Published in Third Text volume 34, 2020
Capitalism tends to work against digital preservation. James Newman writes, "The games industry is essentially founded upon business models and discursive practices that effectively 'wear out' its past and present in order to sell the innovations and revolutions of the future." Among the strongest imperatives of the culture industries are planned obsolescence and even deletion of commodities, and the continual replacement of old commodities with newer ones, which stand in opposition to the preservationist imperatives of cultural heritage systems.
Kosnik makes the argument that centralized, "official, institutional" repositories are already vulnerable to catastrophic loss, and that they will be even more so under conditions of collapse. She argues that this is exacerbated by the artificial scarcity foundational to capitalist profit extraction, pointing to the relative difficulty of creating legally sanctioned archives of "industrial mass media productions" due to the fanatical application and enforcement of DRM technologies.
Ergo, it is the illegal, and therefore necessarily decentralized and highly redundant, copies of "industrial mass media productions" maintained by "pirate-archivists" that will likely preserve these cultural artifacts into and through the coming global collapse. She wraps up the paper with some potential future scenarios, fitting well into a solarpunk, convivialist vision of the world, where small communities in the post-collapse future gather to watch or listen to pre-collapse works from the archives of their local pirate-archivist with whatever bit of hardware said communities are able to scrape together.
Very anticapitalist. Good compatibility with notions of degrowth, though it is not a degrowth-oriented paper, particularly in its ending scenarios of improved community ties (and therefore happiness) in spite of overall reduced material consumption.