Million Memories Movement (M3): Preserving Our Past and Present for Future Generations
Inclusive Design Institute (IDI) is undertaking one of the most ambitious digital preservation efforts in modern history: to fingerprint, and safeguard one million digital cultural memories by the end of 2025 from communities at risk of erasure, neglect, or misrepresentation.
M3 is more than a technical endeavor. It is a moral and civic imperative: ensure that stories of love, loss, and progress are not lost to time, tampered with, or deleted by institutions that were never designed to steward our collective memories.
Why This Matters Now
Information is disappearing. Servers fail. Images are purged. Institutions are underfunded or politicized. Our historic records require permission and platforms. Concurrently, emerging technologies such as generative AI and deep fakes are increasingly eroding public trust.
Meanwhile, the histories of Women, Queer people, Indigenous communities, Black activists, and science itself remain vulnerable to manipulation, censorship, or deletion.
M3 responds to this dual crisis, of deletion and distrust, by building a tamper-evident, publicly verifiable foundation for cultural preservation. Every digitized artifact is cryptographically fingerprinted, provenance-sealed, and redundantly stored in decentralized systems.
Once sealed, these memories cannot be altered or erased without detection and further proliferation. They become persistent proof of life, love, and truth.
Flagship Case Studies
M3 prioritizes five core streams of cultural preservation:
- Women’s Empowerment: Chronicling the contributions of women ranging from grassroots activism to breakthroughs in STEAM fields.
- Scientific and Scholarly Datasets: Protecting critical research outputs vulnerable to political volatility and funding gaps.
- Queer Archives: Histories of love, oppression, activism, and liberation, preserved with dignity and context.
- Civil Rights and Black History: Documenting movements, traditions, and leadership through church records, protest footage, and community narratives.
- Indigenous and Tribal Collections: Enabling sovereign stewardship of memory, language, and artifacts on community-defined terms.
How It Works
Digitized artifacts entrusted to the Initiative are preserved through a five-step process:
- Fingerprinting: Cryptographic hashing using SHA-256 and Blake3 standards to establish the “fingerprint” of the originally submitted file.
- Provenance Anchoring: Embedded metadata that records origin, custodianship, and context is permanently bonded to the originally submitted file.
- Tamper-Evident Sealing: Application of open standards such as C2PA to protect authenticity and transparent version histories.
- Public Storage of Fingerprints: Register and sign the fingerprints of files and collections onto multiple public blockchains.
- Decentralized Storage: Redundant distribution across a myriad of storage systems across several jurisdictions including decentralized solutions (IPFS, Arweave), encrypted backups with cloud storage providers (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.), and both hot and cold storage in university and public libraries.
This multi-layered approach ensures that records remain independently verifiable across time, jurisdictions, and technological regimes.
This model is grounded in participation, informed consent, and distributed custodianship. It rejects extractive preservation practices in favor of community-led stewardship and decentralized resilience.
Our objective is clear: to safeguard one million memories and to build the civic, technical, and ethical infrastructure necessary to protect cultural heritage against the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Our stories matter. Our progress is not disposable.