation of territorial audiovisual creations.
Libraries are facing the disappearance of physical audiovisual media. This technical transformation calls, in my view, for an anthropological (…) -
Conformism versus Sovereignty
The comfort of digital dependence versus the requirement of data mastery.
Our digital lives rely on standardized tools. While this conformism simplifies usage, it exposes us to a loss of control. Let us reflect on this (…) -
For a Political Consciousness of Digital Technology
When our technological choices shape tomorrow’s world.
Every click, every application used, every digital service adopted constitutes a political act that participates in building our collective (…) -
“The flavor of data”: for a phenomenology of digital autonomy
Sentiment of dependency and digital sovereignty.
In the contemporary digital ecosystem, our apparent freedom of use conceals a structural and total dependence on platforms. This illusion of (…) -
The Fantasy of Digital Ecology
When individual guilt-shaming masks industrial predation.
In our situation of ecological emergency, greenwashing diverts our attention from the real culprits. While we conscientiously sort our waste, the (…) -
Cultural data and cultural rights
For an inclusive heritage democracy in the digital age.
Citizen cultural data is tomorrow’s heritage. Their recognition and preservation constitute a major democratic challenge for building a (…) -
Cultivating digital sovereignty
For a democratic reclaiming of our digital spaces.
Faced with our growing dependence on tech giants, digital sovereignty is becoming a major democratic challenge. It’s time to act collectively. The (…) -
Digital politics
When clicking becomes voting: the hidden face of our technological choices.
Code is law: digital tools are not neutral. Our daily technological choices are political acts that shape the world. Here are concrete elements (…) -
Cultural rights and preservation of digital heritage
Bernard Stiegler’s technical philosophy sheds political light.
Have you ever tried to find a video you loved on YouTube from ten years ago? A blog post that made an impression on you? Your friends’ photos on (…) -
Our fragile memory
For a digital archiving policy.
Our lives are now inscribed in digital form: emails, photos, documents, etc. But this collective memory is excessively fragile. Without active (…) -
Liability and computer backup
To stop turning our backs on our future.
Computer backup is often neglected due to a lack of understanding and the illusion of the ubiquity of digital data. This unawareness exposes us to (…) -
Digital and rationality
For a non-phantasmic vision of digital technologies.
Digital technology, often wrongly associated with rationality, is in reality an imperfect and material technology. Our choices of digital tools (…) -
Podcast: “The living archive”
Benoît Labourdette reflects on the challenges of digital archiving in the arts and culture (44’, 2023).
How empowering people to take responsibility for archiving and using data can be a real strategy for the vitality of creation, both artistically (…) -
Digital is not immaterial
Elements of understanding.
The digital world is much more material than we think. It seems important to me to take the measure of it in a concrete way, it is what can allow (…) -
“The Long Tail”: Cultural Diversity in the Digital Age
Tool for the design of cultural projects.
The “long tail” is one of the essential concepts of the Internet economy. Contrary to popular belief, on the Internet it is the great diversity of (…) -
“Artistic creation and digital heritage”: conference by Benoît Labourdette
Bibliothèque Forney (Paris) on Thursday, April 28, 2022 from 7:30 pm to 9 pm. Free admission.
Awareness and responsibility in the present with regard to our digital heritage are the guarantee of the construction of our humanity.Human (…)
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Sovereign Digital, a Micropolitical Choice Escaping the Hegemonic Imaginary of Digital Tools.
Our daily choices of digital tools lock us into a capitalist imaginary. Moving from Microsoft to Free Software is not just a technical issue: it (…) -
Sovereignty or Security? Digital responsibility put to the test of reality.
The fire at a state data center in South Korea in September 2025 proves human fragility in the face of digital storage. Between risky sovereignty (…) -
Cultural rights and preservation of digital heritage Bernard Stiegler’s technical philosophy sheds political light.
Have you ever tried to find a video you loved on YouTube from ten years ago? A blog post that made an impression on you? Your friends’ photos on (…) -
Digital politics When clicking becomes voting: the hidden face of our technological choices.
Code is law: digital tools are not neutral. Our daily technological choices are political acts that shape the world. Here are concrete elements (…) -
For a Political Consciousness of Digital Technology When our technological choices shape tomorrow’s world.
Every click, every application used, every digital service adopted constitutes a political act that participates in building our collective (…)
