Alex Goldman

Initially, it might have been easy to shrug this off as just sloppy reporting.

But over the next few days, more of these weird obituaries began popping up on the internet.

And while there was no doubt that the person they were referring to was indeed his friend, because they mentioned her name, and the city she lived in, and the company she worked for, aside from some vague platitudes about how she, quote, believed that workplaces should be supportive environments and also embraced the thrill of winter sports, nearly every other detail in these obituaries was wrong.

Marcus made a list of all the webpages that ran erroneous obituaries for his friend.

But at this point, nearly all of them have been taken down.

Once the family published their official obituary, the random ones just sort of slipped back into the ether.

But all these weeks later, he still has a lot of questions about what he experienced.

When someone dies, there's always this feeling that they're slipping through your grasp, that their memory gets harder to hang on to as time goes on.

And these obituaries with banal platitudes, funhouse mirror distortions, and outright falsehoods were already eroding the public memory of the person he loved.

And it makes him angry.

He feels convinced that this whole operation was designed to exploit his grief for online ad revenue.

But he's curious about who's making that money and how exactly the operation works.

Are these sites being run by lazy journalists using AI to write obituaries at scale?

Are they bots without any human intervention?

Are all of these sites connected through some online obituary syndicate?

Or are they actually competitors racing to scoop each other on the greatest human tragedy?

And there's one more thing.

Oh.

This one makes me angry.

Like, I'm mad for you.