In September, my colleague and friend called me out of the blue. He said that he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell me the news, but he knew that I had a relationship with the person he was calling about, and thought that I should know. Our shared friend took his own life.

I was stunned. I repeated his first name. Then his first name followed by his last with a question mark lingering at the end. “Yeah.” My colleague confirmed. He committed suicide and is gone forever now.

It was a situation I never anticipated. Perhaps that’s how it always is, my colleague said on the call before we went our separate ways for the evening.

I thought about the friend who had passed away often. His LinkedIn profile was one of my many tabs in Chrome just a few days ago. I was considering reaching out and inviting him to be a guest speaker in the class I teach, but decided against it, thinking I hadn’t heard from him in a while and he was probably busy and maybe didn’t want to hear from me.

The LinkedIn page was gone now. That was what I looked for first, after the initial slap of shock and sorrow settled a little. Then his X account, which he didn’t really use but was no longer there just the same. And his Instagram account too: gone. There, our message history still existed— our last exchange was a couple years ago (actually, three years ago exactly from this date when I’m writing), when I sent a photo of a project we worked on a decade before during my first job after graduating college. “Hahah blast from the past. Hope you’re doing well!” he said, and I hearted it. At that point, his screenname was still present but the avatar was missing, signs of the first phase of account deletion.

In the movie A Ghost Story a recently deceased man returns as a ghost (covered by a white sheet with two holes cut out for eyes) to his home and travels through time to see the history of the physical location. We see it when he inhabited it as a suburban home, in the future after it gets demolished and replaced with an office building, and back in time when it housed its first inhabitants. Throughout the film, the protagonist seeks closure in his relationships, but he also seeks traces of his home within the plot of land. There is a scene where a note is left in the walls of his house; he tries desperately to claw it out, but is only able to do so once the walls are destroyed and the house is left in shambles. Even then, he’s unable to read the message.

If A Ghost Story shows the impermanence and opacity of physical memory, then our digital remains suffer from the opposite fate. When most people die, their data continues to sit online accumulating digital dust for as long as possible. Instagram profiles lie unmoored with the last photo uploaded sitting earnestly in the feed as though nothing happened. WhatsApp chat histories stay in the archive until the recipient clears the cache. These relics become tiny memories, like an old garment that still carries the fading scent of its owner, quietly present, but rarely clicked on, and pushed aside by newer distractions that arrive higher in the feed. They also become data and currency for the host companies that hold on to these remains until they themselves shut down. And then? Our data is up for grabs, as was the case with the recent bankruptcy of the DNA website 23AndMe.

The data we produce while on these platforms is meant to provide a sort of window into who we are, even if it’s incomplete. The default is to keep it up for the value this knowledge provides to those looking to leverage it for profit, rather than its sentiment. In life, erasure is a sort of luxury. In death, some platforms, like Meta or Apple, allow users to appoint a “Legacy Contact” to manage their accounts. Without that however, the law tends to prioritize the “privacy” of the deceased, making it difficult to remove anything from these accounts posthumously. Which is why my friend’s methodical erasure felt so deliberate, something like a quiet resistance to being flattened into a shoppable data point.

My friend was a designer and developer working at a large tech company that you’d know about. He used to be a professor of Communication Design, though he no longer taught. That’s how we met back in 2012. I was a student in his class, the first year he started teaching after finishing an MFA in graphic design.

He taught Core: Interaction, which was an introductory web design class. He spoke about design and code thoughtfully, in a way that made you care about it. He was able to encourage you to present your ideas with confidence, and encouraged us to see the web as a place for self-expression and independent publishing.

One assignment was to create a typeface made entirely out of HTML and CSS with no images. “Why would you ever do that?” I questioned, in a somewhat obstinate way. I didn’t understand the point. At that time custom web typography was nascent. Instead, almost everyone used websafe fonts like Arial and Times New Roman. “Why do you do anything?” he retorted.

His point, albeit indirectly, was that you had to make something interesting to yourself to give it meaning. And I did just that. I made “Utopia,” a display typeface inspired by De Stijl artworks; then, using those letterforms, I recreated some of those paintings in the web browser— a sort of naive comment on whether the internet still had utopian ideologies, like artworks from other eras, and if the browser itself could be an artwork.

Early in design school, many students will try to recreate things that they’ve seen before, like a portfolio website or a social media interface. The prompts in this class required more vulnerability and authorship, a deeper look into your own interests. The other two projects in his class asked us to create a visual narrative (which I did by building an archive of all of my clothes, organized by how you remove the piece), and to republish the index of statistics from Harper’s Magazine into a new, interactive format (for which I compared the printed stats to what was being said about the same topics in real time on Twitter).

Yet the alphabet project was uniquely difficult because it required the form itself to express the concept. These letterforms emerged only when I recognized how the restraints from the tool— that it was easier to create straight horizontal or vertical lines, that I had only so much knowledge and control over the code— were always already shaping the product. The experimentation led me to reflect on how latent ideologies were present in every detail online. My typeface project became a way of carving out that thought visually, a self-portrait rooted in interior ruminations.

His course taught me that something can be personal without being autobiographical or excessively ornamental. What you write or design about, the words you use, the order and structure of your work say more than describing something in an exaggerated way ever could, and they invite a participant in by adding curiosity. He encouraged us to think about why we were interested in the things we were interested in, and to use our personal anecdotes both to fuel our creative process and present our work. These lessons stayed with me throughout my design and writing career, and I imbue it to the students I work with today as a full-time faculty member of the same school we met at.

In addition to the more obvious platforms out there, I looked him up on Goodreads in the days that followed his death—not because I knew for certain that he had an account but because I wanted to see if there were other, less common destinations he had forgotten about.

In recent years GoodReads, the platform for rating and storing information about books you’ve read, has become a popular source of fulfilling curiosities. Take the case of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect in the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Partially due to his physical appearance and his conviction to the cause, online fans considered him something of a folk hero and were inspired to look him up to find out more about him. When they found his Goodreads account, Redditors had a field day analyzing his descent. “We love a literate king” one responded to a post stating that he took the book title The Bullet Journal Method literally.

While I couldn’t be sure that I had found my friend’s account, I noticed a curious profile that had listed a book that looked like something he would read. Plus, his name wasn’t that common. When I looked at this account’s recent activity, I noticed several concerning books stored in the “Want to Read” section: books titled Last Summer in the City, In Memoriam, and The Last Lecture— which was about a college professor who was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer and had to deliver a final class at the university he taught at. I remember feeling spooked by these details. Since then, though, the GoodReads account added a location (which wasn’t New York) and logged in several times. It wasn’t him.

The ways our minds form meaning and connections is heavily shaped by our emotional state, but this can quickly become problematic. Perhaps it’s why my friend wanted to control his level of disappearance, to resist such imposed narratives. In the book Resurrecting the Black Body author and archivist Tonia Sutherland writes about the Pepper’s Ghost illusions used to have Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur perform posthumously. At the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, Michael Jackson performed the song “Slave to the Rhythm,” despite never having performed that song in real life. “As a human being and as an artist, Jackson experienced death only to be reanimated as an echo, a version of himself that was (re)constructed both as a means of extending profit margins and for the satisfaction of the spectacular white gaze,” she wrote.

Like those celebrity holograms, the mental illustrations we craft on Goodreads and elsewhere have little to do with the actual person and more to do with satisfying our own need to know. The projections vary in scale and audience, but the impact is more or less the same. It can be alluring to translate these digital tracks into a coherent narrative that matches our memory— but it isn’t. It’s just the only thing that’s left.

It seemed he was methodological with removing himself online, clinical even. The social media profiles where we were connected were all neatly removed, even if the message caches lingered a moment longer. When he passed away, there were few tributes on social media and the ones that existed acknowledged explicitly that he wouldn’t have liked posts being created online about it. He was private and discerning, and even his most casual peers knew that. This is also why I’ve avoided naming him in this piece.

As sociologist Ruha Benjamin describes in her article “Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice based Bioethics,” in medical studies, choosing not to participate is an act of agency and resistance. It’s a way of seeing “a vision of what can and should be not only a critique of what is.” She writes that without this form of agency, participants are often pressured into deferring to authority. The same can be said online, perhaps, and my friend’s erasure was a way of resisting that default response.

One page that persisted, though, was his personal website. The website was still there when you wrote his first and last name followed by .com in the URL textarea. When I opened it up, it felt like he was still alive. There was no change to it. He had designed and coded the site himself using the same lightweight approach to HTML he taught us in the classroom. The website was professional and focused on his work, but the custom interface details were so distinctly him. The dark grey square with a lighter grey circle centered within it in the favicon, how the buttons smoothly increased in scale when you hovered over them. There was control and restraint, but still a sense of an individual guiding the experience visually. It reminded me of his own work both in the class and at the design studio we would both work at once I graduated. Subtle, intentional, and persevering.

His own authorship of removing his social media profiles seemed like a way to control how he was remembered, and leaving his site up was not an oversight. It was as though this was a way of leaving a piece of himself behind, trying to control how he was remembered and archived— a final designed place in his own voice, a way of lingering online with intention rather than being abstracted into a tech platform’s memorial template. Someone else’s, or rather, a company’s, visual language. Ick.

The decision reminded me of another musical artist that had been the subject of a holographic posthumous experience, Ryuichi Sakamoto. At The Shed Museum, an augmented reality performance titled “Kagami” (which means mirror in Japanese) allowed participants to don headgear and see Sakamoto playing a grand piano. It was stunning. As you walked around the space the floor would appear to dissolve, presenting a galaxy, making it seem like you were in space. This performance was different in nature from the forced resurrection of Tupac and Michael Jackson because Sakamoto filmed it in collaboration with Tin Drum while he was alive. Death was imminent because he had been diagnosed with cancer, and the piece was an act of authorship, an extension of his creative practice that let him persist a little longer.

So too with my friend. For a while after death, the website stayed up in its pre-death form. It existed quietly and confidently with a customized visual language— his own version of a final performance, leaving his mark online a little longer than his body would.

About two months ago, the website content got deleted, leaving only the custom shade of grey background that was there before with no imagery or text. Now, the URL appears to have been purchased by a Russian casino website, offering no hint at what was there just weeks before. As Wesley Aptekar-Cassels points out in their blog response, “How Websites Die,” “the closest you might come to seeing signs of this cycle is witnessing the birth of a new website.” My friend’s final choices to remove his social media accounts but maintain his website were both acts of authorship that allowed us to see this cycle of digital death and repropagation take place.

After seeing his website replaced, I revisited it on the Wayback Machine. I found versions of his site I remembered being online in the time that I knew him, as well as ones that predated that period. My favorite version of his website is from 2009. It has different blocks of content that he wrote little moments of prose for. The website is tied together with jump links that take you to different parts of the page at random. There is even a Flash player that was intended to link to a YouTube video of Van Halen’s “Jump” as a sort of playful note on the navigation.

At the end, he wrote:

“This website is an experiment in experience. As time goes on more modules will be added, creating a more densely populated grid. The point is not to see everything, nor is there a particular order to any of this… I am interested in creating interactions for the viewer; interactions that asks the viewer to think critically about what is being presented to them. You’ve probably noticed that there is no navigation for this website, at least in the traditional sense. Instead, you are left at the will of randomly generated content. Perhaps Jump by Van Halen is playing in the background right now and you are combing your way through the site via the “Jump” links provided. Or, perhaps another song is guiding you through this experience. Either way you are at the hands of computer generated randomness. How ironic is it then, that this website encourages a more interactive experience than that of one with choices?”

The experience you had exploring his old site allowed for spontaneity and projection. Maybe by leaving his later website up— the grey, buttoned up, professionally focused one— and letting it expire on its own, he was leaning into that feeling again. Rather than be flattened into a stagnant post on Instagram, he had left something that would also change and evolve, and in doing so require you to read between the lines and make your own conclusions. Like his old site, the experience was at once super customized, and displayed both a combination of control and the lack of it. It left space for the viewer to create something new, for randomness to lead to an impression. One final breath before a Russian casino moved in, leaving a fossil for the next person with the same name to discover.

‍