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Paper short abstract

Storage infrastructures reach their limits, DNA and biological storage emerge as alternatives. This paper explores the ethical and political questions raised by storing data in living media and asks whether these archives aim to transmit knowledge to future generations or preserve humanity’s memory.

Paper long abstract

As traditional infrastructures such as hard drives, magnetic tapes and data centres reach their physical and energy limits, new experimental forms of storage are emerging. Among these, data storage in DNA and storage in living biological forms offer a radical and ethical change. Transforming digital information into biological sequences encoded in DNA nucleotides is a particularly promising first step for this new generation of storage. This technology promises unprecedented storage density and the ability to preserve vast amounts of information for centuries, even millennia.

However, the promise of quasi-permanent memory raises important ethical and political questions. Which biological (living) elements can be considered suitable for storing data? What ethical frameworks should govern the use of biological media to preserve human information?

These new forms of storage also raise a fundamental question of purpose: for what purpose should storage on such a scale be implemented? One initial avenue explored in my research is that of transmission to future generations. However, in an increasingly unstable environmental and political context, these technologies rely on extremely sophisticated decoding and comprehension systems. Therefore, the desire to store ever more data can also be interpreted as an attempt to preserve the memory of humanity itself, in the event of its possible disappearance. This paper thus proposes to ask an essential question: who, in the future, would be able to decode and understand this stored information, if not perhaps ourselves?