The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden

As a demoscener, I think this cool (though maybe also a bit useless).

But the thing this highlights to me now is how weird it is that UNESCO heritage lists are per country. The design seems wholly unsuited to any sort of culture that has emerged after the invention of global communication networks such as the internet. IIRC demoscene is already recognized as UNESCO heritage in Finland and Germany, what are we going to do, go down the list of every country that ever produced more than a few demos?

I mean of course none of this matters, because there's not really any tangible benefit to one's hobby being on a list like this, but it's still kinda funky. As if culture stops at country borders.

The biggest benefit is in bringing legitimacy to preservation efforts and curation of historic records (photos, videos, data, binaries, sources) on the history of the Demoscene.

There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.

Maybe because it was tied to IP or maybe just because they didn't think much about its historic value or didn't see it as ground breaking or note worthy.

> There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.

Sure but I don't see how being on a UN list helps fix that. Seems to me like efforts from people behind eg scene.org, archive.org (hat tip to jscott) etc are substantially more valuable to preservation efforts than convincing some folk dance geeks who work at the UN that rotating nipple balls are also cool (which of course they are)

EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean to dismiss the effort. The entire point of the demoscene is "because we can!", so obviously this also holds for getting our hobby listed by the UN.

UNESCO has funding available to use on heritage projects, which could support the existing archive efforts.

The IA is closing in on 30 years, has UNESCO done anything to help the IA during that time?

the IA is great for hosting demos too, including running in in-browser emulation. For example see: https://archive.org/details/@deater78