The Hidden Political Costs of Vanishing Culture

In a new article, “The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory,” Michael Menna and Lila Bailey argue that the shift from buying physical media to licensing digital content has created a first-order political crisis. The piece builds on the groundwork laid in Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record, tracing the problem across five arenas—educational resources, journalism, civic and movement archives, religious study, and environmental science—to show how digital ephemerality is already undermining people’s ability to learn, organize, and hold power accountable. The article’s second half revisits the four digital rights at the heart of the Our Future Memory movement: the rights to collect, preserve, provide access to, and collaborate around digital materials—the same things memory institutions have always done with physical collections. It walks through why each right matters on its own terms, from the Wiley e-book withdrawal that blindsided George Washington University to the federal government’s removal of climate data and environmental justice tools like EJScreen. The throughline is simple: none of this is inevitable. Vanishing culture is a policy choice, and it’s one we can still reverse if libraries, archives, and museums make the case together instead of absorbing these losses one at a time. This piece is a call to action as much as an analysis. If you work at or care about a library, archive, or museum, we hope you’ll read the full article over at The Political Librarian, and consider signing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online at ourfuturememory.org. The more institutions that add their names, the harder it becomes for publishers and platforms to treat our shared cultural memory as disposable.