FEATURE
Archiving the Unarchiveable: Digital Tools for Preserving Political Satire in Authoritarian Contexts
by Asma Hedi Nairi
If the preservation of documents and memories posed real challenges in the analog era, it has become a far more precarious undertaking in the digital age. Although technology and digitization appear to offer unlimited storage capacity for all sorts of materials, both digitized and digitally born, time has made clear that the ephemeral, platform-dependent nature of the digital sphere makes preservation far less straightforward than expected. This is especially true when the subject matter is born-digital material that came into being as an act of revolting against, opposing, and aiming to change the status quo. Indeed, one could argue that that preservation is now harder in the digital age than it was before.
ERASURE, BOTH INTENTIONAL AND ACCIDENTAL
An authoritarian regime no longer needs to burn pamphlets or confiscate cartoon plates; a takedown request, a platform suspension, or a server seizure can erase years of documentation, of meaning, and of artwork. A recent Foreign Policy essay, “Don’t Let Autocrats Erase the Internet” (foreignpolicy.com/2025/01/24/russia-china-iran-putin-xi-navalny-internet-digital-archives-preservation), warns that repressive governments can now make entire websites disappear and wipe archives and social media accounts at the push of a button, eliminating historical records and expunging vital information. Nor does erasure require active malice. Even absent state intervention, digital material can vanish simply through the passage of time. Some blog-hosting services no longer function, as blogging has fallen out of use; other bloggers pass away or abandon their platforms, leading to erasure through unpaid domain fees. This is a serious problem, especially when the material in question not only documented an era of a region, but also was itself instrumental in the political transformation that swept the Arab world. I am speaking here of the digital sphere and the born-digital material of the Arab Spring, which, unfortunately, is being lost as we speak.
For the past 3 years, I have been conducting academic research on Tunisian political cartoons and satire in the digital sphere across the previous 2 decades. One of the most challenging and saddening realities of this research has been the sheer number of blogs and websites already lost and erased. For researchers working on political humor in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and the wider Middle East, this is not speculation: It is the daily operating condition of our source material. The erasure of these archives is taking place silently, going unnoticed as it happens, and often coming to our awareness only by accident. This matters precisely because the material in question was digitally born; it exists nowhere else, and once gone, it can be neither recovered nor reconstructed.
Political satire is particularly vulnerable. Unlike official documents, cartoons and satirical blog posts live on privately owned platforms whose moderation policies can be weaponized against dissent. Unlike mainstream journalism, they rarely have institutional backup. And unlike archival manuscripts, they depend on dynamic web technologies that standard web crawlers handle poorly. But satire is often one of the most honest records we have of how ordinary citizens metabolized authoritarian rule. Preserving it is not optional. It is a methodological precondition for any future critical discourse analysis, any postcolonial media history, any transitional-justice process. What follows is a short practitioner’s map, drawn from my own work, for preserving multimodal political satire when the creators are anonymous, the platforms are hostile, and the regime is watching.
THREE AREAS TO CONSIDER
The first lesson is that a screenshot is not an archive, and a link is not a source. A recent Pew Research Center study found that 38% of webpages accessible in 2013 had disappeared within a decade. The international preservation standard is the WARC (Web ARChive) file, which captures not only visible text, but also HTTP headers, embedded images, stylesheets, and the full network trace needed to replay a page exactly as it looked at capture time. Two open source tools developed by the Rhizome/Webrecorder project have transformed what a single researcher can do: ArchiveWeb.page, a browser extension producing high-fidelity local copies of JavaScript-heavy sites without account or cloud trail, and Browsertrix Crawler, a command-line tool for larger automated sweeps of entire blogs or webpages, producing WARC/WACZ (Web Archive Collection Zipped) files that can be stored, shared, and replayed offline.
A second concern runs deeper than tooling and is related to the very nature of satirical, born-digital material: It is irreducibly multimodal, and multimodality is not an afterthought to be bracketed off during preservation. Standard archiving workflows privilege text, but satire does not. A political cartoon is never simply an image. The meaning behind it—the social contexts and realities it refracts—cannot be contained within the frames of the panel alone. The born-digital satire archive is an assemblage of drawing, caption, typography, comment thread, share count, and temporal context. Losing any one of these layers impoverishes analysis and, in many cases, forecloses it entirely.
From this recognition follow a number of methodological rules. The first is to capture the whole page rather than the isolated asset: Downloading a cartoon as a JPEG strips it from its commentary, yet the comments are the reception history and cannot be reconstructed after the fact. The second is to record, at the moment of capture, the metadata that cannot be recovered later (timestamp, URL, platform, share and Like counts, author handle, and the language of the interface). The third is to preserve audience paratexts: I archive not only the post itself, but also the comments beneath it, because these are what reveal whether readers decoded the irony, resisted it, or reported it to the platform. The fourth is to use screenshots as redundancy rather than as primary evidence. PNGs of the rendered page sit alongside WARC files as a human-readable fallback for the inevitable moment when replay tools change, break, or disappear.
Technical rigor, however, is only half the problem. A third matter, and in many respects the most difficult, is the question of security when the creators of the material are anonymous, pseudonymous, or otherwise at risk. The hardest ethical problem confronting the researcher of dissident satire is that the very act of preservation can endanger those whose work is being preserved. An enthusiastic scholar maintaining a public GitHub repository of Syrian or Tunisian cartoons may, with the best of intentions, hand a prosecutor the evidentiary dossier they could not otherwise have assembled. What protects the archive, in other words, is not separable from what protects the archived. If one decides to preserve audience comments as well, it is essential to anonymize them and to bear in mind that the audience can be placed at risk just as much as the owner of the page.
ARCHIVING EFFORTS
The questions to ask before every capture are double-edged: If the regime fell tomorrow and the creator wanted to reclaim authorship, would my archive enable or obstruct that? And if the regime’s hold tightens instead, would my archive expose them? The goal, then, is what might be called a “living dark archive”: fully preserved, minimally circulated, reversible. It treats erasure as the enemy, but also, occasionally, as a tool. Samuel Edquist’s notion of ethical destruction is a useful corrective here: Some records protect the living only by not yet existing in public form. Preservation is not merely a technical undertaking but an ethical one, inseparable from the safety of the people whose voices the archive exists to carry. To archive dissident satire responsibly is to accept that the archivist, too, bears a share of the risk the cartoonist once bore alone.
Turning to the region itself, I have found that preservation initiatives across the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region are strikingly few. Among the rare exceptions is the Creative Memory project (creativememory.org/ar/archive), a community archive devoted to preserving the arts of the Syrian revolution. It does not encompass every form of documentation, but it remains one of the strongest preservation efforts in the region and offers an initial model for how the archive of the Arab Spring might be held. Another important project, Vox Populi (tahrirarchives.com), is led by Lara Baladi and is an open source timeline and portal into web-based archives of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. I have not yet found a comparable initiative for the Tunisian archives, nor any dedicated effort to preserve the political cartoons and satire of the Arab Spring across the region. That gap, in my view, ought to be treated as an urgent task.
Community archiving and civil society work seem to be the only way forward. We are living through the return of even fiercer authoritarian regimes in the region, and the hope for change, for a return to the democratic track, must begin by preserving the story of how the first wave was made. Archiving political satire under authoritarianism is at once a technical practice, a methodological commitment, and a political act. The tools are finally mature enough that a single researcher with a laptop and a VPN can build a corpus that institutions could not have assembled a decade ago. What remains hard is the judgment: what to capture, what to release, and whom to protect. That judgment cannot be outsourced to software. It is the scholar’s own.
|
