Peekaboo! How the Erosion of Object Permanence is Undermining Digital Endings.

A simple game. A flash of joy. Maybe a fundamental psychological lesson in digital deletion?

What was once a helpful metaphor for interaction design—centred on object permanence and ownership—has become muddled by cloud computing, social media, and digital relationships. Questions like "What is where?" and "How do I delete it?" have become increasingly difficult to answer.

Children quickly learn not just that objects persist, but that they belong to specific people. By age two, they understand that the first person to hold an object probably owns it. By three, they can track ownership even between identical items. And by seven, they understand that ownership doesn’t apply to inanimate objects in the same way it does to agents. These mental models form the foundation for how we interact with the world—and with systems of possession and responsibility. But what happens when the things we “own” are no longer physically present? What happens when our most valuable assets—photos, memories, files, conversations—exist only in digital form?The short answer: we begin to lose our grip on endings.

From Ownership to Interface: The Age of the Local File

For decades, computing leaned heavily on metaphors drawn from the physical world. A "file" lived in a "folder." You could open it, close it, drag it to the trash. It lived on your machine, on your hard drive. It had weight in the mind, even if not in the hand.

If something was lost, you could look for it. If something was deleted, it was (mostly) gone. These experiences echoed physical ownership and reinforced object permanence in a new medium. Early UX designers understood this—and leaned into it. A sense of place and presence made digital tools easier to learn and easier to trust. But then came the cloud.

The Cloud: A Thousand Files in a Thousand Places

What started as a convenient backup system quickly became a fragmented, invisible architecture. Cloud services have abstracted storage away from the device, away from the interface—and often away from the user’s understanding.

Today, a typical workday might involve bouncing between Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud, Adobe Creative Cloud, and platform-specific storage across countless apps. Each has its own terms, identity systems, and metaphors—some clear, some confusing. Files are no longer in one place. In fact, it's increasingly difficult to even say where they are.

This erosion of the single, comprehensible object relationship—“my file, on my computer”—undermines our ability to feel ownership. It also makes it harder to understand when something has ended. If you close an account, what happens to the content? Does it persist? Is it archived? Deleted? Shared with third parties? The language of “trash” and “delete” no longer provides assurance. And as our control thins out, so too does our sense of resolution.

The Social Media Mirror: Relationships Without Endings

This problem escalates when applied to human relationships. Social media has radically reshaped our experience of presence and absence. Jon-Christian Pass, writing for Simply Put Psych, draws a compelling parallel between digital interaction and the breakdown of object permanence. He notes that platforms like Instagram and TikTok train us to depend on constant feedback loops—likes, comments, stories, shares.

When that interaction stops—when someone goes silent or doesn’t engage—our brains respond as if they’ve disappeared. Ghosting, a phenomenon almost unheard of a generation ago, has become a default behaviour. Because digital presence feels conditional, its absence feels like erasure.

And what about identity? Without regular updates—without the stream of posts, stories, likes—people begin to feel invisible. Even our self-worth has become algorithmically regulated. No post? No presence. No presence? No existence. This isn’t just bad for relationships. It’s deeply disorienting for any sense of continuity. It’s object impermanence applied to the self.

Where Does This Leave Endings?

Endings are a natural part of the human experience. We break up. We finish projects. We outgrow things. We say goodbye. In the physical world, objects linger. A chair sits unused in the corner. A jacket remains in the wardrobe. A camera gathers dust in the drawer. These physical remnants occupy space, reminding us of the things we’ve kept and the things we’ve let go.

But digital products and services don’t behave that way. Subscriptions, data, and app-based accounts don’t take up room. They don’t make noise. They don’t decay. Instead, they linger silently, often without our awareness—until they pop up with a notification, a charge, or a promotional email.

Even deletion is ambiguous. When a consumer asks a company to remove their data, they’re often operating under physical-world assumptions: that data is like a product they can dispose of, or a privilege they can rescind. But data lives across systems, is backed up redundantly, and is shared with partners. What feels like “deletion” may only be blindness. And when we don’t know if something has truly ended, we carry a lingering unease.

Do you feel it?