Popular in Sociology

Culture and Society

The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place

New York University Harvey Moltoch

Culture and Society

Carceral Entrapments: Views from the Prison/Street Interface in India

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi Mahuya Bandyopadhya

Culture and Society

Pre-problem families: predictive analytics and the future as the present

University of Southampton Rosalind Edwards

Ethnicity and Racism

Were Muslim Barbarians Really Knocking On the Gates of Ontario?

University of Ottawa Natasha Bakht

Culture and Society

Poor People’s Survival Strategies

The University of Texas at Austin Javier Auyero

Ethnicity and Racism

Sociology of Whiteness

Arizona State University Monica McDermott

Ethnicity and Racism

Narratives of Harm and the case for detention abolition

Queen's University Sharry Aiken

The Digital Departed: How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality

View more insights in Books - Social Sciences - Sociology - Culture and Society

View more figures from Smith College

View the page of Timothy Recuber

Read the Study

Timothy Recuber traces how communication beyond death evolved over time.

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 28, 2023

Generating Workspace

Export as PDF

The speaker reflects on their journey of exploring the intersection of the internet and death, beginning in graduate school after the loss of a mentor, Richard Harvey Brown. They were inspired to analyze how social media serves as a space for mourning and remembrance when individuals die or go missing. Initially anxious about the lack of existing literature, the speaker ultimately wrote their dissertation on disaster news coverage and later returned to the topic for their second book, focusing on the concept of "digital death."

The exploration notes that much of the academic work on digital death has centered on how the living interact with the deceased's digital footprints, but less attention has been given to the agency of the dying and the dead themselves. The speaker delves into various digital expressions surrounding death, including blogs by the terminally ill and digital suicide notes, and investigates emerging technologies aimed at post-mortem messaging and mind uploading.

They describe the evolving understanding of legacy in the digital age, where anyone can strive for remembrance, extending beyond the traditionally powerful or heroic figures. The speaker discusses the challenges of achieving genuine digital immortality, emphasizing that while technology allows for innovative expressions of legacy, these records are often impermanent, as websites and data can disappear.

The speaker also raises concerns about digital legacy being commodified or overly individualistic, urging people to consider their contributions to the world beyond personal legacies. They advocate for thinking about mortality in communal terms and addressing real-world problems to ensure that any digital afterlife reflects positive contributions to society. Ultimately, the discussion highlights the complexities of integrating technology with our understanding of death and remembrance, challenging individuals to thoughtfully engage with their digital legacies and broader impacts on the world.

Language:

Export as PDF

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

00:00.285 --> 00:02.885
A long time ago, when I first started graduate school,

00:03.005 --> 00:05.125
I worked for a very brilliant,

00:05.125 --> 00:06.725
professor named Richard Harvey Brown.

00:06.985 --> 00:10.405
And, sadly he passed away at the, toward the end

00:10.405 --> 00:11.645
of my time working there.

00:11.905 --> 00:13.725
Um, this is around 2003.

00:14.385 --> 00:16.805
And, one of the things I was asked to do then was

00:16.805 --> 00:21.245
to create a website, that would contain his, you know,

00:21.465 --> 00:24.125
cv, other information about him,

00:24.125 --> 00:26.965
some unpublished works that, he wasn't able to finish

00:26.965 --> 00:28.485
before he, before he died.

00:29.065 --> 00:31.325
Um, so I guess that got me thinking about the ways

00:31.325 --> 00:33.045
that the internet was gonna change

00:33.145 --> 00:35.445
or might be changing our relationships with death.

00:35.605 --> 00:38.245
I took a little bit of time off from academia,

00:38.245 --> 00:41.365
and when I went back to finish my PhD at the City University

00:41.365 --> 00:45.325
of New York, I wrote a paper, a conference paper,

00:45.515 --> 00:49.125
this is, I guess around 2007, about a few case studies

00:49.175 --> 00:52.645
where people, young people had died or gone missing,

00:52.665 --> 00:55.325
and their social media pages became like these gathering

00:55.325 --> 00:58.325
points for, their friends

00:58.325 --> 01:00.245
and family, to talk about them

01:00.345 --> 01:02.445
or try to figure out what happened or anything like that.

01:02.505 --> 01:05.965
But at the time, there really wasn't any other literature,

01:06.225 --> 01:08.685
that I could find, people doing this kind of work.

01:08.705 --> 01:09.565
And as a graduate

01:09.565 --> 01:10.765
student, I was, that made me a little nervous.

01:11.265 --> 01:13.805
So I, I ended up writing my dissertation,

01:13.805 --> 01:16.085
which became my first book on a,

01:16.205 --> 01:18.885
I guess a only slightly less macabre topic,

01:18.885 --> 01:20.205
news coverage of disasters.

01:20.665 --> 01:23.525
And then, I always kind of thought I would come back

01:23.525 --> 01:26.325
to it, after the first book, which I did.

01:26.385 --> 01:28.085
So the, this is my second book,

01:28.085 --> 01:30.845
and this is, the, that's what spurred I guess,

01:30.845 --> 01:31.845
the digital departed.

01:32.185 --> 01:36.885
So when I came back to the topic, then there was a growing,

01:37.185 --> 01:39.765
literature and pretty robust literature out there.

01:39.815 --> 01:42.725
There were a lot of academics doing work in this general

01:42.795 --> 01:43.925
area,

01:43.925 --> 01:47.125
but most of that work was focused on,

01:47.465 --> 01:50.565
how someone's social media page becomes kind of a space

01:50.565 --> 01:53.445
for mourning and grieving for the living, right?

01:53.465 --> 01:58.285
How the living engage with the, what's left behind

01:58.345 --> 01:59.845
by the, the dead, right?

02:00.345 --> 02:04.045
Um, but there wasn't a lot of work, on how

02:05.065 --> 02:07.645
the dying and the dead themselves,

02:07.675 --> 02:09.045
have agency in these things.

02:09.505 --> 02:13.725
Um, and so I started to think about that end of things

02:13.905 --> 02:18.245
and try to find, places where people,

02:18.835 --> 02:21.325
well, I looked at things like blogs of the terminally ill,

02:21.705 --> 02:23.845
digital suicide notes, things like that.

02:24.425 --> 02:28.005
Um, so I went about kind of combing the internet

02:28.065 --> 02:31.045
for examples of, of these that I could kind of analyze

02:31.045 --> 02:32.285
and look at the discourse and try

02:32.285 --> 02:34.685
to understand the different themes that were in these kinds

02:34.685 --> 02:37.125
of, digital engagements with death and dying.

02:37.345 --> 02:39.965
Um, and also then I kind of, for some

02:39.965 --> 02:43.085
of the more future oriented, cutting edge stuff,

02:43.325 --> 02:45.765
I entered, I ended up interviewing, entrepreneurs

02:45.765 --> 02:46.845
who were working these spaces.

02:46.945 --> 02:49.925
So people who are working on like postmortem messaging

02:49.985 --> 02:52.925
or even, the idea of mind uploading

02:52.925 --> 02:54.485
where you might be able to preserve your brain

02:54.505 --> 02:57.405
and get it eventually, uploaded into a computer

02:57.465 --> 02:58.805
or something to kind of keep yourself

02:58.805 --> 02:59.805
Going. Digital

02:59.805 --> 03:02.805
death is a kind of

03:04.015 --> 03:07.725
grassroots, populist, democratizing thing, right?

03:07.905 --> 03:11.365
For, for most of human history, if you wanted to be

03:12.165 --> 03:16.325
remembered by people other than those closest to you,

03:16.905 --> 03:21.405
you had to be powerful, or maybe exceptionally heroic

03:21.405 --> 03:22.445
or something like that, right?

03:22.945 --> 03:26.525
Um, but you know, a lot of what I've seen in the data

03:26.525 --> 03:28.285
that's in my book, and the people

03:28.305 --> 03:31.445
and the stories behind it are, you know, everyday people

03:32.325 --> 03:34.405
figuring out ways to use the internet to say like, you know,

03:34.405 --> 03:35.885
I'm worthy of being remembered too.

03:36.365 --> 03:38.845
I want some kind of, you know, virtual immortality

03:38.945 --> 03:39.965
for myself as well.

03:40.185 --> 03:43.085
And kind of expanding the idea of who gets to be remembered,

03:43.085 --> 03:45.125
who gets to craft a legacy for themselves.

03:45.825 --> 03:48.285
Um, so that to me is what's kind of new

03:48.285 --> 03:50.365
or interesting about digital death especially.

03:50.635 --> 03:52.885
It's not that, you know, the idea of using

03:53.405 --> 03:57.765
communication technologies to be remembered, started

03:57.765 --> 03:59.565
with the internet like far from it.

03:59.665 --> 04:03.285
But, the idea that anyone could do this, with,

04:03.505 --> 04:06.605
you know, relatively little resources behind it,

04:06.675 --> 04:07.685
that I think is pretty new

04:07.685 --> 04:09.845
and interesting as long as there have been, you know,

04:09.845 --> 04:14.125
anatomically modern humans, been,

04:14.175 --> 04:16.685
using communication technology as long

04:16.685 --> 04:18.565
as we define technology broadly enough, right?

04:18.565 --> 04:21.445
Like, if we think about Red Ochre as a pigment,

04:21.445 --> 04:24.325
that shows up all over, you know, prehistoric grave sites,

04:24.745 --> 04:27.925
in the bodies that are buried in the grave sites on,

04:28.065 --> 04:30.165
you know, cave walls in the drawings

04:30.165 --> 04:33.125
that prehistoric peoples used there or made there.

04:33.145 --> 04:37.205
And so, we don't really know, obviously the,

04:37.265 --> 04:40.485
the substance of what was being communicated in, you know,

04:41.185 --> 04:43.045
in those drawings, or by the way

04:43.045 --> 04:45.165
that bodies were adorned with this pigment.

04:45.225 --> 04:47.845
But it's pretty clear that they are, you know,

04:48.315 --> 04:49.645
talking about death

04:49.705 --> 04:52.085
and perhaps even trying to talk to the people

04:52.105 --> 04:53.125
who have died, right?

04:53.745 --> 04:58.495
Um, so I think that, yeah, there's, you know, as long

04:58.495 --> 04:59.455
as there've been humans, they've

04:59.455 --> 05:00.255
been doing that sort of thing.

05:00.255 --> 05:03.095
Now, of course, different technologies have different sorts

05:03.095 --> 05:05.175
of affordances and can change this kind of relationships.

05:05.235 --> 05:08.095
So, if we think about, you know, the written word

05:08.155 --> 05:12.015
and the alphabet and things like that, obviously that

05:12.565 --> 05:13.935
greatly changes the ways

05:13.935 --> 05:17.255
that we can think about communicating with the dead,

05:17.875 --> 05:19.935
or that the dead can communicate with us, right?

05:19.935 --> 05:22.175
It creates this problem of like absent presence,

05:22.205 --> 05:25.535
that your words can be places that you aren't, right?

05:26.195 --> 05:29.535
And, you know, in some ways that does allow you

05:29.535 --> 05:30.615
to communicate from beyond the grave,

05:30.615 --> 05:32.255
but if you just think of like a will, right?

05:32.495 --> 05:34.655
Suddenly you're getting instructions from someone who's dead

05:34.785 --> 05:36.855
about, you know, how to proceed when they're gone.

05:37.435 --> 05:38.775
Um, and so that notion

05:38.775 --> 05:40.935
of absent presence figures prominently in the book,

05:40.935 --> 05:44.015
at least the, the book's historical chapter, you know,

05:44.135 --> 05:46.655
a continued into the Victorian era,

05:46.655 --> 05:47.975
people would experiment with new

05:47.975 --> 05:49.415
technologies like photography.

05:49.875 --> 05:52.575
Uh, there was a whole sort of genre of photography

05:52.575 --> 05:53.855
where you would pose with the

05:54.415 --> 05:56.775
recently deceased corpse of a family member

05:56.795 --> 05:59.165
Or a friend before you buried them, right?

05:59.165 --> 06:00.565
Oftentimes kind of simulating

06:00.565 --> 06:02.245
that they were still a lit alive

06:02.355 --> 06:04.045
that continued a after World War.

06:04.125 --> 06:06.805
I, there's been an argument that there's kind

06:06.805 --> 06:10.005
of a retrenchment of some of that experimentation,

06:10.075 --> 06:12.645
that there's a period of kind of death denial,

06:12.805 --> 06:14.365
a a medicalization of death,

06:14.375 --> 06:16.725
death moves into hospitals and things like that.

06:17.505 --> 06:21.445
Um, so, but at the same time, I think the, the actual kind

06:21.445 --> 06:25.685
of internet, digital death kind of movement comes along

06:25.685 --> 06:28.565
with a, I guess, a backlash to that backlash

06:28.625 --> 06:31.365
or a sort of, you know, reassessment of the place

06:31.625 --> 06:32.765
of death in modern life.

06:32.785 --> 06:35.765
If you think about, you know, the modern hospice movement

06:35.765 --> 06:36.925
that starts in the sixties,

06:37.145 --> 06:39.485
or even more recently, things like death cafes,

06:39.485 --> 06:41.685
where people are kind of encouraging, you know,

06:41.765 --> 06:44.365
a change in norms where, you know, death shouldn't be

06:44.985 --> 06:47.005
hidden from view, death shouldn't be something

06:47.005 --> 06:48.405
stigmatized, something that we don't talk about.

06:48.945 --> 06:52.805
Um, I think all of that kind of set the stage for the sorts

06:52.805 --> 06:56.005
of, you know, experimentation

06:56.005 --> 06:58.365
and innovation that you see today.

06:58.625 --> 07:01.445
Uh, and that the book talks about one of the more,

07:01.445 --> 07:04.165
most interesting cases that was covered a little bit in the

07:04.165 --> 07:06.405
press, was a guy named Martin Manley.

07:06.865 --> 07:11.245
Um, he, was a, I mean,

07:11.245 --> 07:12.245
I think he had a number of jobs,

07:12.305 --> 07:13.725
but he was a sports journalist.

07:13.905 --> 07:15.965
Uh, he created some basketball metrics.

07:16.145 --> 07:18.085
He was like a basketball journalist,

07:18.625 --> 07:22.125
and did some other things, but he, got very

07:22.635 --> 07:24.925
worried about the idea of growing old

07:24.925 --> 07:26.125
and losing his faculties.

07:26.505 --> 07:31.405
And so he created this immense website all about his life,

07:31.665 --> 07:34.005
all about, you know, basically anything

07:34.005 --> 07:36.285
that anyone would ever wonder about him

07:36.905 --> 07:40.765
and, set it to go online the day that he killed himself.

07:41.465 --> 07:45.725
And, you know, it became this kind of huge legacy.

07:45.945 --> 07:49.645
And he speaks explicitly about, you know, creating a legacy

07:49.785 --> 07:52.685
for himself, making sure that his, you know,

07:52.905 --> 07:56.805
his life was understood on his own terms, making sure

07:56.805 --> 07:59.205
that, anyone who, he even says anyone who wants

07:59.205 --> 08:01.365
to study suicide notes, I'm sure you must be out there

08:01.605 --> 08:02.925
that you know this is for you too.

08:03.585 --> 08:07.205
Um, so yeah, I mean, that's one of the more sort of,

08:07.645 --> 08:11.085
interesting case studies in the, in the book.

08:11.545 --> 08:13.725
Um, there are other people, of course,

08:13.775 --> 08:16.685
there are bloggers who are, you know, terminally ill

08:17.105 --> 08:20.805
who really talk about thinking through what it does to the,

08:20.805 --> 08:22.325
to the, their sense of themselves

08:22.745 --> 08:25.805
and how being ill kind of changes who they are.

08:26.145 --> 08:27.365
And it's not always, you know,

08:27.385 --> 08:29.005
framed in even a bad way, right?

08:29.005 --> 08:31.445
They, they've like come to realize some things

08:31.445 --> 08:34.685
that only people who are facing their own mortality have

08:34.685 --> 08:35.765
come to realize,

08:35.865 --> 08:37.965
and they're trying to share them in these blogs.

08:38.465 --> 08:40.485
Um, so there are, you know, I mean, there's a lot

08:40.485 --> 08:42.005
of like really rich

08:42.025 --> 08:45.685
and often, often very like, sad stories, in the book.

08:45.745 --> 08:47.445
And I think for some people,

08:48.695 --> 08:52.125
especially people working in, you know, when I talk

08:52.125 --> 08:54.605
to the people who were kind of in the field of

08:54.675 --> 08:57.965
Mind uploading, to some of them, it's sort

08:57.965 --> 09:00.485
of like just seeing what can be accomplished

09:00.665 --> 09:04.845
or just being, you know, against the idea

09:04.955 --> 09:08.205
that you would die without doing everything you

09:08.205 --> 09:09.685
could not to, right?

09:09.755 --> 09:13.485
Like that, that it just seemed to them to be kind of a waste

09:13.825 --> 09:16.045
to just accept the realities

09:16.045 --> 09:19.245
of death at a moment when at least they felt, you know,

09:19.295 --> 09:20.525
we're on the precipice

09:20.525 --> 09:23.485
of some real important technological developments

09:23.515 --> 09:26.485
that could ultimately lead, you know,

09:26.485 --> 09:27.605
to some breakthroughs

09:27.605 --> 09:29.885
or to your sort of digital re animation

09:30.105 --> 09:33.285
or, you know, all kinds of sort of sci-fi concepts.

09:33.285 --> 09:36.045
So some of those people are, you know, signed up

09:36.045 --> 09:39.005
with a company called Alco that will preserve you,

09:39.005 --> 09:40.405
when you die or preserve your brain

09:40.405 --> 09:41.965
because they know we're not quite there yet,

09:41.985 --> 09:44.445
but they're hoping, you know, maybe 50 years down the line,

09:45.025 --> 09:47.325
we might be able to,

09:48.265 --> 09:49.725
be digitally reborn in those ways.

09:49.905 --> 09:51.885
You know, I'm not that sort of scientist,

09:52.145 --> 09:55.445
but I tried to learn as much as I could about it,

09:55.985 --> 09:57.885
and I don't think that we are,

09:58.285 --> 09:59.685
I remain pretty skeptical.

10:00.185 --> 10:02.405
And that part of the book was kind of tricky to write

10:02.405 --> 10:04.445
because on the one hand, I really,

10:04.725 --> 10:05.925
I thought these people were really interesting,

10:05.925 --> 10:07.525
and the things they were saying were fascinating.

10:07.725 --> 10:11.165
I, you know, I also felt like I should not be just

10:11.335 --> 10:12.925
completely credulous about it.

10:12.925 --> 10:15.405
And, and you can find, you know, other scientists

10:15.405 --> 10:17.165
who are like, look, the brain isn't a computer.

10:17.505 --> 10:18.525
It doesn't work that way.

10:18.755 --> 10:20.565
It's, that's a metaphor that we understand,

10:20.565 --> 10:23.325
just like people used to think the brain was a series

10:23.325 --> 10:25.445
of gears, or the brain was electricity,

10:25.445 --> 10:28.125
or, you know, the metaphors are always contemporary

10:28.245 --> 10:29.805
with the technology that we're using.

10:30.385 --> 10:33.565
Um, so I'm still somewhat skeptical about that.

10:33.785 --> 10:36.245
Um, but, you know, there are people working hard on it.

10:36.435 --> 10:38.765
From my vantage. Digital immortality is more

10:38.765 --> 10:40.565
of an idea than a reality, right?

10:40.605 --> 10:45.085
I mean, 'cause in the end, links rot websites go, you know,

10:45.345 --> 10:47.365
the, someone stops paying the bill eventually.

10:47.645 --> 10:48.725
I mean, even Martin Manley,

10:48.725 --> 10:52.645
who I discussed a a little bit ago, when there was a lot

10:52.645 --> 10:55.765
of, publicity, Yahoo was gonna shut the site down,

10:55.785 --> 10:57.245
and then some other people cloned it

10:57.245 --> 10:58.485
and put it up in other spaces.

10:58.745 --> 11:01.285
So, you know, it's more about sort of

11:03.265 --> 11:06.815
being able to s solve your own fears of death, I think,

11:06.875 --> 11:08.935
rather than really achieving some kind

11:08.935 --> 11:09.935
of lasting immortality.

11:10.075 --> 11:13.215
Uh, I spoke with people who work in the, space

11:13.235 --> 11:14.615
of post-mortem messaging,

11:14.795 --> 11:16.495
and, you know, many of the companies

11:16.495 --> 11:17.975
that initially came out offering

11:17.975 --> 11:19.375
that service aren't around anymore.

11:19.995 --> 11:23.095
Um, so again, it's, it's, it's still pretty difficult

11:23.095 --> 11:26.215
to achieve digital posterity, just like, you know,

11:26.575 --> 11:29.015
anything on the web, huge portions

11:29.015 --> 11:31.735
of the web have been lost to history and not archived.

11:31.735 --> 11:34.335
And there's only, you know, basically one website that tries

11:34.335 --> 11:36.455
to archive, you know, a tiny fragment of

11:37.085 --> 11:38.215
what we've put online.

11:38.355 --> 11:40.575
So, the idea that we know

11:41.995 --> 11:45.735
you in some really full rich sense are gonna be preserved

11:46.955 --> 11:50.095
online is still, I think, doesn't mesh with

11:50.095 --> 11:51.295
how online really works.

11:51.955 --> 11:55.525
Um, but I do think, you know, it's good

11:55.525 --> 11:59.125
that more people can at least experiment with that,

11:59.235 --> 12:02.285
that they can play around with the idea of

12:02.395 --> 12:03.805
what is my legacy gonna be?

12:03.805 --> 12:04.965
What am I gonna leave behind?

12:05.425 --> 12:07.605
The fact that you have things to leave behind that

12:08.285 --> 12:10.045
previous generations didn't, all kinds of photos

12:10.065 --> 12:12.525
and all kinds of, you know, writing

12:12.665 --> 12:15.725
and all kinds of, other data playlists

12:15.725 --> 12:16.965
and things like that even, right?

12:17.065 --> 12:18.605
So I think that's good.

12:18.685 --> 12:21.845
I think it's interesting too that more people than ever have

12:21.845 --> 12:24.325
that, offered to them.

12:24.665 --> 12:26.645
Um, and I, I guess the only thing,

12:26.745 --> 12:28.005
the only other thing I worry about

12:28.005 --> 12:31.765
with digital immortality is that, it'll get kind

12:31.765 --> 12:34.725
of swallowed up by a handful of companies that, you know,

12:35.195 --> 12:37.205
largely control the internet as we speak.

12:37.765 --> 12:40.405
I hope readers will think about their own digital legacies.

12:40.445 --> 12:42.085
I mean, I don't have any kind

12:42.085 --> 12:43.685
of like prescriptive tips about

12:43.685 --> 12:47.645
how you should handle your own, digital legacies.

12:47.765 --> 12:49.645
I mean, whether you should, you know,

12:50.355 --> 12:52.405
make sure your passwords are all passed on,

12:52.405 --> 12:54.205
or how you wanna safeguard all that kind of stuff.

12:54.525 --> 12:56.805
I mean, some people might wanna be more mysterious about it

12:56.805 --> 12:58.085
or leave things up to fate,

12:58.085 --> 12:59.965
and I, I think that can be okay too.

13:00.545 --> 13:03.605
Um, you know, I hope that whatever people do that they'll

13:04.135 --> 13:06.525
think carefully about it, at least, right?

13:06.555 --> 13:07.925
Make a decision and,

13:07.945 --> 13:10.325
and perhaps consult their loved ones about it too.

13:11.065 --> 13:15.485
Um, and then I guess like more broadly, you know, I hope

13:15.485 --> 13:17.845
that people will think about their own mortality in more

13:17.845 --> 13:19.485
than just individualistic terms.

13:19.905 --> 13:22.445
Um, you know, you aren't actually gonna live forever.

13:22.625 --> 13:24.845
You may be able to stretch out the period in which people

13:24.865 --> 13:26.765
are talking and thinking about you and,

13:26.785 --> 13:30.085
and maybe able to expand it beyond the kind of small circle

13:30.185 --> 13:32.125
of like intimate family

13:32.145 --> 13:33.765
and friends that, that prior

13:33.765 --> 13:35.365
generations had to be content with.

13:35.865 --> 13:38.365
Um, but again, that's only kind of a temporary salve

13:38.365 --> 13:39.565
for our fears of death, right?

13:40.025 --> 13:43.765
Um, and so I think like there's a small tendency

13:43.765 --> 13:46.045
for this kind of stuff to be very individualistic

13:46.045 --> 13:48.325
and to pull us away from, you know, other kind

13:48.325 --> 13:49.965
of good questions that people have asked

13:50.545 --> 13:52.565
of their lives at the end of their lives.

13:52.715 --> 13:55.125
Like, was I a small part of efforts

13:55.185 --> 13:56.765
to make the world a better place, right?

13:56.795 --> 13:58.685
Like that kind of stuff, you know,

13:58.685 --> 14:00.165
because ultimately the digital world

14:00.975 --> 14:04.285
still reflects the problems of the physical world.

14:04.585 --> 14:08.045
And if we want any, you know, portion of our digital selves

14:08.105 --> 14:11.605
to like, live on in some kind of digital afterlife, you,

14:11.625 --> 14:13.645
you know, I make the case that you've gotta fix the

14:13.645 --> 14:14.845
problems of the physical world too.

14:14.845 --> 14:17.085
You've gotta try to make that world a better place,

14:17.345 --> 14:18.525
you know, while you're still in it.

00:00 - A long time ago, when I first started graduate school, I worked for a very brilliant, professor named Richard Harvey Brown. And, sadly he passed away at the, toward the end of my time working there. this is around 2003.

00:14 - And, one of the things I was asked to do then was to create a website, that would contain his, you know, cv, other information about him, some unpublished works that, he wasn't able to finish before he, before he died. so I guess that got me thinking about the ways that the internet was gonna change or might be changing our relationships with death. I took a little bit of time off from academia, and when I went back to finish my PhD at the City University

00:41 - of New York, I wrote a paper, a conference paper, this is, I guess around 2007, about a few case studies where people, young people had died or gone missing, and their social media pages became like these gathering points for, their friends and family, to talk about them or try to figure out what happened or anything like that. But at the time, there really wasn't any other literature, that I could find, people doing this kind of work. And as a graduate

01:09 - student, I was, that made me a little nervous. So I, I ended up writing my dissertation, which became my first book on a, I guess a only slightly less macabre topic, news coverage of disasters. And then, I always kind of thought I would come back to it, after the first book, which I did. So the, this is my second book, and this is, the, that's what spurred I guess, the digital departed.

01:32 - So when I came back to the topic, then there was a growing, literature and pretty robust literature out there. There were a lot of academics doing work in this general area, but most of that work was focused on, how someone's social media page becomes kind of a space for mourning and grieving for the living, right? How the living engage with the, what's left behind by the, the dead, right? but there wasn't a lot of work, on how

02:05 - the dying and the dead themselves, have agency in these things. and so I started to think about that end of things and try to find, places where people, well, I looked at things like blogs of the terminally ill, digital suicide notes, things like that. so I went about kind of combing the internet for examples of, of these that I could kind of analyze and look at the discourse and try to understand the different themes that were in these kinds

02:34 - of, digital engagements with death and dying. and also then I kind of, for some of the more future oriented, cutting edge stuff, I entered, I ended up interviewing, entrepreneurs who were working these spaces. So people who are working on like postmortem messaging or even, the idea of mind uploading where you might be able to preserve your brain and get it eventually, uploaded into a computer or something to kind of keep yourself

02:58 - Going. Digital death is a kind of grassroots, populist, democratizing thing, right? For, for most of human history, if you wanted to be remembered by people other than those closest to you, you had to be powerful, or maybe exceptionally heroic or something like that, right? but you know, a lot of what I've seen in the data that's in my book, and the people and the stories behind it are, you know, everyday people

03:32 - figuring out ways to use the internet to say like, you know, I'm worthy of being remembered too. I want some kind of, you know, virtual immortality for myself as well. And kind of expanding the idea of who gets to be remembered, who gets to craft a legacy for themselves. so that to me is what's kind of new or interesting about digital death especially. It's not that, you know, the idea of using communication technologies to be remembered, started

03:57 - with the internet like far from it. But, the idea that anyone could do this, with, you know, relatively little resources behind it, that I think is pretty new and interesting as long as there have been, you know, anatomically modern humans, been, using communication technology as long as we define technology broadly enough, right? Like, if we think about Red Ochre as a pigment, that shows up all over, you know, prehistoric grave sites,

04:24 - in the bodies that are buried in the grave sites on, you know, cave walls in the drawings that prehistoric peoples used there or made there. And so, we don't really know, obviously the, the substance of what was being communicated in, you know, in those drawings, or by the way that bodies were adorned with this pigment. But it's pretty clear that they are, you know, talking about death and perhaps even trying to talk to the people

04:52 - who have died, right? so I think that, yeah, there's, you know, as long as there've been humans, they've been doing that sort of thing. Now, of course, different technologies have different sorts of affordances and can change this kind of relationships. So, if we think about, you know, the written word and the alphabet and things like that, obviously that greatly changes the ways that we can think about communicating with the dead,

05:17 - or that the dead can communicate with us, right? It creates this problem of like absent presence, that your words can be places that you aren't, right? And, you know, in some ways that does allow you to communicate from beyond the grave, but if you just think of like a will, right? Suddenly you're getting instructions from someone who's dead about, you know, how to proceed when they're gone. and so that notion of absent presence figures prominently in the book,

05:40 - at least the, the book's historical chapter, you know, a continued into the Victorian era, people would experiment with new technologies like photography. there was a whole sort of genre of photography where you would pose with the recently deceased corpse of a family member Or a friend before you buried them, right? Oftentimes kind of simulating that they were still a lit alive

06:02 - that continued a after World War. I, there's been an argument that there's kind of a retrenchment of some of that experimentation, that there's a period of kind of death denial, a a medicalization of death, death moves into hospitals and things like that. so, but at the same time, I think the, the actual kind of internet, digital death kind of movement comes along with a, I guess, a backlash to that backlash or a sort of, you know, reassessment of the place

06:31 - of death in modern life. If you think about, you know, the modern hospice movement that starts in the sixties, or even more recently, things like death cafes, where people are kind of encouraging, you know, a change in norms where, you know, death shouldn't be hidden from view, death shouldn't be something stigmatized, something that we don't talk about. I think all of that kind of set the stage for the sorts of, you know, experimentation

06:56 - and innovation that you see today. and that the book talks about one of the more, most interesting cases that was covered a little bit in the press, was a guy named Martin Manley. he, was a, I mean, I think he had a number of jobs, but he was a sports journalist. he created some basketball metrics. He was like a basketball journalist, and did some other things, but he, got very

07:22 - worried about the idea of growing old and losing his faculties. And so he created this immense website all about his life, all about, you know, basically anything that anyone would ever wonder about him and, set it to go online the day that he killed himself. And, you know, it became this kind of huge legacy. And he speaks explicitly about, you know, creating a legacy for himself, making sure that his, you know, his life was understood on his own terms, making sure

07:56 - that, anyone who, he even says anyone who wants to study suicide notes, I'm sure you must be out there that you know this is for you too. so yeah, I mean, that's one of the more sort of, interesting case studies in the, in the book. there are other people, of course, there are bloggers who are, you know, terminally ill who really talk about thinking through what it does to the, to the, their sense of themselves and how being ill kind of changes who they are.

08:26 - And it's not always, you know, framed in even a bad way, right? They, they've like come to realize some things that only people who are facing their own mortality have come to realize, and they're trying to share them in these blogs. so there are, you know, I mean, there's a lot of like really rich and often, often very like, sad stories, in the book. And I think for some people,

08:48 - especially people working in, you know, when I talk to the people who were kind of in the field of Mind uploading, to some of them, it's sort of like just seeing what can be accomplished or just being, you know, against the idea that you would die without doing everything you could not to, right? Like that, that it just seemed to them to be kind of a waste to just accept the realities of death at a moment when at least they felt, you know,

09:19 - we're on the precipice of some real important technological developments that could ultimately lead, you know, to some breakthroughs or to your sort of digital re animation or, you know, all kinds of sort of sci-fi concepts. So some of those people are, you know, signed up with a company called Alco that will preserve you, when you die or preserve your brain because they know we're not quite there yet,

09:41 - but they're hoping, you know, maybe 50 years down the line, we might be able to, be digitally reborn in those ways. You know, I'm not that sort of scientist, but I tried to learn as much as I could about it, and I don't think that we are, I remain pretty skeptical. And that part of the book was kind of tricky to write because on the one hand, I really, I thought these people were really interesting,

10:05 - and the things they were saying were fascinating. I, you know, I also felt like I should not be just completely credulous about it. And, and you can find, you know, other scientists who are like, look, the brain isn't a computer. It doesn't work that way. It's, that's a metaphor that we understand, just like people used to think the brain was a series of gears, or the brain was electricity, or, you know, the metaphors are always contemporary

10:28 - with the technology that we're using. so I'm still somewhat skeptical about that. but, you know, there are people working hard on it. From my vantage. Digital immortality is more of an idea than a reality, right? I mean, 'cause in the end, links rot websites go, you know, the, someone stops paying the bill eventually. I mean, even Martin Manley, who I discussed a a little bit ago, when there was a lot of, publicity, Yahoo was gonna shut the site down,

10:55 - and then some other people cloned it and put it up in other spaces. So, you know, it's more about sort of being able to s solve your own fears of death, I think, rather than really achieving some kind of lasting immortality. I spoke with people who work in the, space of post-mortem messaging, and, you know, many of the companies that initially came out offering

11:17 - that service aren't around anymore. so again, it's, it's, it's still pretty difficult to achieve digital posterity, just like, you know, anything on the web, huge portions of the web have been lost to history and not archived. And there's only, you know, basically one website that tries to archive, you know, a tiny fragment of what we've put online. So, the idea that we know you in some really full rich sense are gonna be preserved

11:46 - online is still, I think, doesn't mesh with how online really works. but I do think, you know, it's good that more people can at least experiment with that, that they can play around with the idea of what is my legacy gonna be? What am I gonna leave behind? The fact that you have things to leave behind that previous generations didn't, all kinds of photos and all kinds of, you know, writing

12:12 - and all kinds of, other data playlists and things like that even, right? So I think that's good. I think it's interesting too that more people than ever have that, offered to them. and I, I guess the only thing, the only other thing I worry about with digital immortality is that, it'll get kind of swallowed up by a handful of companies that, you know, largely control the internet as we speak.

12:37 - I hope readers will think about their own digital legacies. I mean, I don't have any kind of like prescriptive tips about how you should handle your own, digital legacies. I mean, whether you should, you know, make sure your passwords are all passed on, or how you wanna safeguard all that kind of stuff. I mean, some people might wanna be more mysterious about it or leave things up to fate, and I, I think that can be okay too.

13:00 - you know, I hope that whatever people do that they'll think carefully about it, at least, right? Make a decision and, and perhaps consult their loved ones about it too. and then I guess like more broadly, you know, I hope that people will think about their own mortality in more than just individualistic terms. you know, you aren't actually gonna live forever. You may be able to stretch out the period in which people are talking and thinking about you and,

13:26 - and maybe able to expand it beyond the kind of small circle of like intimate family and friends that, that prior generations had to be content with. but again, that's only kind of a temporary salve for our fears of death, right? and so I think like there's a small tendency for this kind of stuff to be very individualistic and to pull us away from, you know, other kind of good questions that people have asked

13:50 - of their lives at the end of their lives. Like, was I a small part of efforts to make the world a better place, right? Like that kind of stuff, you know, because ultimately the digital world still reflects the problems of the physical world. And if we want any, you know, portion of our digital selves to like, live on in some kind of digital afterlife, you, you know, I make the case that you've gotta fix the problems of the physical world too.

14:14 - You've gotta try to make that world a better place, you know, while you're still in it.

Faculti AI can make mistakes