In the late 90s and early 2000s, GameSpy Network, was an inescapable presence of the early interactive web—either in the GameSpy Network—a collection of websites dedicated to covering popular game franchises (e.g Planet Quake, Planet Half-Life) or by working with game developers and publishers to provide multiplayer capabilities for hundreds of PC and console games. Even in instances when GameSpy did not provide the online infrastructure for a game, services like GameSpy Arcade gave users easy access—through monthly subscription fees or watching free ads—to multiplayer matchmaking, voice chat, and social features.

Through its deliberate convergence of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers as multiple sides of a lucrative technology and content business, we see an early instance of a “multisided market” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018) that is a distinguishing feature of today’s digital platforms and their ecosystems. GameSpy might now be a “dead platform” (McCammon & Lingel, 2022) but in its death we find crucial insights about the past and future of digital platforms, and the undervalued labour necessary to support them. We situate our study at the intersections of journalism studies, platform studies, and game studies to examine GameSpy as an early instance of platformization (Helmond, 2015), digital journalistic labour (Cohen, 2015), and what David Nieborg and Maxwell Foxman (2023) call the “mainstreaming of games.” Though GameSpy predates the intense platformization that characterizes contemporary digital journalism, the enmeshment of journalistic editorial work with commercial advertising and player connectivity function as early clues for how the industry would continue to develop.

Internet cultures fundamentally change the relationship between death and memory practices. The rise of the internet and web added new complexities to memory as a social and economic practice. The "problem" of memory sits at the heart of the burgeoning digital afterlife industry, a range of platformized services that promise to manage the expired organic body as data and curate “forever” relationships with friends and family through software. This paper identifies how the platformization of grief requires the positive reinvention of remembering via death-as-information-management. I argue that grief platforms’ remediation of death illuminates a useful intersection of grief, memory, and data that is symptomatic of memory in an era of extendable data bodies. Digital memory is both restless in its desire to live forever and restless in its ceaseless search for capitalist validation. Using an archive of press articles and personal interviews with tech founders and a close reading of user-facing and promotional materials, I outline how data restlessness is a lucrative solutionist approach that reframes memory as computationally perfectible.

From oral storytelling traditions to Victorian seances communing with the dead has long been a part of human existence. But as technology advances, our means of connecting with the past proliferate; as Kasket suggests “technology is [now] where the dead live” (2019, 7) and the dead are increasingly online. Websites and apps like PeopleAI and MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia utilise deep learning algorithms to evoke, re-frame, re-work and distort the past, and similar tools are now being introduced in cultural and heritage contexts. Indeed, as the capabilities of AI-enabled voice ‘clones’ and ‘deepfake’ technologies improve, working with algorithmic afterlives is fast becoming a mundane proposition. These practices however expose deep ethical questions about consent, legacy, ownership and custodianship which are increasingly important in the context of concerns about disinformation and declining levels of trust in public institutions and the media.

We have been working with heritage professionals to better understand and respond to these concerns, in particular when it comes to the algorithmic ‘revival’ of historical figures. In this paper we introduce and reflect upon our recent work – in collaboration with 19 UK cultural professionals and alongside creative studio yello brick – to co-design an innovative toolkit for museum/historic sites navigating the creation of ‘AI afterlives’. We discuss the key takeaways from our research, highlighting the ruptures between past and present that arise in the context of AI and automation and the potential paths organisations and professionals can follow to address concerns around algorithmic revivals.

Social media has transformed how grief is experienced and shared, turning platforms into unexpected spaces for mourning, remembrance, and community-building. Yet grief is not only about what is made visible—it is also about what remains unseen, unspoken, and deliberately withheld. This paper explores non-sharing as grief work, examining the ruptures that emerge when mourning does not align with platform logics of visibility, algorithmic curation, or public engagement. While digital mourning is often framed as a means of connection, we highlight how grief may be disrupted by grief policing, moderation practices, and the pressure to conform to platformed expressions of loss.

Drawing on interviews with bereaved individuals and professionals, we introduce grief ruptures—breaks in digital continuity where the complexities of mourning exceed platform affordances. These ruptures surface in content moderation that obscure certain losses, self-censorship of stigmatized grief, and tensions between personal grieving and public sharing. This paper argues that non-sharing is not a void but a meaningful refusal, challenging dominant narratives of digital mourning as inherently visible.

For internet researchers, these ruptures raise methodological questions about how to study the unseen. Traditional digital ethnography may prioritize what is publicly posted, yet grief often manifests through absence, withdrawal, and refusal. We propose new approaches that account for non-use, silence, and platform resistance, contributing to broader discussions on platformisation, grief literacies, and the evolving politics of loss in digital spaces.