The ones we lost, the ones we fight for

I went back to the list I found in March. The blacked-out names stared at me like censored tombstones. Tonight I tried something different. I wrote out the names I still remember from before they vanished. Colleagues, friends of friends, people I saw at conferences.

Not lines in a CSV. People. One built open-source tools that made debugging easier for thousands. Another used to organize meetups in her city, teaching beginners how to code. One of them once fixed a bug for me at 3 AM because he happened to be awake and generous.

Now they’re all “inactive.”

Maynet thrives on statistics, on reducing lives to data. That’s how it consumes without guilt. But we cannot forget who we’re fighting for. Not numbers. Names.