Life After Death, in Digital Form
by Robert Roper
JUNE 3, 2010 TAGS:
The recently celebrated Digital Death Day was a happy affair. Casually dressed Silicon Valley thinkers got together over bagels and healthy bran bars at the Museum of the History of the Computer in Mountain View, California. Within a few miles of this spot, the greatest creation of legal wealth in the history of mankind took place. This is where Apple, Intel, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Google, the vacuum tube, the transistor, the microchip, and the pc all came into existence. This is digital ground zero.
The happiness was because a new industry is being born. Silicon Valley thinkers like to get their minds around rocking big new phenomena, and they especially like it when there’s a profit angle in there somewhere. The premise is that all of us now die twice. There is the old kind of death, the cessation of breathing kind, followed by the old-fashioned funeral and the divvying up of traditional assets. And then there’s the digital kind of death. As Trendwatching.com put it, in a recent what’s-new-and-what’s-on-the-come report, “With personal profiles … representing an ever-greater emotional and financial value, expect a burgeoning market for services that protect, store, and, in case of emergencies/death, arrange handing over of one’s digital estate to trusted others.”
One’s personal files are “the nucleus of one’s personal brand,” Trendwatching.com adds. By this they mean your online bank accounts, your usernames, your ever-multiplying entry codes. Your PayPal, e-mail, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Second Life, and WorldofWarcraft presences. What becomes of these precious assets when you die? Who has access to them if you go to your grave without sharing your impossible-to-remember passwords? For that matter, what about all the great stuff you’ve written on your blog or blogs? A blog is the contemporary equivalent of a private diary, says Evan Carroll, one of the co-creators of thedigitalbeyond.com, a blog, and a thoughtful young man from North Carolina. In the old days you had a book with little pages that you locked up with a little gold key and kept in a drawer in your nightstand, but now the kind of deeply personal ruminations and reflections of your most intimate life that used to be locked up safe each night are out there in the cloud, available to somewhere in the neighborhood of four billion Web readers. Hey, you can’t let all that great stuff just fade away! Your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren are going to want to pore over your clever posts as they try to figure out what great-grandma Janice was like, way back there in 2010. Poor deluded technologically primitive old bag that she was.
The exciting thing about this moment in time is that “The Internet holds humanity’s first opportunity for everyone to be remembered for who they are, what they did and what they thought,” thedigitalbeyond.com tells us. The infinitely expandable cloud is ready to accept our prodigiously increasing output of posts and e-mail messages and tweets and shared photos and videos from our recent trip to the Grand Canyon, and there’s no reason why all that great stuff should ever go away. As one of the Digital Death Day conferees put it, “It used to take vastly more time to write a book or shoot a movie than it did to read one or watch one. But now it takes about the same amount of time to record a home video as to view it. Hence the vast expansion of content ready to store. Why should you throw away those 16,000 images of your child’s third birthday party? It’s as easy to store 16,000 as 16.”
Clearly, we’re on the verge of a great opportunity for humanity to get its every creative expression down on the record and stored safely for all time. We are all very creative individuals after all, and who’s to say there’s not something of value hidden in that photo file of little Justin’s 2010 graduation from preschool? Somewhere down the line, some clever computer person may figure out how to myne those Flickr portfolios for information that we’re not even aware we desperately need right now. Keep everything, just to be safe. Go on, just keep it. It’s easy.
The Digital Death Day attendees were not all entrepreneurs working out their promising business plans. (And some of those business models make good sense. LegacyLocker, DataInherit, AssetLock, and Deathswitch are all new companies offering sensible and useful services, on the order of providing Web locations for safe password storage, or promising to notify interested parties at the time of your death.) There were funeral directors present – digital technology is playing more and more of a role in bereavement, with Facebook walls functioning as memorials and slide shows and other media-borne mementos important. The city of Hong Kong, thedigitalbeyond recently reported, has turned to online memorials to help deal with a shortage of burial plots.
A young graduate student from the University of London, Stacey Pitsillides, whose mother has worked for a long time as a palliative care nurse, described the dissertation she’s been writing (“Communal Bereavement and Networked Support”). She reminded the conferees that, as the British cultural theorist Raymond Williams put it, “A main characteristic of our society is a willed coexistence of very new technology and very old social forms.” When we live intensely on the Web, must we not then be prepared to mourn there, just as intensely? Two thousand Facebook users will die this year, a social-networking death rate of around .8 percent. Facebook and Google and Microsoft are among the few corporate entities with a policy as regards the accounts of dead social-networkers – the ownership of content, who gets access to your accounts when you go, the whole legal and estate-planning and intellectual-property reality of death on the Web remains to be fully defined, or defined to the point where lawyers will start to relax about it.
Stacey Pitsillides told a frightening story, about a British Web researcher she knows who wears a sort of thumb-drivey thing around his neck all the time, on which are recorded all his e-mails, all his IM’s, all his photo files, all his YouTube uploads, all his Twitter feeds and blogposts and everything else, and which functions also as a camera, taking a picture of wherever he happens to be every 30 seconds. It’s a beautiful little device and he doesn’t think he’ll be taking it off anytime soon. The conferees were bemused, and then they were admiring. Where did one get such a device? But one of the other conferees, an older woman, worried about the oppressive “weight” of all this ever-expanding digital data, wondering if the gift of every moment of digi-life to children or grandchildren or other conceivable beneficiaries was not in some way selfish. “When I go,” she said, “I want to be swallowed up, I want to disappear. I don’t want to be forgotten, but I don’t want people mucking about with my blogs, for gosh sake. If my parents had left me a million digital images and thousands of pages of Twitter and e-mail I never would’ve gotten out from under them all and back to the moment I was trying to live. The dead owe the living the courtesy of stepping out of the way. A few pictures of Grandma up on a digital wall somewhere, with anybody having access who wants it. That’ll be just fine, thank you. I don’t want my digital shadow to live forever.”
People looked at her like she was nuts.
Robert Roper, a regular contributor to Obit, is the author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.
The happiness was because a new industry is being born. Silicon Valley thinkers like to get their minds around rocking big new phenomena, and they especially like it when there’s a profit angle in there somewhere. The premise is that all of us now die twice. There is the old kind of death, the cessation of breathing kind, followed by the old-fashioned funeral and the divvying up of traditional assets. And then there’s the digital kind of death. As Trendwatching.com put it, in a recent what’s-new-and-what’s-on-the-come report, “With personal profiles … representing an ever-greater emotional and financial value, expect a burgeoning market for services that protect, store, and, in case of emergencies/death, arrange handing over of one’s digital estate to trusted others.”One’s personal files are “the nucleus of one’s personal brand,” Trendwatching.com adds. By this they mean your online bank accounts, your usernames, your ever-multiplying entry codes. Your PayPal, e-mail, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Second Life, and WorldofWarcraft presences. What becomes of these precious assets when you die? Who has access to them if you go to your grave without sharing your impossible-to-remember passwords? For that matter, what about all the great stuff you’ve written on your blog or blogs? A blog is the contemporary equivalent of a private diary, says Evan Carroll, one of the co-creators of thedigitalbeyond.com, a blog, and a thoughtful young man from North Carolina. In the old days you had a book with little pages that you locked up with a little gold key and kept in a drawer in your nightstand, but now the kind of deeply personal ruminations and reflections of your most intimate life that used to be locked up safe each night are out there in the cloud, available to somewhere in the neighborhood of four billion Web readers. Hey, you can’t let all that great stuff just fade away! Your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren are going to want to pore over your clever posts as they try to figure out what great-grandma Janice was like, way back there in 2010. Poor deluded technologically primitive old bag that she was.
The exciting thing about this moment in time is that “The Internet holds humanity’s first opportunity for everyone to be remembered for who they are, what they did and what they thought,” thedigitalbeyond.com tells us. The infinitely expandable cloud is ready to accept our prodigiously increasing output of posts and e-mail messages and tweets and shared photos and videos from our recent trip to the Grand Canyon, and there’s no reason why all that great stuff should ever go away. As one of the Digital Death Day conferees put it, “It used to take vastly more time to write a book or shoot a movie than it did to read one or watch one. But now it takes about the same amount of time to record a home video as to view it. Hence the vast expansion of content ready to store. Why should you throw away those 16,000 images of your child’s third birthday party? It’s as easy to store 16,000 as 16.”
Clearly, we’re on the verge of a great opportunity for humanity to get its every creative expression down on the record and stored safely for all time. We are all very creative individuals after all, and who’s to say there’s not something of value hidden in that photo file of little Justin’s 2010 graduation from preschool? Somewhere down the line, some clever computer person may figure out how to myne those Flickr portfolios for information that we’re not even aware we desperately need right now. Keep everything, just to be safe. Go on, just keep it. It’s easy.
The Digital Death Day attendees were not all entrepreneurs working out their promising business plans. (And some of those business models make good sense. LegacyLocker, DataInherit, AssetLock, and Deathswitch are all new companies offering sensible and useful services, on the order of providing Web locations for safe password storage, or promising to notify interested parties at the time of your death.) There were funeral directors present – digital technology is playing more and more of a role in bereavement, with Facebook walls functioning as memorials and slide shows and other media-borne mementos important. The city of Hong Kong, thedigitalbeyond recently reported, has turned to online memorials to help deal with a shortage of burial plots. A young graduate student from the University of London, Stacey Pitsillides, whose mother has worked for a long time as a palliative care nurse, described the dissertation she’s been writing (“Communal Bereavement and Networked Support”). She reminded the conferees that, as the British cultural theorist Raymond Williams put it, “A main characteristic of our society is a willed coexistence of very new technology and very old social forms.” When we live intensely on the Web, must we not then be prepared to mourn there, just as intensely? Two thousand Facebook users will die this year, a social-networking death rate of around .8 percent. Facebook and Google and Microsoft are among the few corporate entities with a policy as regards the accounts of dead social-networkers – the ownership of content, who gets access to your accounts when you go, the whole legal and estate-planning and intellectual-property reality of death on the Web remains to be fully defined, or defined to the point where lawyers will start to relax about it.
Stacey Pitsillides told a frightening story, about a British Web researcher she knows who wears a sort of thumb-drivey thing around his neck all the time, on which are recorded all his e-mails, all his IM’s, all his photo files, all his YouTube uploads, all his Twitter feeds and blogposts and everything else, and which functions also as a camera, taking a picture of wherever he happens to be every 30 seconds. It’s a beautiful little device and he doesn’t think he’ll be taking it off anytime soon. The conferees were bemused, and then they were admiring. Where did one get such a device? But one of the other conferees, an older woman, worried about the oppressive “weight” of all this ever-expanding digital data, wondering if the gift of every moment of digi-life to children or grandchildren or other conceivable beneficiaries was not in some way selfish. “When I go,” she said, “I want to be swallowed up, I want to disappear. I don’t want to be forgotten, but I don’t want people mucking about with my blogs, for gosh sake. If my parents had left me a million digital images and thousands of pages of Twitter and e-mail I never would’ve gotten out from under them all and back to the moment I was trying to live. The dead owe the living the courtesy of stepping out of the way. A few pictures of Grandma up on a digital wall somewhere, with anybody having access who wants it. That’ll be just fine, thank you. I don’t want my digital shadow to live forever.”
People looked at her like she was nuts.
Robert Roper, a regular contributor to Obit, is the author of Now the Drum of War: Walt Whitman and His Brothers in the Civil War.
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