Ghosts of Our Lives - by Philip Walford - Morbid Curiosity

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Ghosts of Our Lives<br>Ryan Armand, Tronicbox and occasional immortality

Philip Walford<br>Jul 03, 2026

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In 2011, a cartoonist called Ryan Armand self-published a complete edition of minus, his webcomic about an omnipotent little girl. I’d read the digital version that ran from 2006 to 2008 on RSS after being introduced to it by an illustrator friend. It was extraordinary: funny, tender, imaginative and unsettling, all rendered with a precise line and cloudy washes of ink. After the run finished, the feed went quiet; three years later there was an update about the book. On a whim I bought one.

I didn’t know at the time that the artist would vanish just a few years later. He has never reappeared, and aside from a few fragmentary clues uncovered by fans on Reddit, nobody knows why he left or where he went. Someone whose work was enjoyed by thousands and nominated for industry awards simply stopped and let his domain lapse. Overnight, the comics disappeared from the web, though devotees managed to recover most of the strips from cached versions on the Internet Archive and their own machines.<br>It’s not that I don’t wonder what happened to him, but I do think that when someone separates themselves from a body of work like that, it should be respected. We don’t know what Armand wanted to happen to his comics, but the absence of take-down notices or other claims of ownership at least partially validates the ongoing curation. And it could be worse. After all, The Castle and The Trial only survive because Max Brod ignored Kafka’s wish that his unpublished manuscripts be burned after death. At least minus is still there, both in its original context and in the book on my shelf.<br>YouTube creator Tronicbox followed a similar trajectory in a slightly different configuration. A decade ago he began uploading 80s remixes of songs by the likes of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and Ariana Grande. For two years he mined this niche, exhibiting an exquisite grasp of the musical idiolect of that decade, culminating in a Borgesian reworking of Closer by the Chainsmokers that really is infinitely richer than the original. Because of the platform and the medium, his work caught the attention of more people than minus (including, presumably, the singer Gotye, whose Somebody That I Used to Know was the subject of a popular remix, taken down and since reuploaded by fans). Tronicbox was sought out and gave a couple of very brief interviews. Then after a two-year run and tens of millions of views, he just stopped. Again, there are rumours, this time with slightly more to sustain them, but the question of why the work ceased goes unanswered. As of writing, his account still has over 600k subscribers and his most popular video now has more than 19m views.

Ordinarily, two examples would appear to be a thin foundation for an essay. But in this instance, all you have to do is look at your own digital footprint for further evidence. Far from increasing ephemerality, digitisation has made us all unwitting autobiographers, day-traces of our lives uploaded automatically by phones on which this behaviour is the default. This kind of completist preservation requires no effort, either on our own part or anyone else’s; it is a function of the platforms themselves that copy, mirror, distribute and retain whatever we give them, regardless of whether it is mundane or a masterpiece. This is a major departure from how things used to work. Between the invention of the compact camera and the launch of the iPhone, the majority of the world’s photos sat in drawers and wardrobes, if they were developed at all, retrieved only on birthdays or during visits home in the company of serious girlfriends and boyfriends. Cheap drugstore processing meant the images never stayed vivid for long, fading only slightly more slowly than the family photographs in Back to the Future. When we moved or when we died, boxes of old photographs were often one of the first things to be thrown away. Who has room for them? Now they survive even if no one remembers them. All you have to do to travel back in time with perfect clarity is swipe through Google Photos.<br>In contrast, the process by which earlier generations of human creativity were preserved or forgotten is politically fraught. Fortunately, the only thing that matters here is that it happened at all. As with the resurrected minus, survival across time was mostly reliant on forces beyond the artist; other people committed to carrying the work into the future. Without conscious conservation, even the greatest art was unlikely to last long beyond its creator’s death. To take arguably the most famous example, Heminges and Condell believed that Shakespeare’s work needed to endure, so ninety per cent of the plays still exist. Armand’s fans performed a similar act of service, collating and republishing what would have otherwise become...