By 2100, the dead could outnumber the living on Facebook, and other social platforms like it.
Centuries of hiding the dead away may come to a close as our “digital remains” may keep our ancestors around us at all times. We ought to have a plan.
So argues the Oxford researcher Carl Öhman in his new book The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care.”
The book is a mix of philosophy, technology and information sciences. It’s rich, light, short and important. I recommend it. Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- The dead make civilization: historian Thomas Laquer in The Work of The Dead: “Caring for [the dead] is the sign of our emergence from the order of nature into culture”
- Modernistic “forbidden death” is different than the Nauftian ritual decorating of family skulls or other ways to keep deceased present: does data return death to be more present?
- The dead will outnumber the living on many social platforms in future
- Your data create “a hyper realistic and three dimension imago mask, printed not in wax but in ones and zeroes.”
- These digital remains create “an informational corpse”
- Islamic prayer apps that keep posting after a subscribers death
- “Our post-mortal condition”
- “Onlife” Ricardo Fioridi
- Rozenzweig in 2002: Private companies owning all our data presents “grave danger for the future of the past”
- Jeff Rothenberg: “[d]igital objects last forever – or five years, whichever comes first.”
- The dead were the first to have permanent dwellings: Lewis Mumford
- Roland Barthes Camera Lucida: photography is a “ a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity
- The unsettling art of death photography
- Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey: keeping photos in our homes make “a site of materialized memory”
- Author says we think it is a problem that we follow laws set by the past and an old constitution but I do not think most Americans agree with him! He writes: “The fact that this is generally regarded as a flaw, rather than a feature, of democracy is telling for how we moderns conceive of it.” (39)
- If Jefferson was the liberal who chose life, then Edmund Burke was the conservative who argued a span of generations “a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born”
- Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern condition inspired the authors post mortal condition
- 2018 German court law confirms that German deceased girl’s memorialized Facebook page gets opened up and parents can inherit her correspondence (a la her real letters if she had any)
- Short film developed from actual Youtube comment sharing the story of keeping his father’s memory alive by not beating his previous score (See below
- AI Project Luka Labs by Eugenia Kuyda (Replika)
- Du3a.org prayer app that this author studied for sending posthumous prayer
- Nick Bostrom : trans humanism
- Martine Rothblatt: mindclones
- Eric Steinhart: digital ghosts
- Author calls this all “nonsense”; “ when we say that AI is becoming smarter or developing this or that cognitive ability, what we mean for the most part is not that it is becoming increasingly similar to a human brain, but they we are becoming better and better at decoupling sophisticated tasks, like natural language, processing, or playing some board game, from intelligence.”
- Personal data is either something we own (the American tradition, like a car) or as Luciano Floridi argues, it is more a part of whom we are (European tradition of privacy)
- Patrick Stokes: persons va selves
- Thomas Nagel: states of pain (disappointed or loss, which must be felt) compared to “irreducibly relational” facts of pain (betrayal, which are bad regardless?)
- This “facts of harm” are why betrayal of someone dead still matters
- “The data archives harbored by these platforms are more than an advertising resource; they are a global portrait of our species in the twenty first century”
- Bettany Hughes: women are just 0.5% of named historical figures we know
- Now instead of asking is this important enough to record we now ask is this record unimportant enough to destroy?
- Author’s 2019 paper of Facebook as encyclopedia of the dead
- Examples of developing archival plans for data: Task force on arching digital information in the 1990s and Digital Preservation Coalition; and UNESCO software heritage project and Internet archive
- Richard Meadow: trash is a proxy for human behavior
- Karl Marx: Capital is dead labor
- Google’s inactive account manager
- Facebook legacy contact
- Legacy Locker
- Christian Fuchs audience labor
- Magdalena Kania: digital mourning labor
- Does this “digital afterlife industry DAI” perpetuate grief?
- International Code of Ethics for museums has standards for human remains that could be followed for digital remains: human dignity
- Facebook as digital cemetery: if having memorial profiles aren’t enough to keep it inevitable and keep living users clicking (mourning labor), then perhaps they must be paid to remain like real cemeteries (but this would skew future data); also North American user is worth $53.56 to Facebook but the average African user worth just $2.77 but the cost to store data is the same
- War crimes documented on social media is typically removed by platforms (human rights)
- Vanessa Callison Burch and Jed brubaker Facebook paper on legacy strategy (author thinks Facebook has navigated digital remains well)
- Chinese censors have so been unaware of Tiananmen Square controversy that they accidentally published them, having never recognized them as controversial
- Twitter donation to Library of Congress is welcome but not repeatable: “a public digital world archive is a dead end”
- He argues for many overlapping uses and systems.
- Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “rooted cosmopolitism:” morality of global village, cosmopolitan values , if not spatially close they are indornatiobally close
- Author really wants to make “archeopolitan” a thing
- We are custodian of digital records, not their owner
- Dead and unborn also have claims
- Debora Basset: business code of ethics for digital remains
- Author recommends a UNESCO style digital remains pledge for companies like states for physical remains
- “Information fiduciary”
- “The shortest way to take possession of a place and secure it as one’s own is to bury one dead in it.” Robert Pogue Harrison.