The Algorithmically Authorised Heritage Discourse: how Big Tech ‘uses of heritage’ help to build Big Tech power

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 policies and codes. (2) Historically, nation-states have used heritage as one of their nation-building policies, and (3) the Critical Heritage Studies movement interprets any use of heritage as inherently political. Building on these ideas, this article analyses the online platform Google Arts & Culture – ‘GAC’ – to establish if and how the uses of heritage by Big Tech might be understood as variants of nation-building policies. Following a critical multimodal digital discourse analysis, this article finds that GAC promotes a type of easily consumable heritage that is rooted in quantified popularity, data colonisation, disneyfication and neoliberal individualism. This yields a new variant of the Authorised Heritage Discourse: the Algorithmically Authorised Heritage Discourse – ‘AAHD’. This emergent discourse transforms heritage into networked fragments of consumer culture, consequently producing a global ‘undifferentiated community’ that understands heritage as a ‘universal’ commodity that can serve individual desires. The resulting apparent apoliticalness of the AAHD is in fact deeply political, as it induces a type of political banality that discourages critical engagements with both heritage and Big Tech.