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.