Deathswitch

» see deathswitch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i did not sign up for this one and i doubt many people did. Deathswitch is here for what it was willing to say out loud, not for its numbers. Most services that touch death do it sideways, through a memorial page or an account setting buried four menus deep. This one put the word in the domain name.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist. In 2006 he published a short piece in Nature called A Brief History of Death Switches, about automated messages that fire when their sender stops responding, and then he built the thing under a company called Information Immortality. The mechanism was as plain as the premise. You wrote messages, encrypted, addressed to specific people. The system emailed you at intervals and asked for your password.

Answer and nothing happens. Miss one and it asks again, more often, and if you keep missing it concludes you are dead and sends everything. There is no way to build that which is not slightly rude, because the check-in is the service asking whether you are still alive, on a schedule, for as long as you keep paying.

It arrived right when my generation started keeping things that only existed in one place. i had been online since 1998 by then and the accounts had piled up, mail archives and forum logins nobody else had the passwords to. Deathswitch was an early answer to a question almost nobody had phrased yet, which is what happens to all of that. The answer it gave was narrow and it was still ahead of everyone.

~ the dossier ~

~ why it kept getting written about ~

The press loved it and never quite knew what to do with it. The Guardian covered it in 2007, NPR in 2009, the New York Times in 2011, Wired as late as 2014, and the framing barely moved across those seven years: here is a strange little service, and here is a paragraph wondering whether you personally could see yourself using it.

The reason it never grew is sitting in the mechanic. A service like this asks for trust on a timescale nobody can verify. You are betting that a small company will still be running its cron jobs on the day you stop replying, which might be forty years out. Nine years later Deathswitch closed, and every message sitting inside it stopped being a plan.

~ what replaced it ~

The idea did not die, it got absorbed. Google shipped Inactive Account Manager in 2013, doing the same job with much better odds of the company still existing: pick a waiting period, pick who gets told, and the account either hands itself over or deletes itself. Facebook added legacy contacts in 2015. The function moved out of a product you bought and into a checkbox inside an account you already had.

That is the normal ending for a single-feature service and it is a fair one. What got lost is the framing. A settings page called Inactive Account Manager is describing an account. Deathswitch was describing you, and it made you confirm every few weeks that the description did not apply yet.

~ the funny part ~

A service built entirely on the promise of outlasting its users announced its own shutdown on 22 October 2015 and went away first. Nobody has said publicly why. There is a separate and unrelated service called Dead Man's Switch, running since 2007 and still up in 2026, which is a longer run than Deathswitch managed and still nowhere near long enough for what it is promising.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »