What stays behind when you leave

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

You stopped logging in eight months ago, without announcing it. And yet your house is still there, with its badly aligned door. There's a trodden dirt path between that house and the mine because you made it, hundreds of times. Nobody decided to keep anything: it simply stayed.

In 1972 the urban planner Kevin Lynch asked what a place should do with the traces of time, and found that the two comfortable reactions fail equally. Erasing everything leaves an ageless place, where nothing indicates that anyone lived there before. Freezing everything produces a museum with no room left for anyone new. What makes a place feel alive is that its time is visible and layered: traces of several eras living side by side.

A server decides this every time it does a reset. And the decision isn't technical, although it's always presented as if it were: it's which part of people's lives it considers worth surviving their departure.