Meerkat, the live video broadcasting application developed by Life on Air, Inc., died in September 2016, aged nineteen months. It was born in a corridor at South by Southwest Interactive in March 2015, where it achieved a velocity of adoption that had not been witnessed at that festival since Twitter itself announced its presence on the same stages eight years prior. For one luminous fortnight, it appeared that Ben Rubin and his team had located something essential in the human appetite for unmediated witness.

Twitter revoked Meerkat’s access to its social graph within days of the app’s emergence, then acquired its rival Periscope before either product had drawn a full breath. Meerkat pivoted to Houseparty, which found its own moment and its own ending. It is survived by the reflex it normalised: the raised phone, the live dot, the small gathered crowd watching a stranger’s ordinary life unspool in real time.