Good Death looks at the end-of-life process for worlds. Worlds are what grows on a protocol when a protocol lives, though they can grow on other substrates, including games, social media platforms, and other communal spaces. The core thesis of this essay is that the death of a world is a decision-making process with a duration, rather than an atomic event, and that a clearer understanding of mortality in a protocological context can improve archiving processes and memorialization. By considering their death, we can better understand what constitutes the life of these worlds. Looking at examples ranging from eulogies spoken over dead video games, to the effects of automatically-deleted posts on 4chan, to the history of how human death was diagnosed, we will ask in particular what a good death looks like in decentralized world contexts, such as blockchains and DAOs.

The essay is accompanied by a taxonomy of possible protocol-deaths and a series of proposals for how to kill worlds, entitled Founding Memorabilia from the Order of Protocological Death.