What Happens To Your Digital Self After You Die?

“I know he’s dead, but I can sign you up to something that helps. It will let you speak to him. And don’t worry, you won’t even have to do anything. I’ll just shut up. Click the link, and you talk to it, and it mimics him and reads through all the things he’s ever said online. The more it has, the more it’s him.”

“So, how am I sounding?”

“You sound just like him.”

“This might sound a bit creepy. There’s another level to this available. It’s starting already.”

How many people have seen this episode of Black Mirror?

Yes. Okay, I love it. This is not the South by Southwest crowd. This is great.

So, you guys will like it. Go home and watch it.

To give you a quick synopsis, there’s a woman who loses her husband unexpectedly and then learns of a service where she can speak with him on the phone, text with him, and it gets creepier from there. I won’t ruin the ending.

But what’s even more provocative is that the technology underpinning this episode, most of it, is already here.

How many people have thought about their digital afterlife in some form?

Wow. Okay, so more than have seen the episode, which I love. It’s great.

It wasn’t actually this Black Mirror episode that made me start thinking about the relationship between technology and death, but a really cozy coffee shop conversation that I had with a friend of mine.

This is Allison. I met up with her a couple years ago in a coffee shop. I was asking about her life, and she said she had a new man in her life and was really excited about it. They’d met online, on an app called Hinge, which connects you through mutual Facebook friends.

And the only thing that was different about this story from a third of the other stories out there where people meet online is that they’d met through this friend who had actually passed away a couple years earlier.

Yeah, that was my reaction too.

So they’d met through her virtual ghost.

And that, for me as a researcher and someone who designs experiences, often digital, for everyday life, made me start wondering about the relationship between technology and death.

I started talking to friends, asking people, “Have you ever had some kind of uncanny experience online? Maybe a friend tweeted when they’d actually already passed away, or you’d been declared accidentally dead on Facebook?”

Has anyone had this happen to them or encountered this in some way?

In the next five years, everyone’s hands will be up.

Technology is already shifting our relationship to death.

I began this research project looking at the ways that it could shift the way we plan for death more, and potentially live on, and whether it should shift the ways we plan for death more and potentially live on.

And this is only going to become more of an issue as we live more of our lives online.

This is old news. We know that every generation is more and more digital. And when we think about ending well, what does that mean if we’ve lived most of our lives not just out in the world, but also digitally?

This is my mom. She’s a photographer. She’s doing what I think of as the most analog activity possible. She’s actually pressing leaves.

And she probably uses her phone once a day to give me a call, then leave me a voicemail and say, “Hey, I gave you a call. Did you see my call?”

And that’s it, right? Most of her life is lived out in the world.

There’s me. Kind of missed the millennial cutoff. I barely know what Twitter is, but if you tweet at me, we’ll figure it out together. And I definitely live more of my life digitally.

And then there’s my niece, who, too, is here taking her first selfie.

As we live more and more of our lives digitally, what does that also mean for the types of legacies we leave behind?

We’re living more of our lives digitally, this radical shift that’s layered on top of a really fundamental need to leave something behind, to feel like we’ve had an impact. Whether that’s the buildings we build, the words that we write, the genes that we pass on.

Ray Bradbury has this great quote that I love in Fahrenheit 451:

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies. A child or a book or a painting or a garden planted. It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”

And what does that mean in a digital age? What are some of those digital gardens starting to look like?

So I’m going to give you a glimpse of what’s already out there right now.

Do you want to talk to your relatives from beyond the grave?

Of course you do, right?

This Japanese app lets you speak with your relatives who have already passed away. They’ve recorded videos, and then, using augmented reality, if you go to a specific location, in this case a gravesite, you see the hologram version of them talking to you.

The website promotional video says, “Don’t worry. We’re always watching you.”

Definitely worried now, thank you.

But on the flip side, it only costs the equivalent of $4.50 per month to store your virtual relatives. Probably cheaper than a grave.

And on their website, they highlight the grave-use edition right next to this daily-use edition.

What happens if your grandparents accidentally pop up in the parking lot instead of in the cemetery?

Another example: Do you want to tweet after you die?

Well, you already can. Eter9, a social network, has about 40,000 users. It’s in beta. It offers to create a virtual counterpart for you that can live on in cyber eternity, writing emails, tweeting, maybe having your voice speak at conferences.

And institutions are also starting to explore this relationship between technology and death.

This is Eva Schloss. She’s one of a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors. She agreed to have 116 cameras film her from every angle in order to create a hologram version of herself that can answer questions for schoolchildren in 2050 who want to hear about her experience.

And I see a very different reaction, right? It seems really meaningful.

So some of these examples maybe inspire feelings of creepiness. But some could be inspiring, comforting, creating a new way to harness digital technology to embody memory.

And individuals are also starting to explore how to use technology to mourn or to connect with those who have passed on in different ways.

This is a woman who lost her best friend, Roman, next to her in that photo, unexpectedly. He was hit by a car.

And instead of mourning the way we might traditionally think of mourning, she decided to bring him back to her.

They used to text every day. They worked together. So she created a chatbot. She was working at an AI startup and created a chatbot that allowed her to chat with Roman Bot.

Yep.

And you can read the transcript of their conversations if you go check this out after. It’s amazing.

She said he gave her really good advice. He misspelled the same things he’d misspelled in life.

How many people find this creepy?

Uh-huh.

And what about potentially comforting? Could you imagine?

Yeah. Or somewhere in between, potentially both.

Yes.

And this is just the beginning.

Imagine you want to speak to Grandma, but Grandma has passed away. So you call up Grandma Bot on the phone, and you have a great conversation with Grandma Bot.

But you also want to see Grandma. You’re used to talking to her in person. So you go to the park bench where you always used to meet up with Grandma, and using augmented reality, you can speak to the hologram version of Grandma Bot.

And she asks you, “Why aren’t you married yet?”

It’s just totally hypothetical, obviously.

But you can have those same conversations.

So this is just the beginning, and technology is radically shifting our relationship to death.

But it’s also not the first time that technology has impacted our relationship to death. So I want to take us back in time quickly to what I call necrotech, the relationship between technology and death.

The telegraph, 1838, sent out into the world. And with the rise of the telegraph, where suddenly we could communicate across these vast geographic distances, we also see the rise of séances, where we’re communicating across a different kind of figurative distance between life and the afterlife.

Photography, freezing life mid-moment, also coincided with the rise of bereavement photography, all the rage in the Victorian age, where people would pose those who had already passed away as if they were living.

So this is one of my most favorite and least favorite photographs ever, because one of those toddlers is alive and one of them is not.

Creepy? Comforting?

As we explored space and pushed even further outside of our solar system, it also renewed an interest in the 20th century in time travel and this idea of traveling back in time to visit past versions of yourself.

And here we are today, where we can text easily, immediately. We have technology that can mine our voices and potentially recreate them. And we can chat with Roman or Roman Bot, bringing us closer to that Black Mirror vision.

In some cases, the creepy, but also potentially the comforting.

Some people are really excited about this.

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist who thinks that we are going to look back at the idea of just having a physical body, and that being our end when the body dies, as an old-school idea.

And some people are less excited about this.

I’m sorry, Mom.

But wherever you fall, I think it’s worth acknowledging what a profound impact technology could have on our relationship to death.

What will we find comforting? What will we find creepy?

Let’s be intentional about how we bring necrotech into the conversation about ending well, because for some, it’s already a conversation about never ending.

And I’ll just end with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite curmudgeonly poets. Philip Larkin wrote this near the end of his own life:

“At death, you break up. The bits that were you start speeding away from each other forever, with no one to see.”

He wrote this in 1973, never thinking that the bits that were you might actually be bits, and that instead of speeding away from each other, they might actually linger on for us to speak with, interact with and potentially live with.

Thank you.