When a cold case is solved, why can't internet sleuths move on?

In hindsight, I think my strong reaction is directed more toward those who want to intrude than toward you.

I get that a lot of people invested a lot of time into this, but there's a suggestion in TFA that implies that this effort merits some special privileges, whether that inlcudes knowing the identity of the suicide or some other kind of recognition. It doesn't.

It was a voluntary act, perhaps a kind act, perhaps not from the perspective of the family. The implication is that the family either wanted to know or ought to have wanted to know. We have no information to evaluate those judgments, and there's enough gray there that it's irritating as an assumption.

The reality is that it is morally no different than participating in a subreddit on cats or submitting articles and commenting on them on HN. We're all voluntarily spending time on the internet rather than doing something else.

Records are public, but the problem is one of searching for a small needle in a large haystack: ~7k people die in the United States every day.

I can think of a couple ways to narrow that down and get to a probable answer, but they all would take money, manual effort, or both.

To your second question, any debts owed by the deceased would be paid out of his estate. There's no guarantee that creditors would actually bother, this long after the debts were incurred, or that an inquisitive third party would be able to usefully find records of the debt being pursued.

I hear where you’re coming from, and we seem agreed that there’s nothing internet sleuths are entitled to. I do think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this:

The implication is that the family either wanted to know or ought to have wanted to know. We have no information to evaluate those judgments, and there's enough gray there that it's irritating as an assumption.

I think if someone has died — even if it was a fairly long time ago — it’s safe to presume that there are people somewhere who still care about them, still think about them, would like to know what happened. From a state of ignorance about who those people are, I think it’s compassionate to try to let them know, especially when no one else is trying.

And naturally, the same compassion instructs one to respect their wishes after that point. Again, all working as intended.

Try making friends irl, you'll notice the difference

"Reverse Adaptation" is maybe close -- see Langdon Winner's book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought (1978)".

A (partial) summary of the term reverse adaptation is here by someone else: https://anarcho-primitive.blogspot.com/2012/08/reverse-adapt... "Technology structures our lives in ways that accommodate its own operative requirements. Langdon Winner called this reverse adaptation. Technologies start out serving specific human ends or addressing a highly circumscribed set of problems. But once they come into being, they shape human thought and activity in ways that conform to the structure and organization of the technology itself. The technological solution becomes a way of reframing the original problem, and features of the original problem that do not correspond to the technological solution are ignored or redefined."

But that summary doesn't quite capture everything Langdon Winner talked about -- since he does go into how most institutions become self-perpetuating (or try to).

To me, it is also an evolutionary issue -- that we tend to only come across institutions with some sort of equivalent of a survival drive and the means to carry out that drive. I rambled further on that theme in this post: https://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/01... "Evolution can be made to work in positive ways, by selective breeding, the same way we got so many breeds of dogs and cats. How can we intentionally breed "nice" corporations that are symbiotic with the humans that inhabit them? To what extent is this happening already as talented individuals leave various dysfunctional, misguided, or rogue corporations (or act as "whistle blowers")? I don't say here the individual directs the corporation against its short term interest. I say that individuals affect the selective survival rates of corporations with various goals (and thus corporate evolution) by where they choose to work, what they do there, and how they interact with groups that monitor corporations. To that extent, individuals have some limited control over corporations even when they are not shareholders. Someday, thousands of years from now, corporations may finally have been bred to take the long term view and play an "infinite game". "

The late Prof. James R. Beniger (lucky to have had him as a professor in college) had an interesting book that explores an example in the area of self-perpetuating professional networks: "Trafficking in Drug Users" https://www.amazon.com/Trafficking-Drug-Users-Professional-S... "Examines the way in which the complex network of organizations and professions required for the control of social deviance coordinated their activities to solve the "drug problem" of the 1960s. Beniger demonstrates that incentives used to encourage law enforcement officials to control deviance actually fostered a desire to perpetuate drug abuse in return for various rewards."