The Politics of Digital Stratigraphy

Power, Preservation, and the Question of Whose Heritage

Digital Archaeology Reconsidered: Essay IV of IV

Unearth Heritage Foundry

Abstract

The previous essays in this series have established the theoretical foundations and taxonomic categories as well as the methodological protocols of archaeobytology. This concluding essay turns to politics. Archives are not neutral repositories; such institutions are instruments of power that determine what is remembered and what is forgotten, whose voices are preserved and whose are silenced. The essay examines three political dimensions of digital archaeology: the structural violence of platform capitalism, which creates and destroys digital heritage according to corporate imperatives; the unequal distribution of preservation resources, which privileges certain communities while abandoning others to digital oblivion; and the politics of access, which determines who can investigate the digital past and for what purposes. Against these forces of enclosure and erasure, the essay articulates an ethics of digital sovereignty, a commitment to decentralized preservation and community control as well as resistance to the platform logics that threaten digital heritage. Archaeobytology, properly understood, is not solely a scholarly discipline but a political practice.

Introduction: The Archive Is Not Innocent

Every archive is a political act. The decision to preserve one item and not another, to classify in a specific way intent on exclusion, to grant access to specific groups and deny others; such choices are not neutral technical choices but exercises of power with consequences for how the past is understood and who gets to understand it. As archival theorist Terry Cook has argued, archival work involves "the privileging of certain records and records creators, certain functions, activities, and groups in society, and the marginalizing or silencing of others."¹

Political considerations apply with special force to digital archives. Physical archives are constrained by material scarcity: there is only so much storage space and only so much money for acid-free folders and climate control alongside only so many archivists to process incoming materials. The constraints impose a certain democracy of limitation; no archive can preserve everything. Digital archives, however, face different constraints. Storage is cheap and getting cheaper. The bottleneck is not capacity but *will*: the decision of platform owners and institutional administrators alongside funding bodies to preserve or destroy and to open access or restrict it as well as to invest in certain communities' heritage while neglecting others.

The previous essays in this series have established archaeobytology as a theoretical framework and an ontological position as well as a methodological practice. The final installment addresses what has been implicit throughout: the political stakes of digital archaeology. Who owns the digital past? Who decides what is preserved and what is lost? What power relations are encoded in the infrastructure of digital preservation? And how should archaeobytology position itself in relation to these structures of power?

The essay proceeds in four movements. First, the text examines the political economy of platform capitalism and its structural violence against digital heritage. Second, the analysis considers the unequal distribution of preservation resources and its consequences for whose heritage survives. Third, the discussion addresses the politics of access; who can investigate the digital past, under what conditions, and to what ends. Fourth, the essay articulates an ethics of digital sovereignty as archaeobytology's political commitment.

Part I: Platform Capitalism and the Structural Violence of Enclosure

The Homestead Betrayal

The destruction of GeoCities in 2009 stands as the paradigmatic case of what is termed *platform betrayal*: the violation of implicit social contracts between platforms and users, resulting in the mass destruction of digital heritage.²

GeoCities was founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, offering free web hosting organized into thematic "neighborhoods"; Hollywood for celebrity sites and Area51 for science fiction alongside Athens for philosophy. By 1997, the site was the fifth most-visited site on the web. The platform's organizing metaphor was explicitly territorial; users were "homesteaders" who "settled" in neighborhoods, building "homes" on allocated "land." The metaphor was not accidental. The phrasing promised ownership and permanence as well as community (the digital equivalent of the frontier homesteading narrative that shaped American identity).

In 1999, Yahoo acquired GeoCities for $3.57 billion. Within a decade, the company had destroyed it.

The shutdown on October 26, 2009, erased an estimated 38 million user pages (by some calculations, 190 million hours of human creative labor, vanished in seconds).³ The Archive Team, a volunteer organization led by Jason Scott, scrambled to preserve what could be saved, ultimately rescuing approximately one terabyte of data. Yet even this significant effort captured only a fraction of the whole. Most of GeoCities is gone forever. The loss occurred not because the data decayed, nor because storage failed, but because a corporation decided continued existence was not worth the cost.

The GeoCities extinction reveals a fundamental asymmetry in the platform relationship. Users invested time and creativity as well as identity in their "homesteads," treating the sites as their own. However, the terms of service (documents few users read and fewer understood) preserved the landlord's right to demolish the neighborhood at will. The homesteading metaphor was ideology masking the reality of tenancy; the "owners" were renters whose lease could be terminated without notice or recourse.

Surveillance Capitalism and the Extraction Imperative

The GeoCities case is not anomalous; it is structural. The political economy of contemporary digital platforms (what Shoshana Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism") creates systematic pressures toward the destruction of digital heritage.⁴

Surveillance capitalism operates by extracting behavioral data from users and converting it into prediction products sold to advertisers and other clients. Under this logic, the value of user-generated content lies not in the content itself but in the behavioral surplus generated: the metadata revealing what users like, where clicks occur, how long users linger, and what is shared. The platform's interest in the content extends only as far as utility for extraction. When the content ceases to generate valuable behavioral data, when users abandon a platform, when advertising models shift, when a service becomes unprofitable, the content becomes a liability rather than an asset.

The extraction imperative explains why platforms have so little interest in preservation. Archived content generates no new behavioral data; the data represents, from the platform's perspective, dead weight. The cost of maintaining servers and paying engineers as well as ensuring continued accessibility is pure loss, justified only by regulatory pressure or reputational concern; even these are easily outweighed by the imperative to cut costs and maximize returns.

Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism "unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data."⁵ This analysis extends to the temporal dimension; surveillance capitalism treats the digital past as raw material to be exploited while useful and discarded when exhausted. The platform is not an archive but a mine, and mines are abandoned when the ore runs out.

Data Colonialism and the Enclosure of the Commons

Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias have characterized the platform economy as "data colonialism": a new phase of colonial extraction that appropriates human life itself as raw material.⁶ Historical colonialism enclosed common lands and extracted resources from colonized territories; data colonialism encloses the digital commons and extracts value from human behavior.

Comparison illuminates the archaeobytological predicament. GeoCities was, in a meaningful sense, a commons: a shared space where millions of people built and collaborated as well as created community. The platform's "neighborhoods" were not marketing metaphors but functional social structures. Yahoo's enclosure of this commons (first through acquisition, then through destruction) mirrors the historical pattern of enclosure that dispossessed peasants from common lands and concentrated wealth in the hands of proprietors.

The structural violence of this enclosure is not always visible. The violence operates not through dramatic confrontation but through the quiet withdrawal of infrastructure, the gradual degradation of service, and the termination notice buried in email. Platform death appears as simple business decision, not as dispossession. However, for the communities whose heritage is destroyed (the fandoms and the hobbyist networks alongside the diasporic communities who found in GeoCities a space for cultural expression) the loss is as real as any physical demolition.

The archaeobytologist must recognize this structural violence and name the phenomenon. The destruction of digital heritage is not a natural process, like the decay of physical artifacts; the erasure is a political choice, made by identifiable actors in pursuit of identifiable interests. Archaeobytology cannot be neutral toward such violence; neutrality is complicity.

Part II: The Distribution of Preservation

Who Gets Saved

If the destruction of digital heritage is politically determined, so too is preservation. The resources devoted to digital preservation (money and expertise as well as infrastructure and attention) are not distributed equally. Some communities' heritage is carefully stewarded; others' is abandoned to decay.

Consider the contrast between the Library of Congress's web archiving program and the fate of most personal websites. The Library preserves government sites and news organizations alongside materials deemed culturally significant by professional curators. The collection is comprehensive and well-funded as well as professionally maintained. Meanwhile, the ordinary person's blog and the small business's website alongside the community organization's digital presence are preserved, if at all, only by the contingent efforts of volunteers and the accidental captures of general-purpose crawlers.

The disparity is not technical but political. The decision about what counts as "culturally significant" encodes assumptions about whose culture matters. Elite institutions (universities and governments as well as established media) have the resources to ensure their own preservation. Marginalized communities, diasporic populations, and subcultural formations do not. The archive that results is systematically biased toward the already-powerful.⁷

Archival Justice and Counter-Archives

Archival scholars have increasingly recognized this political dimension of preservation. Michelle Caswell and Ricardo Punzalan alongside others have developed the concept of "archival justice": the commitment to ensuring that marginalized communities have access to records about themselves and the power to determine how those records are collected and described as well as made available.⁸

Counter-archives represent one response to archival injustice: community-controlled collections that preserve what mainstream archives neglect. Examples include the South Asian American Digital Archive, which collects materials documenting South Asian diasporic experience, and the Lesbian Herstory Archives, preserving LGBTQ+ history, alongside numerous grassroots initiatives documenting social movements and immigrant communities as well as subcultural formations.

In the digital realm, counter-archiving takes distinctive forms. The Archive Team's rescues of dying platforms are a form of guerrilla preservation, preserving what corporations would destroy. Community-maintained mirrors and torrents distribute preservation labor and reduce dependence on centralized infrastructure. Decentralized protocols like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) offer technical alternatives to platform-controlled storage.⁹

Counter-archives, however, face structural disadvantages. The initiatives depend on volunteer labor that cannot match corporate resources. Such collections lack the legal protections afforded to official archives. The projects struggle to achieve the discoverability and accessibility that makes archived materials usable. The playing field is not level; the forces of enclosure have advantages that counter-archival efforts cannot easily overcome.

The Platformization of Memory

The complexities are compounded by what might be called the "platformization of memory": the increasing concentration of digital heritage in the hands of a few dominant platforms.¹⁰

When heritage institutions digitize collections, the administrators increasingly deposit materials on platforms like Google Arts & Culture, YouTube, or social media. Such a strategy extends the reach of the materials but transfers control to platform owners. The institution retains the physical original but surrenders the digital copy; for users who encounter the material only digitally, the platform *is* the archive.

Platformization creates dependencies that institutions may come to regret. YouTube's policies on copyright enforcement and monetization alongside content moderation affect how heritage materials are presented and who can access them. Google's algorithms determine what is discoverable and what is buried. Terms of service can change without notice, and platforms can terminate accounts or remove content at will. The institution's carefully curated collection becomes subject to platform logics over which curators have no control.

The archaeobytologist must attend to these dynamics of control. The question is not only whether heritage is preserved but *how* and *by whom*. Preservation that concentrates power in corporate platforms may save materials from immediate destruction only to subject them to different forms of enclosure and exploitation.

Part III: The Politics of Access

Who Gets to Investigate

Even when digital heritage is preserved, questions of access remain. Who can investigate the digital past? Under what conditions? For what purposes? Such questions are not solely administrative but political, with implications for scholarship and accountability as well as justice.

Consider the challenges facing researchers who wish to study platform data. Social media platforms sit on vast troves of historically significant material, the collective discourse of billions of people over decades, but access is tightly controlled. API restrictions and terms of service alongside legal threats constrain what researchers can collect and analyze. The Cambridge Analytica scandal led Facebook to restrict researcher access, protecting user privacy but also protecting the platform from scrutiny.¹¹

The situation creates what might be called "asymmetric memory": platforms have comprehensive records of user activity, but users and researchers cannot access those records. The platform remembers everything; the public remembers only what the platform chooses to reveal. The imbalance constitutes a form of power: the power to know what others cannot know, to remember what others are forced to forget.

Forensic Access and Legal Constraint

Forensic investigation of digital artifacts faces similar constraints. While Essay III outlined protocols for forensic imaging and analysis, the protocols can be deployed only where legal and institutional conditions permit. Copyright law and computer fraud statutes as well as terms of service and privacy regulations constrain what investigators can access and how.

The constraints are not without justification. Privacy matters; people should not have digital traces exposed without consent. Copyright protects creative work from unauthorized exploitation. Computer fraud statutes prevent unauthorized access to systems. Legitimate concerns, however, can also serve as shields for those who wish to suppress investigation: corporations hiding misconduct, governments concealing abuses, and platforms resisting accountability.

The archaeobytologist works within limitations but must also recognize the political character of such limits. Legal frameworks are not neutral arbiters but products of political contestation, shaped by the interests of those with power to influence legislation. The constraints that bind investigators often protect the powerful more than the vulnerable.

Access as Power

Access to digital heritage is, fundamentally, access to knowledge, and knowledge is power. Researchers who can investigate the digital past can understand how society arrived at the present and imagine different futures. Individuals who cannot are confined to the official narratives that platforms and institutions choose to provide.

Archival justice therefore demands not only that marginalized communities' heritage be preserved but that communities have access to records about themselves, including records held by institutions that may prefer to keep them hidden. Truth and reconciliation processes and human rights investigations alongside accountability journalism depend on access to archives that power would prefer to keep closed.¹²

The digital context intensifies these stakes. Digital records are more comprehensive than any previous documentary form (email trails, metadata, version histories, deleted files recoverable through forensics). Such breadth makes digital archives potentially more revealing than any previous archive. The scale also makes access more consequential and more contested.

Part IV: Toward Digital Sovereignty

The Principle

Against the forces of enclosure and extraction as well as unequal access, archaeobytology articulates an ethics of *digital sovereignty*: the principle that communities should control their own digital heritage, independent of platform intermediaries and corporate owners.¹³

Digital sovereignty has several dimensions:

• Technical sovereignty means building and maintaining infrastructure that is not dependent on corporate platforms. The approach includes self-hosted servers and decentralized protocols alongside open-source tools and community-maintained archives. Technical sovereignty ensures that preservation is not contingent on corporate decisions about profitability.
• Legal sovereignty means establishing frameworks that protect community control over heritage materials. Strategies may include copyright arrangements that prevent corporate appropriation, terms of use that preserve community access, and legal structures (such as trusts or cooperatives) that institutionalize community control.
• Epistemic sovereignty means communities determining how heritage is described and classified as well as interpreted. Colonial archives often imposed categories that distorted or demeaned colonized peoples; digital sovereignty requires the power to define one's own categories and tell one's own stories.
• Temporal sovereignty means communities deciding what to preserve and what to let go as well as what to actively forget. Not everything should be preserved forever; some materials should be allowed to decay, some actively destroyed. Digital sovereignty includes the right to be forgotten as well as the right to be remembered.

The Practice

What does digital sovereignty look like in practice? Several strategies can be identified:

Own your ground: The fundamental principle is to maintain control over primary copies of heritage materials. The concept requires hosting on infrastructure you control, not solely on platforms that can terminate access at will. Security demands maintaining local backups, not trusting the cloud alone. True sovereignty treats platform presence as distribution, not as archiving.

Decentralize: Concentration creates vulnerability. If all copies of a heritage collection exist on a single server, that server's failure means total loss. Decentralized architectures (multiple mirrors and distributed storage alongside peer-to-peer networks) reduce vulnerability by eliminating single points of failure. The Archive Team's torrent of the GeoCities archive exemplifies this approach: the data exists in thousands of copies across thousands of machines, making extinction nearly impossible.

Document and describe: Sovereignty requires knowledge. Communities must document heritage practices, describe materials in respective terms, and maintain metadata that enables future access. Such documentation should be stored with the materials themselves, so that future investigators can understand context even if institutional knowledge is lost.

Build solidarity: Individual communities cannot match the resources of corporate platforms. Collective action, however, can shift the balance. Solidarity networks (communities sharing infrastructure and pooling expertise while supporting each other's preservation efforts) create resilience that no community could achieve alone.

Resist enclosure: Sovereignty requires active defense against enclosure. Active defense entails refusing platform dependence where possible, advocating for legal frameworks that protect community control, and building technical countermeasures against corporate appropriation. Resistance is not solely defensive; the action is constitutive of sovereignty itself.

The Steward's Mandate

The discussion concludes with what is termed the *Steward's Mandate*: the ethical commitment that governs archaeobytological practice.¹⁴

The archaeobytologist is not solely a technician who preserves data but a steward who holds heritage in trust for communities and for the future. Stewardship implies obligations:

• To the past: the obligation to preserve with fidelity, to resist the temptation to edit or sanitize, and to maintain the integrity of what has been entrusted to the steward's care.
• To the present: the obligation to make heritage accessible and to enable investigation and interpretation as well as to share knowledge rather than hoard it.
• To the future: the obligation to ensure continuity and to plan for succession as well as to build structures that will outlast individual careers and institutions.
• To communities: the obligation to respect sovereignty and to support community control as well as to subordinate professional interests to community needs.

The Steward's Mandate is not a recipe for neutrality. The mandate requires taking sides: against enclosure and extraction as well as against the concentration of power over heritage. The archaeobytologist who serves the Mandate is not a disinterested observer but a committed actor in the politics of memory.

Conclusion: Archaeobytology as Political Practice

The present work has argued that digital archaeology is inescapably political. The structures that create and destroy digital heritage and the resources that enable preservation as well as the conditions that govern access: all these are products of power relations that archaeobytology must understand and engage.

Against the structural violence of platform capitalism, archaeobytology affirms the value of digital heritage as commons rather than commodity. Against the unequal distribution of preservation resources, archaeobytology commits to archival justice and the support of counter-archives. Against the asymmetric access that serves the powerful, archaeobytology advocates for transparency and community control. Against enclosure in all its forms, archaeobytology articulates an ethics of digital sovereignty that places communities rather than corporations at the center of heritage practice.

Archaeobytology should not abandon scholarly rigor for political activism. The disciplines of careful excavation and systematic documentation alongside critical interpretation remain essential. But these disciplines must be exercised in awareness of their political context and political consequences. The archaeobytologist who imagines such work is politically neutral is not neutral but naive.

The four essays of this series have traced an arc from theory to practice to politics. Essay I diagnosed the ontological vacancy of digital archaeology and proposed archaeobytology as its remedy. Essay II articulated the processual ontology of digital artifacts and developed the state-based taxonomy that enables classification. Essay III translated theory into method, presenting protocols for excavation and documentation as well as interpretation. The current text has situated archaeobytological practice within structures of power and articulated the political commitments appropriate to that situation.

What remains is the work itself: the excavation of sites and the preservation of artifacts as well as the interpretation of findings and the ongoing resistance to the forces that would consign digital heritage to oblivion. Archaeobytology is not complete as theory; the discipline becomes real only in practice. The Archive awaits its archivists; the Anvil awaits its smiths.