Article

The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory

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Abstract

Written from the perspective of the Internet Archive and the Our Future Memory movement, this article repeats an urgent call for four digital rights that would allow libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations (“memory institutions”) to uphold their shared public service mission of preserving history and providing access to information. The ongoing transition from physical media sales to digital licensing markets has unleashed a new wave of archival ephemerality, which endangers these memory institutions’ core operations and threatens to plunge society into a digital dark age. This article presents this phenomenon of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis by surveying several social contexts wherein that crisis hinders people’s ability to educate themselves and freely participate in public life. To fortify our shared knowledge against that epistemic threat, the article reintroduces the background and substance of the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online (2024), which came to inspire the Our Future Memory campaign’s growing global coalition. That framework asserts that memory institutions must have practical options and legal protections to undertake four basic practices with digital materials that they were previously allowed to do with physical ones: (1) collection, (2) preservation, (3) access, and (4) collaboration. In lieu of a formal conclusion, the article ends with a call to action, asking memory institutions to sign the Statement, join the movement, and work together to protect their critical role in the digital age.

Keywords: vanishing culture, digital rights

How to Cite:

Menna, M. & Bailey, L., (2026) “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory”, The Political Librarian 9(1), 106-125. doi: https://doi.org/10.7936/pollib.9287