Manifesto for Cultural Sovereignty and Algorithmic Biodiversity

Preamble: digitisation is not neutral

Museums, theatres, music venues and festivals have been giving up ground for years, often without quite noticing. Digitisation hasn't been a neutral way to reach people. It brought recommendation algorithms that turn heritage into a commodity, flatten thinking and wear down the diversity of our communities.

Against the algorithmic sameness and cognitive monoculture imposed by the dominant recommendation platforms, the organisations that sign this document make a shared commitment: the Vindra model, a way of relating to audiences that doesn't depend on the platforms' commercial logic.

I. Cultural biodiversity against statistical indifference

Whether a work gets seen can't depend on whether it fits an algorithm built to reward the predictable and the viral. That's why we give priority to local, independent, minority and experimental work: regional theatre, visual poetry, everything a recommendation system tends to bury. We won't let a machine's indifference decide what reaches the public.

II. Relationship technology we control, against commercial transactions

Audiences aren't customers, and cultural experiences aren't finished products. We don't import the corporate customer experience model and its metrics without thinking. An aggregate NPS, for example, hides real audience loss behind results inflated by whoever chooses to answer the survey. We measure an institution's health with other indicators: Season Return Rate, Attendance Density Index and Profile Activation Rate.

III. The six motivational profiles and the two dimensions: why and how

Each person comes to culture for different reasons, and we speak to them accordingly instead of sending everyone the same message. We distinguish six motivational profiles: people who come for discovery, for emotional impact, for ideas, for community, for belonging or for practical convenience.

• Curiousdiscovery
• Emotional travelleremotional impact
• Intellectualengaging with ideas
• Social ritualcommunity
• Loyalactive belonging
• Pragmaticpractical convenience

Knowing what moves someone isn't enough. The motivational profile answers the why, so we add an attitude question that answers the how: the way each person prefers to be addressed. Two curious people may need opposite registers. One responds to open enthusiasm; the other prefers distance and facts.

Motivation explains why someone takes part. Attitude explains how they want us to talk to them. Reducing a person to only one of these dimensions is a mistake technology should avoid.

IV. Against extraction: sovereignty over collective data

Heritage built up over generations (literature, digitised art, performance records, oral traditions) belongs to the communities that created it, not to whoever indexes it first. Some platforms have spent years using this shared knowledge to train commercial models without the consent of the people who made it, and we won't hand over that access without safeguards. Our audiences' data is not sold, not passed on and not analysed with tools that breach their privacy. When we listen to attract new people, we stay on the institution's own channels. No third-party tracking.

V. Deliberate diversity

We programme and recommend with risk, on purpose. We introduce recommendations that break the filter bubble and the comfortable convergence of traditional CRMs, exposing our audiences to experimental and unexpected work. We want curiosity, debate and some cognitive friction, not just comfort.

What this means day to day

In closing

If your organisation shares these principles, start by understanding what really moves your audience, not just how many people come through the door.