SoP Discord handle: @isthisa#3973
🗺️ Arena Board
Hypothesis: protocols for death can reveal something useful in terms of the deaths of protocols
In 2008, Electronic Arts decided to shut down the servers of The Sims Online, a multiplayer version of the classic single player simulator - essentially sending the entire world and all of its community members to a scheduled apocalypse. While the data of a digital world can be archived, the community, interactions, and social life that surrounds digital things cannot. What does a good death look like in a digital place? The project will encompass research around death rituals and grieving specifically as it relates to digital things and places, looking at virtual worlds that have been sunset by developers, protocols that have stopped being maintained, and end of life processes for user accounts at large social media platforms. If each blockchain is a universe how does it end? What is a good death for a digital creature, or LLM, or idea?