Digital Afterlives

Kick the bucket, push up daisies, bite the dust, draw aces and eights, check out, buy the farm, cash in one’s chips, take the long nap, etc., etc. The length of our list of euphemisms for something is a pretty good indicator of our wish to avoid thinking about that something. It doesn’t help. Avoiding thinking about something is thinking about it. We try anyway. Half a century ago anthropologist Ernest Becker, diagnosed with terminal illness, developed a theory of human behavior called terror management (TMT) that he described in his 1973 book The Denial of Death for which he won a posthumous Pulitzer the following year. Humans, so far as we know, are the only animals aware they are mortal, and Becker argued that in the process of trying to deny our mortality we developed civilization, art, religion, and neuroses. Studies by experimental psychologists (see On the Role of Death in Life by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenburg, and Tom Pyszczynski) largely support Becker’s conclusions.

One of the many ways we try to cheat death is by creating a legacy such as books, art, businesses, buildings, and (of course) children in order to live on in some fashion. Nonetheless, few of us enjoy facing our motives head on, which explains why a large majority of adults have not written wills. Some event usually has to prod us into doing it: a health scare, the loss of someone close to us, or even just a close call on the interstate. In the current century, however, new questions have arisen that people who do write wills generally fail to address: our digital legacies. A physical photo album is personal property and transfers to heirs in the same way as furniture, but what of an online photo album (quite aside from whether anyone knows the deceased’s password)? What of e mail accounts, which are often forbidden by the Terms of Service to be turned over to third parties? What of a Facebook page or Instagram account? Is it property at all? Keep in mind that a Facebook page contains not just the user’s info but links to everyone who interacted with the user. In 2004 the scifi movie The Final Cut anticipated a time when implants would record our entire lives, and a professional editor could be hired to pare the final record into a watchable video biography made of key moments; very different pictures could emerge depending on what was included and omitted. We don’t have implants (yet) but we do create voluminous digital records with similar potential.

Psychologist Elaine Kasket (an aptronym if there ever was one) discusses the various aspects of digital legacies in her book All the Ghosts in the Machine. She recommends writing specific instructions for the disposition of your digital footprint in your will. 

While users can instruct Facebook to delete their accounts upon death, very few do and someone would have to notify Facebook of the event. An uncertain number of “users” are deceased; estimates are in the tens of millions. In the US alone hundreds of thousands of people with Facebook profiles die every year and most of those profiles remain standing. The dead will inevitably outnumber the living later this century – assuming the platform itself survives that long. Pages are sometimes kept active by survivors who have password information – which can be disconcerting to other friends and family who see posts from their deceased loved one. It is also permitted to turn the profiles into memorial pages where people can continue to speak to the deceased. Going to physical cemeteries to visit relatives for much the same reason was more of a thing when I was a kid than it is today. My mom never saw the sense in it. “Give your flowers to people when they are alive,” she always said. My dad did find solace in it, however; after my sister died he went every day. Online memorial pages are vastly easier: people can visit them without leaving their chairs. There are even dedicated sites, such as World Wide Cemeteries, for virtual graveyards. I have my mom’s perspective on such things, but I understand that visits to real and virtual memorial sites do have value to many.

We are far away from the scifi fantasy of downloading one’s own consciousness into a machine and thereby breaking free of biological limitations and mortality. However, we can make eerily convincing simulations of this. The holograms of Roy Orbison and Michael Jackson already perform before live audiences. (Who owns these images is still not entirely settled.) Sophisticated AIs with access to a deceased person’s digital media presence – blogs, comments, messages, posts, etc. – can uncannily imitate his or her conversational style and content right down to the type of jokes cracked. Few of us at present inspire the investment of resources needed to create such virtual simulacra of ourselves, but as they become easier and cheaper to produce they will become more common. What postmortem rights, if any, do we have with regard to them? Case law has conflicting opinions, but there is generally a recognition of some interest by surviving family members.

For now, most of us need only be concerned about blogs, email, social media profiles, online subscriptions, photographs, and financial data. Yet the importance of these should not be underestimated as fewer and fewer of our records are stored on paper in boxes in the closet and more and more on the cloud. Kasket makes several recommendations. Nominate a digital executor and create a master password list so that the executor can access your accounts – do not store the list somewhere that needs one of the passwords to open it. Curate your presence online. Each of us likes to self-present in certain ways and none of us is proud of everything. Be sure you want your survivors to see what is online – after all, we edit physical scrapbooks, too. Remember we won’t be around to explain context. Back up the most important stuff the old-fashioned way: physical photo albums and paper-and-ink documents. Yet, Kasket reminds us, nothing is forever, including legacies. Digital formats change, social media platforms go broke, physical photos fade. Immortality, digital or otherwise, is not on the table. Try to be OK with that.

Also, I have it on good authority that you should give your flowers to people while they’re alive.

On rare occasions an inscription apparently is legacy enough:

The Pretty Reckless – Death by Rock and Roll (acoustic)