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