Could data become part of UNESCO's world heritage? Nowadays alot of culture happens in the digital space and it's always a tragedy when huge amounts of cultural creations just vanish into nothing. Web archives are perhaps not enough, lots of content are inside walled gardens, convincing a company to release all that information is a different question of course :)
No. World heritage sites are of archeological interest, whereas marking and preserving only some internet properties perhaps less than a decade old, would only play into the hands of sycophants bent on gaming the UNESCO system for personal gain.
The reality is that an UNESCO site is something that warring factions should agree to avoid destroying with bombs and guns, even while they eviscerate each other amid very real bloodshed.
You can’t make such a promise that destroying a certain server in a data center may or may not cost the world something valuable. Furthermore, there are not warring factions in the equation, to threaten precious data centers housing your precious data.
You would waste UN resources on... bought and sold consumer products? Why not a clutch of warez d00dz cracked proprietary software? Who decides what world heritage is?
The wrong kind of war might seek to destroy your precious garbage, if there’s no obvious reason it’s special.
> You can’t make such a promise that destroying a certain server in a data center may or may not cost the world something valuable.
Think on a different level of abstraction. Cyberwar is a thing; cyberweapons are a thing. You could totally have rules about what online services state-sponsored malware shouldn't try to attack. It would make just as much sense to protect Archive.org as it would to protect the Library of Congress.
Except political motives exist to preserve the powers that be, and their culture.
There’s less skin in the game, when the preserved items are thousand year old buildings in ruins, of intrinsic interest to tourists from all walks of life.
Compare examples of physical architecture to bar fliers advertising happy hour and ladies night. Video game profiles rank closer to bar fliers, even if the architecture in ruins is the bar itself.
This discussion isn’t about profiles per se; Miiverse was essentially a game-visible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oekaki forum. It’s the drawings that are worth preserving, being actual acts of artistic creation.
I mean, you could still compare this to things posted up in a bar—but it’d be the doodles people have made on their placemats. Some of those placemat doodles are genuine works of art, you know!
The difference you premised your rant on is superficial. The point is that humans create things that become important to their societies. Sorry if you're upset that Mario and Link were integral cultural touchstones in my life and many others'. I assure you, these "consumer products" had a large effect on my path.
