The Myth of Meaning: 8 The Archive as Heaven — Eternal Storage as Secular Afterlife

The Problem

Modern culture and scholarship often imagine that preserving knowledge, culture, or data secures immortality. Digital archives, libraries, and recorded histories promise to safeguard meaning indefinitely, as if permanence itself guarantees significance.

The Distortion

This is a secularised afterlife: the archive functions like heaven, a repository where significance is stored beyond decay. Meaning is displaced from lived relational processes into static preservation, reproducing theology’s logic of eternal reward and salvation, but in material or informational form.

The Relational Alternative

Meaning does not reside in storage or record. Its significance arises through ongoing relational actualisation — interpretation, performance, and enactment. Archives and records only acquire meaning when they participate in active relational networks; without use, they are inert. Significance is processual, not permanent.

Takeaway

The drive to eternalise meaning is theology’s ghost in the machine. Relational ontology reframes the archive: preservation is meaningful only in the context of living interaction, not as a secularised heaven.