Let’s talk about death.
Over the years, we have gotten used to the parental adage that everything you post online exists forever, so you should be careful in case any future boss or whoever came across some embarrassing photo or inflammatory comment. While this has never technologically been true, it always felt true, as common as it was to encounter some unintended consequence of something by you or about you being posted on the web. Despite the ephemerality we’ve come to expect from our online experiences, for a time, it did seem like our posts and our information, once shared, would be retrievable in some way until the end of time, even if it became buried.
We now know better. In recent days and weeks, this has come into sharper focus, as numerous tech companies have announced that they plan to either delete inactive accounts and data storage, or otherwise find ways to cut down on their own costs by eliminating data of ours. There are some obvious culprits, like Elon Musk announcing that he plans to remove accounts that have been dormant for several years (as usual, the actual implementation of this policy could look very different). Imgur is doing something similar, and Google announced they will do the same for personal accounts that have been inactive for two years, apparently in an attempt to curb hacks and spam activity (they clarified that YouTube accounts won’t be affected).
A common workaround for social platforms has been account memorialization, largely led by Facebook, whereby loved ones of users that have passed away can memorialize their account so that it stays up even if unused, though there are problems with this system, including the deletion of all that user’s chat logs. In any case, while all these policies are not explicitly about what to do with accounts and data for the dead, that is obviously the spectre haunting each of these decisions, in that even an apparently good-faith attempt to stop spam inevitably reverberates for literally-dead accounts.
I wrote back in 2019 about these bizarre digital gravestones, specifically the accounts and posts of people like the photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed while covering the conflict in Libya in 2011. His Twitter account remains up (his last tweet, sent a day before his death, reads, “In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO.”), but would presumably be deleted according to Musk’s proposed policy change. Indeed, as I wrote at the time, “we all must confront this reality. Our online selves will outlive us, and in many cases, we will cease having control over them.” How wrong I was!
On the other hand, I agree with my assessment then that we have an obsession with maintaining some kind of contact with the dead, even, or perhaps especially, online. I noted how every year on his birthday, loved ones write on the Facebook page for a friend of mine who died of cancer in high school, wishing him well and updating him on their own lives, as they did once more this year. At the same time, we maintain different versions of ourselves across the internet, from our Twitter persona(s) to our fanfic accounts to our Reddit to whatever else, all of it, maybe, adding up to something, some puzzle of the self. These records, one might assume, can take on even more significance after death, apparent windows into the unknowable, certainly reflecting something true and real.
So, putting aside how to go about putting together those puzzles or what our self-awareness about digital legacy does or does not change about what we do online, the bigger question now, it seems, is how much will be left at all. It sounds incredibly obvious, but walking through Highgate Cemetery in London the other day, intending to see Karl Marx’s grave, I couldn’t help but think about the thousands of other folks buried there, generally utterly forgotten to history, though perhaps granted some sideways longevity because countless tourists might walk by on their way to see Marx, or George Eliot, or Douglas Adams, and catch your name on the way by. Remembered, in a way, by chance.
Everyone wants to be remembered, or so we like to say. The complicated and yearning emotional frisson of leaving your mark on the world, or just on those you cared for. As J.K. Rowling said, “It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.” Gonna hold you to that, J.K.! Anyway, you won’t be surprised where I land on this when it comes to the decisions being made about our digital legacies without our input by companies who, by and large, simply don’t want to be responsible for the bandwidth it requires to hoard all our data in perpetuity, because it costs money. As usual, users get the shaft because the platforms don’t want to do the proper maintenance required to take care of something that they shouldn’t control in the first place.
The thing is, any ostensible “fix” that these companies offer, like deleting old accounts to severely cut down on spam and phishing, is always followed by ripple effects that take down so much else, precisely because companies like Google have been allowed to monopolize how we use the internet — I don’t know how many things I sign into by actually signing into my Google account. And so, we have no choice but to take out the baby with the bathwater.
You’re likely familiar with the phrase planned obsolescence, referring to how new technologies under capitalism are designed to stop working or become much slower at some point so that you eventually have no choice but to upgrade. This is so baked into the formula of so-called innovation that it is a part of everything, from your iPhone to supposedly endless cloud services. Likewise, we are in the era of link rot, where so many old URLs lead to dead-end webpages, as those old pages get deleted, moved, or otherwise become unavailable. All of this is a result of an industry with an unhealthy relationship to death. They operate according to a logic of singularity, let’s say, where you are assumed to always be updating, thereby never dying. To stop updating is to die is to disappear from the internet. We deserve a better way to die.
Ephemera
Great episode of On the Media, touching on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Congressional testimony, pictured above, how AI is being understood in politics, plus a segment with Emily St. James on the ongoing WGA strike and writers’ strikes of the past, AND a segment with Cory Doctorow and his era-defining concept of enshittification.
Max Read graciously shared an extensive syllabus on good reading on generative AI, from how it will impact jobs and the economy to the difference between AI and AGI. Very much worth digging into.
I personally loved Sasha Geffen’s review of the 1992 Nine Inch Nails EP Broken for Pitchfork. “But there was a moment, captured in Broken, when the world’s leading industrial pop star was a sub for the masses, laying bare his worst impulses and then chasing them all the way down the pipes to searing, mangled bliss.”
Film critic A.S. Hamrah wrote a great piece for Fast Company about the ongoing WGA strike by putting the fight against artificial intelligence into historical context, whereby the formulas of the franchise era have carefully built a scenario where AI is perfectly poised to take advantage of the Good Enough ethos I wrote about a couple weeks ago.
Song Recommendation: “To Remain/To Return” — Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily