The Era of Erasure

In an era sold as “mass information,” what’s actually vanishing is our collective memory.

we are told this is the era of mass information.
Infinite archives. Endless access. Everything saved, searchable, permanent.

That story is convenient.
And it’s wrong.

What we are actually living through is an era of erasure: quiet, systematic, and often disguised as progress.

The New Face of Erasure

Erasure doesn’t look like censorship anymore. It looks like moderation. It looks like “community guidelines.” It looks like comments disappearing, posts shadow-banned, histories quietly removed because they disrupt comfort or threaten profit.

We delete what unsettles the feed. We smooth over conflict. We flatten complexity into something brand-safe and monetizable.

This isn’t neutral.

When Knowledge Becomes Optional

When schools in Florida, US remove Black history from curricula, they are not “adjusting content.” They are severing memory.

They are teaching that certain lives, struggles, and contributions are optional knowledge, that history can be inconvenient and therefore disposable.

When the past is erased, unity is not created. Amnesia is.

Extraction Masquerading as Innovation

In music, intellectual property is dissolving in real time. AI systems are trained on decades of human-made sound—underground records, bedroom demos, regional scenes—often without consent, credit, or compensation. Voices become datasets. Styles become prompts. Labor becomes “inspiration.”

Now, companies like Suno and Udio are formalizing that extraction into a business model. After facing lawsuits from major record labels over use of copyrighted catalogs in training, both platforms have moved toward licensing agreements and so-called “strategic partnerships” that reshape their operations going forward without fully addressing how artists whose work informed earlier systems will be credited or compensated.

Udio’s agreement with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group confines its next-generation model to a controlled environment for remixes of licensed music. Suno’s deal with Warner, meanwhile, allows it to continue offering fast, text-to-music generation, provided future training data is licensed and users pay to download tracks. The underlying question remains unresolved: what happens to the value extracted before these guardrails existed?

Forbes have described this pattern as “launch, train, settle”: build scale and valuation first, then legitimize the model by cutting deals with the only actors powerful enough to sue—major labels, not working artists. Warner has framed its agreement with Suno as a “victory for the creative community,” yet the power dynamics are hard to ignore. Licensing deals and equity positions open new revenue streams for rights holders within AI ecosystems, while artists are left guessing how—or if—any of that value will reach them.

Ownership evaporates while extraction is renamed innovation.

This is not mass creativity.
It is mass extraction.Everything Visible, Nothing Protected.

The visual arts follow the same pattern. Work is scraped, reproduced, remixed endlessly while attribution becomes optional.

Museums digitize without reparative context. Archives expand, but responsibility contracts.

We are surrounded by content, yet starving for memory, stuck in a bad simulation that keeps replaying aesthetics while deleting origins.

Responsibility Over Convenience

This is not a tech problem.
It is a responsibility problem.

If culture is built by people, then people deserve credit.

If history shaped the sound, the image, the movement, then history must be taught, cited, and protected. Preservation is not passive. It requires refusal. It requires slowing down. It requires saying no to convenience when it comes at the cost of erasure.

Choosing Memory

Support artists who own their work.
Credit your sources.
Question platforms that profit from forgetting.
Demand transparency from systems trained on human labor.

Memory does not survive on its own.
It survives because someone chooses to carry it.

We are told this is the era of mass information.
But unless we protect memory, it will be remembered as the age that erased itself.

Unmixed chooses memory.