Three years ago, I lost my college roommate, Robert. Facebook reminded me to wish him a happy birthday last Tuesday. Alongside his profile picture, a hiking photo where he grinned at the age of eternally 32, my notifications showed a birthday wish notification. The moment was disorienting because, for the briefest amount of time, I forgot that he was dead. Then reality crashed over me—bringing with it a strange blend of grief and discomfort with technology, all at once.
The social media accounts we both shared continue to digitally house Robert’s ghost. His Twitter account regularly pops on my “People You May Know” section. Robert’s Pinterest boudoirs filled with future vacation spots and home renovation plans still net occasional engagements. His Amazon account continues to publish unsolicited purchasing testimony suggestions and Robert’s blog about craft beer receives a barrage of irreversible spam comments.
He’s lost and not lost at the same time. The paradox is that while he no longer exists physically, his digital identity remains suspended in strange persistent state. With the uncharted territory of the digital afterlife, transformation into an unwitting pioneer of guidance has begun.
This is something that weighs on my mind a tad too much for my own good. Maybe it’s simply watching how the maintained traces of an individual have changed from being ephemeral to permanent outrageously over the decades as a professional in the technology industry. Or the fact that I certainly as of now, migrating in my mid-life stage, will turn into digital carnage for others to reflect upon and figure out commenting digital remains.
In the greater picture of humanity, the consideration of what happens to our online relics after we kick the bucket is new. The physical footprints that humanity has traditionally left behind in the shape of letters, diaries, captures, or even photographs were all described artifacts that had not only a limit but also decayed with time and required active protection to sustain. With our digital legacies, the constraints are precisely the opposite as they are suffocatingly persistent, while deletion becomes the only means to erase them.
We are just starting to understand grappling these types of scenarios that inversively pushes boundaries further. Mark Zuckerberg just simply launched Facebook with his friends a few hours ago and now, please try and wrap your mind around this gopher. Current estimations for those deceased individuals with active facebook accounts are stanched at thirty million. As eerie as it sounds, way over two decades from now, numbers predict they’ll be users who have already died who per facebook outnumber the zombies. Imagine the prospect itself goes dull and turns humanity into borderline surreality.
The continuous existence of a person’s online profile after their death raises some issues. Who retains the rights to these accounts? What will happen to the digital information? How do we differentiate between what the dead would have wanted to keep and what they would have liked to erase? Without adequate planning for a digital will, families are forced to deal with these matters during a period of mourning which is already filled with the absence of, access, or unambiguous direction.
When my friend Elena’s mother unexpectedly passed away, she learned this lesson the hard way. With her mother’s cellphone locked, the passwords unknown, and her digital accounts which included emails, her phone and even her banking accounts—became technological crypts. She was able to see the notifications come in, however she was unable to access the contents. Moreover, important documents and photos that she treasured were only visible as thumbnails. It was unique in the sense that even though Elena could see enough information to know that her mother’s digital existence was tantalizingly within her reach, the reality is that, every bit of it was beyond her grasp.
This very experience encouraged me to come up with what my wife affectionately mocks as my “digital death plan,” a document explaining what I want done to my accounts, including access info for my accounts, online presence management, instruction on what to save or delete, and most importantly, everything after I pass away. These suggestions and instructions will be stored securely behind a password. While my wife views it as ominous, I consider it practical. Realistically, we both hold weight in what we are arguing.
The social conventions regarding digital remnants are still developing and bring up new mandatory etiquette questions. Is it proper to tag a deceased person in pictures? Should their professional accounts on LinkedIn still be active? What about dating apps — should families be aware of their loved ones’ accounts, messages, and contacts? There is, however, no Emily Post guide for posthumous technological etiquette.
I have seen different approaches with friends who have lost someone dear to them. Some celebrate the life of the deceased by keeping their social media accounts as centers of remembrance, posting messages and photos on special dates. Others prefer the silence of closing accounts and maintaining private grief. Others leave accounts dormant in a way that suspends them as a time capsule at the moment of death. Each option highlights specific values related to dealing with memories and loss in an increasingly anchored digital world.
While at [REDACTED TECH COMPANY], I participated in a grand total of one meeting which covered the topic of our product’s interaction with a user’s death. This meeting was half an hour long, and concluded with the decision to include a new button within the settings page that simply read, ‘Memorialize this account upon verified death of user.’ In our typical fashion, they implemented the feature with no further discussion than we usually spend on button color changes. The product manager for that meeting seemed to be perpetually squirming under the hypothetical user mortality cloak when we discussed our user base’s death shroud.
This speaks to a wider ‘tech industry issue’ of approaching the subject of digital afterlife with a casual demeanor. In perpetually building for user engagement, the tech sector forgets to account for user disengagement, let alone user disengagement for good. When users disengage for good, it becomes an afterthought – a digital death is a side case rather than the universal truth.
This leads to problems of a particularly absurd nature. All too often software systems are programmed to treat dead users as fully active. A user who has passed away continues to be served retirement and holiday ads tailored to pre-programmed engagement logic. Mail services cheerfully spam people with inactivity alerts who are never going to use the account. Fitness tracking applications actively entice the already dead to get more steps. Each encounter accentuates the gap between biological existence and perpetual digital existence.
Socrates is a predecessor of modern Western philosophy who raised practical and personal queries regarding life and civilization and the impact it leaves on an individual. Where does the question of existence come into play when contemplating one’s digital footprint outliving them? In today’s context, does a compilation of status updates, images, and engagements equate to life after death, or simply an empty masquerade? Are the shattered remnants of our digital selves giving solace to those that outlive us, or causing a detrimental mirage that inhibits productive moving on?
While hosting dinner, I posed these queries to a myriad of friends, which resulted in what my wife aptly named “the most depressing dinner party conversation ever” according to David. The answers given were surprisingly unpredictable. On one hand, David expressed wanting a clean break from the social world post-death, exclaiming, “I don’t want to linger as pieces of data,” while his counterpart Sarah was more optimistic, arguing that “social media gives humanity the opportunity to share artistry long after they leave,” and will live on through joy. These are radically distinct predictions that display an impactful shift in societal views of identity.
A shift towards the belief that our digital presence will cease to exist in the hands of humanity long after we perish allows capabling the ability to share opinionated artistry long after we leave.
Should your online remains be nothing more than an asset to be locked away? Should it be a composite of imaginative endeavors that, due to your existence, ought to exceed your lifespan? Or should it be simpler—something that exists as the ‘raw ingredient’ for where some iteration of your consciousness could be disentangled from?
Moving towards the practical problems is in the realm of belief—digital resurrection possibility—although the border fusing reality and science fiction fades closer each year. Businesses analyzing one’s virtual interaction for the purpose of building digital replicas of themselves for users to control and interact with as real chatbots capable of seamlessly messaging in the form the user sets is already a service provided. One day, they might rid the skin of their physical embodiment, and instead don their digital footprints to muse of the user’s void-emitting interactive chatbots.
Would such advanced technology gift us with a new framework of solace or a novel strand of agony? Agony in the form of simulating a user’s cherished individuals void emitting semblances of them and conceal their true selves. Capture users alive but absent in a state dealing with an absence they can’t interact with. As an individual AI and human linguistics researcher, the technological capabilities egotistically elate me while grappling with the ethical implications profoundly disturbs me.
The intersection between the permanence of digital remains and the impermanence of biological life is equally heart wrenching and fascinating. It seems to be the case that social media accounts, emails, and photos stored in the ‘cloud’ will outlive our physical being. There is no denying that the digital self—those curated, performative versions of ourselves—will be how younger generations interpret our existence.
This potential reality is forcing me to rethink the impression I intend to create online. If my granchchildren’s first glimpse of me is shaped by the digital footprint i left behind, i wonder what i will be remembered for. Will they see filtered vacation pictures, witty tweets, and think they represent a persona? Will they notice the discrepancies between my documented life and the life that I truly live?
Commemoration takes on an entirely new form with the consideration of a digital afterlife. One of my acquaintances is known to still send text messages to the phone number of her deceased brother. She employs this is as a very unique form of a grief journal. One other friend runs a private instagram account where she posts messages and photos targeted to her late mother and in doing so, she creates a digital conversation to help her process her memories and the loss that she is constantly together with. Such practices showcase the unique ways in which people are learning to cope with the presence and absence that digital remains facilitate.
On a personal level, I have become more proactive regarding a person’s digital legacy. I systematically retrieve archives of pertinent photographs and documents, saving them in both formats and locations that my relatives could access without the need of technical expertise. I’ve provided step by step processes on what accounts should be memorialized, deleted, and content extracted before terminating the account. To normalize the process, I have drafted my last social medial post which is to be published by my wife apon my death, which is an odd nostalgic practical exercise.
Aside from taking these steps, coming to terms with the digital death that awaits us all is something I have also come to accept. There will be a time when account holders will no longer have the ability to manage the life they wish to represent online. Accounts that were never remembered, shameful posts and incomplete digital tasks will always exist. The conscious ability of a person’s self to exist beyond their bodily demise is a muddled truth riddled in technology, and epitomizes the way mankind outlives preconceptions long associated with existence ceasing functionality.
So for those now reading my message, if by any chance I have recently passed from the world of online and transitioned into the offline world, removesake any unsent messages or cringe inducing spam requests from roaming accounts online. Feel free to send me virtual messages on Facebook during spinal interface time in mindless captcha wishing happy birthdays as such my digital skeleton frowns would be grateful but would rather not play the role of the bodiless conscience forever saddled to their semblance.
