In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history.
The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at risk—in digital form—of disappearing from public view without ever being archived.
Web sites like MTV News, Gawker, and others are removed from the live web by their corporate owners, leaving only web archives like those in the Wayback Machine as the last remaining public record of their reporting and cultural impact.
Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new form of digital barrier, impeding access to information at community scale.
When digital materials are vulnerable to sudden removal—whether by design or by attack—our collective memory is compromised, and the public’s ability to access its own history is at risk. Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record aims to raise awareness of these growing issues, featuring essays from:
- Digital librarian Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive;
- Humanities scholar Luca Messarra;
- Book historian and social media star Allie Alvis;
- Game designer Jordan Mechner;
- Journalist Philip Bump;
- Writer and editor Maria Bustillos;
- Film archivist Rick Prelinger;
- Digital humanities scholar Nichole Misako Nomura;
- Writer and book artist Eve Scarborough;
- And many more…
The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.
Throughout history we’ve generally moved towards ever more ephemeral storage media. Stone tablets > clay > paper > etched vinyl > magnetic tape > hard disks > solid state memory, and a bunch more I’m not remembering or not aware of (and there are some that have made extremely long lives their purpose, but they’re not generally in common use, see the etched gold records in Voyager I).
Arguably, what actually survives is only what a civilization values enough to go back and put into its longer lifespan storage media, it’s only really in the modern era of mass-production and mass-media that the desire to preserve everything has popped up.
I’m very nostalgia-driven, and I still consume a lot of the media I did as a kid, but my Jellyfin and Kavita servers aren’t meant to represent things I believe should be preserved for others, just for myself.
I’ve visited the Internet Archive several times (I used to live on 3rd and California, so it was a 5 minute walk), but I think their original purpose of especially preserving the “old internet” blogs and forums and whatnot has somewhat lost its purpose now. It doesn’t archive the mediums where most internet interaction takes place now, like Discord, and it hasn’t for a while (even twitter in its heyday wasn’t being backed up unless you manually requested a tweet be saved).
There are micro-cultures that absolutely are going to disappear entirely from our cultural record once they become defunct, but that’s always been true, and I don’t think the kinds of cultural records this article is about are really part of our larger “culture” in a meaningful way. MTV News? Gawker? How about SubSim.com and NoMutantsAllowed (2 game-specific forums I’m part of)? Does our proverbial Library of Alexandria really need to remember those existed?
