Narrative Provenance
The term was codified in The Archaeobytology Textbook (Chapter 1) to describe the shutdown of GeoCities in 2009. While Yahoo! claimed the service was obsolete, millions of sites were still active. Archaeobytologists argue that this was not a natural death, but a calculated execution of a digital manufacturing town.
The concept reframes digital preservation: we are not just saving things that are "falling apart"—we are saving things that are being actively destroyed.
Field Notes
Diagnostic Criteria: A platform is "murdered" (as opposed to dying naturally) if:
- The user base is still active and creating content.
- The termination is a top-down corporate decision.
- Users are given a deadline to "evict" (export data) or face deletion.
Notable Victims: GeoCities (2009), Vine (2017), Posterous (2013), Google Reader (2013).
Ecological Impact
Platform murder creates "digital refugees"—entire communities that are forced to migrate to new platforms, often losing their history, social graphs, and cultural norms in the transit.