Dead-and-dying platforms: a roundtable

Abstract

Abstract This roundtable, which unfolded over many months in 2021, brought fourteen technologists and scholars together for a full-fledged discussion of platforms and death as a metaphor. The discussion proceeds with each person responding to the previous question and then posing one of their own. Some contributors discuss the ethical quandaries that await researchers attempting to exhume digital lifeworlds of the past. Others contemplate who gets a say in what aspects of platform life are preserved. Reflecting moments of convergence and divergence around the ethics and politics of platform death, the roundtable reads as a kaleidoscope of sociotechnical values and a map of the people fighting for control over digital infrastructure that has fallen apart.