Current conditions of global climate change, fossil fuel exhaustion, economic precarity, and political unrest may be indicators that modern industrialised society is on the verge of Collapse. What will happen to digital and digitised media – files of images, text, films, television series, audio recordings, video games, and so on – in the event of Collapse? The author argues that individuals who exchange such files online via peer-to-peer protocols, who are deemed ‘pirates’ by the culture industries, are in fact amateur archivists whose personal caches of digital media will be the most likely to survive catastrophic change. Indeed, catastrophic change will not be catastrophic for all parties: Collapse may put an end to capitalism, which optimises for the rapid obsolescence of cultural commodities and combats the unpaid exchange of goods in myriad ways, thereby preventing official archives and libraries from implementing strategies for the legal preservation of digital culture.