IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section B

Abstract

Three observations anchor the argument developed in this paper. (1) Major tech corporations increasingly act as the ‘peers’ of nation-states, as they rule their digital ‘fiefs’ through their policies and codes (Celeste, 2022). (2) Historically, nation-states have used ‘the museum’ as one of their nation-building policies (Anderson, 2016), and (3) the Critical Heritage Studies movement interprets any use of heritage as inherently political. Building on these ideas, this article uses data from the Google Arts & Culture initiative to establish if and how the uses of heritage by Big Tech might be understood as post-digital variants of nation-building policies. By critically analysing three different sections of its digital environment, this article finds that Google Arts & Culture promotes a type of ‘clickbait heritage’ that is rooted in the accumulation of quantified popularity, data colonisation, gamification and neoliberal aspirational wealth. In this sense, Google Arts & Culture reproduces a new version of the Authorised Heritage Discourse — ‘AHD’ — that can be labelled the ‘Algorithmically Authorised Heritage Discourse’ — ‘AAHD’. Major tech corporations do not appear to transform heritage into ‘state regalia’, like Anderson argued in relation to colonising nations. Rather, Big Tech transforms the AHD to create a global ‘undifferentiated community’ that understands heritage as a ‘universal’ commodity, and thus as detached from ‘office politics’ nationalisms. The resulting apparent apoliticalness of the AAHD is in fact deeply political, as it produces a type of political conformity and undemocratisation that discourages critical engagements with heritage on both individual, communal and (inter)national levels.