Cultural rights and preservation of digital heritage
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 MySpace? There’s a good chance this content has vanished. The Internet Archive’s “Vanishing Culture” report alerts us to a massive phenomenon: our digital cultural heritage is evaporating at a dizzying speed. But beyond the technical observation, this raises a fundamentally existential and political question. I propose to analyze this subject through the lens of cultural rights and Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technology.
Cultural rights facing digital erosion
Cultural rights view culture in its anthropological sense - that is, what constitutes us (language, tastes, family heritage, place of residence, etc.) and not “the great works of humanity.” The Fribourg Declaration (2007) affirms that “every person has the right to access cultural heritage” (article 7). This report demonstrates that this right is systematically violated by what we could call a privatization of collective memory. When Paramount deletes decades of MTV News and Comedy Central archives, it doesn’t simply destroy commercial entertainment content - it amputates part of a generation’s cultural memory, as the report clearly shows.
This situation reveals a fundamental contradiction: while Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to “freely participate in the cultural life of the community,” current digital distribution mechanisms create what the report calls gaping “memory holes.” The transformation from an ownership model to a licensing model thus constitutes a cultural expropriation, depriving communities of their ability to transmit their heritage.
Digital technology as pharmakon: the poison in the remedy
Bernard Stiegler, a philosopher who passed away in 2020, left us a precious concept, the pharmakon: every technical tool is both remedy and poison. For example, the Internet promised universal access to culture, and this is partly true, but this same tool creates the conditions for this culture’s disappearance. To summarize:
- Remedy: Digital technology enables unprecedented cultural dissemination (Wayback Machine, digitization projects)
- Poison: It creates the conditions for its own disappearance (obsolescence, DRM, proprietary control).
The disappearance of 50 million songs on MySpace or the intentional destruction of DuMont archives reveals what Stiegler calls informational entropy: the growing disorganization of memory systems under the effect of market logic.
Another example: 87% of video games created before 2010 are now legally inaccessible. These works are not simply commercial products. They are, like cinema or literature, testimonies of our time, spaces of shared experience, objects of cultural transmission. Their disappearance is not collateral damage of technical progress: it’s the direct result of economic and legal choices.
From ownership to rental: a cultural expropriation?
Bernard Stiegler distinguishes three types of “retention” (memory):
- primary (immediate perception),
- secondary (recollection),
- tertiary (technical memory supports). It’s the latter that is in peril today.
The “Vanishing Culture” report precisely documents the collapse of this digital tertiary retention. As I mentioned above, when 87% of historical video games become inaccessible, it’s the technical exteriorization of our collective memory that is compromised.
This situation illustrates what Stiegler calls the hyperindustrialization of culture: memory supports, having become purely digital, are subject to immediate profitability logics, or long-term (via the long tail principle), only if it’s in the industrialist’s interest.
Let’s remember, for the older among us: we used to buy records, cassettes, DVDs... We owned them. We could lend them, give them away, bequeath them. While today, we “access” Spotify, Netflix, digital books (even with libraries when we subscribe to their digital services, which they don’t operate). But what happens when:
- The company goes bankrupt?
- Rights holders remove a work from the catalog?
- Terms of use change?
- Our subscription ends?
This shift from ownership to licensing is not trivial. It’s what Stiegler called “generalized proletarianization”: we lose not only our know-how (with industrialization), but also our ways of living and our ability to transmit. We become, in a way, “tenants” of our own culture.
The case of Papiamento: when a language risks disappearing from digital space
The report cites the instructive example of Papiamento in Aruba. This creole language, spoken by 300,000 people, risked becoming invisible in digital space. Without the efforts of the Biblioteca Nacional Aruba and the Internet Archive, an entire community could have lost digital access to its own language.
Isn’t this a flagrant violation of cultural rights? The Fribourg Declaration affirms everyone’s right to “identify with one or more cultural communities.” But how can we exercise this right if the digital traces of our culture disappear?
Towards a contributive economy of memory
The necessary reappropriation of technical milieus
Faced with this crisis, the report proposes solutions that align with Stiegler’s vision of a contribution economy. Initiatives like CAMP BOOKS by Brooke Palmieri or community preservation efforts for LGBTQ+ video games embody what Stiegler calls care practices: activities that produce negentropy (organization, meaning, value) against market entropy.
The Internet Archive itself represents a form of general organology in Bernard Stiegler’s sense: an attempt to think together psychic organs (individuals), social organs (institutions) and technical organs (digital supports) in a coherent ecology of memory.
New juridical-technical arrangements
The Internet Archive’s legal battle against major publishers reveals the urgency of what Stiegler calls a new critique of political economy adapted to the digital age. The report’s proposals - reduced copyright durations, preservation exceptions, right to digital ownership - constitute attempts to create what we could call, in Bernard Stiegler’s vocabulary, associated milieus capable of caring for collective memory.
The imperative of a politics of memory
The convergence between the “Vanishing Culture” report, cultural rights and Stiegler’s thought reveals that digital preservation is not a technical but an existential question. It touches on what Stiegler calls transindividuation: the process by which individuals constitute themselves by inheriting and transforming a common cultural fund.
Without access to this fund, which the report documents as being in massive decline, the very possibility of forming society is compromised. The struggle for digital preservation thus becomes a struggle for what Stiegler calls the life of the mind against the forces of deindividuation and desublimation carried by hyperindustrialization.
The urgency is therefore not only archival but political: it’s about building a true ecology of mind where cultural rights would be guaranteed by technical and legal arrangements allowing the transmission, appropriation and creative transformation of our common heritage. Only under this condition can we, to use Stiegler’s words, “take care of youth and generations” in a world where digital has become the very milieu of our collective existence.
To take action
- Download and save what matters to us, and take care of backups, as I document precisely in the article Digital is not immaterial. Yes, download. Because possessing a local copy of what culturally constitutes us becomes an act of resistance. As I explain in this article on piracy, private copying can be a blessing for culture.
- Generate and support preservation initiatives, financially or as volunteers. The Internet Archive, but also local digitization and backup projects.
- Demand appropriate public policies. Why shouldn’t public libraries become local digital preservation centers? Why not create a truly operational digital legal deposit?
- Practice an ecology of attention. Take care of what matters to us, document it, share it, transmit it. We could say “cultivate our digital garden.”
In the XXIst Century, most of the human productions are made with digital tools and circulate in digital form: written, photo, sound, video, multimedia...
What is heritage? It is the access to human productions of the past and present (cultural, artistic, industrial, built, financial...). Heritage has a cultural, political, economic and historical value. Without heritage, societies have no history. Without the Eiffel Tower, without the Sacré Cœur, without the Louvre Museum and other elements of architectural heritage, Paris would not have a tourist economy, for example.
The heritage that we will be able to produce from contemporary digital productions will strongly contribute to our future wealth, in every sense of the word. But how can we identify, build up and enhance our digital heritage? Methodological, technical and strategic elements.
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