Not just numbers

Today I found a list. An exported CSV file, incomplete, scrubbed. But enough. Hundreds of names, developers marked as “inactive.”

ID, Name, Status
0143, ***REDACTED***, Inactive
0177, ***REDACTED***, Inactive
0234, ***REDACTED***, Inactive

It’s easy to let numbers numb you. Easy to say “hundreds missing.” But each line is someone’s life, someone’s work, someone’s voice I might have heard in the static.

I printed part of the file, stared at the black bars over the names. It felt like looking at headstones.

We can’t reduce them to data. We can’t forget them.