It hits in a quiet, almost uncanny way when you really let it sink in: we are entering a strange era where the internet will preserve people who once lived, not only the famous, but the almost-forgotten too. An old film clip, a vintage recording, a family video, a crowd scene, a candid moment. Somewhere in the frame, a face turns, a hand waves, someone laughs, someone looks away. A whole life briefly passes through the lens.

They have not “disappeared” in any dramatic sense. They are simply gone in the most irreversible way. Life continued without them. Yet here they are, still walking, still smiling, still speaking with a voice that somehow retains its warmth. A video is a strange kind of miracle. It does not just show a person; it almost summons themm; nd our minds, faithful and easily moved, respond as if presence still means possibility, until reality gently refuses.

That is what makes this feeling so sharp: these were people once full of hope, opinions, love, anger, ambition, tenderness. They carried entire worlds inside them, as real as ours. Now their world is sealed, and all that remains is a thin, flickering trace. The thought lands with a quiet dread and a quiet humility: one day, we too will be part of this archive.

This is why the past feels different now than it did for older generations. History once arrived mostly as text, as dates, as stories handed down with missing details and softened edges. But we live in an age where the past is not merely remembered. It is replayed. The dead do not stay in portraits; they move, blink, dance, and occupy the background of someone else’s life. What stirs you is not only the person meant to be seen, but the unnoticed ones too: the dancer at the edge of the frame, the spectator who claps once and vanishes, the nameless passerby whose whole universe of dreams, grudges, love, and fatigue was real to them and invisible to us.

And that is where the thought turns uneasy: when time erases names, when families dissolve into branches no one can trace, when platforms vanish and passwords are lost, what remains as proof? Did that person, among the crowd, truly exist, or are they now only an illusion made of light, pixels, grain, and forgotten credits?

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” — L. P. Hartley

Now we are entering an even stranger era, shaped by evolving AI, where the internet will hold not only those who once lived, but also those who never lived at all. Faces that look convincing. Smiles that never belonged to a childhood. Eyes that have never watched a sunrise. Generated, polished, perfectly plausible. A world where “this person doesn’t exist” is no longer a warning, but an ordinary description of what we scroll past.

So one day, social media may feel like a city of ghosts in two ways: the departed who still move in our archives, and the fabricated who never had a heartbeat to begin with. To a distant future, the difference may not always be obvious. Not because the real becomes unreal, but because context, the invisible threads of a life, does not archive itself neatly.

Perhaps that is the quiet lesson. We are all briefly recorded in the world, sometimes in memory, sometimes in pixels, sometimes only in the ripple we leave in other lives. Even if one day proof becomes thin and names fade like old captions, something remains undeniable:

They were here.
We are here.
And for a moment, the light touched us, and did not forget.

This brings me to the main theme of the movie Coco, people vanish not because they leave this world, but because they vanish when the thread of remembrance finally snaps. Photos are not magic, but they are anchors, evidence that a life once stood in the world and was loved there. In our era, the internet becomes a vast ofrenda, filled with faces that still move, still speak, still smile. The only difference is that it will also hold faces that were never real, and the future may struggle to tell which is which unless the story behind the image survives.