Someone Built a Cemetery for Dead Tech. ICQ Has a Tombstone.
A handmade web cemetery, complete with handwritten obituaries for ICQ, Songza, Microsoft Tay, Clippy, and a long list of services and devices that quietly stopped existing. The joke is funny. The premise underneath, that objects deserve a death, is the part to sit with.
Burak Ozdemir, a Turkish web developer, built rip.so: a hand-coded virtual cemetery for dead technology. ICQ, GeoCities, Google Reader, Songza, Microsoft Tay, Clippy, the original Pebble. Each one gets a tombstone and a handwritten obituary, all wrapped in the visual language of the era it belonged to. Hackaday wrote it up this week.
'Killed by Google' is a list. rip.so is a cemetery, which is a meaningfully different gesture. The obituaries are written, not generated. The design is committed: tiled backgrounds, marble textures, the kind of HTML that hasn't been fashionable for twenty years. Wandering through, you notice how much of it predates Ozdemir himself; he clearly went deep. ICQ comes with its number history. Tay has a paragraph about why public chatbots need safety rigging. Pebble has a footnote noting that it has, in fact, recently risen from the dead.
There is something serious underneath the joke. We have no shared language for how a device should die. Apps stop opening one morning. Hardware piles up in a drawer until it goes to a landfill. What would it look like if our objects were designed to be mourned when they end, the way books and instruments and tools used to be? Maybe an obituary should ship with the product.