The End is Trending: Virtual Immortality in the Digital Age

The remains of the dead increasingly haunt us and have made themselves comfortable, ever-present, and accessible through their digital remains—the photos, videos, and messages left behind.

by Nilou Davoudi

For YouTube user @00WARTHERAPY00, video games can be—and have been—a spiritual experience. While playing Rally Sport Challenge on their father’s Xbox console, newly discovered ten years after his death, @00WARTHERAPY00 noticed something: a transparent racing car flying across the screen of the game. It was a “racing ghost,” or the saved recording of the previous race that held the highest score. This was the racing ghost of the last person to have played the game—their dad: “and so i played and played, and played, untill [sic] i was almost able to beat the ghost, until one day i got ahead of it, i surpassed it, and…~ i stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure i wouldn’t delete it.”

In the contemporary West, the remains of the dead are no longer sequestered in perfectly manicured cemeteries or graveyards. Their physical artefacts are not confined to plots, vaults, or storage boxes in dusty attics, to be rarely visited and very often forgotten. Increasingly, the dead show up in strange places: a Facebook birthday reminder from an aunt who died five months ago; a text message from a dead grandmother; an email invitation from a deceased friend urging one to get up and finally clean that dusty attic; or the digital echo of a late father’s presence emerging as a racing ghost across the screen of a video game. The remains of the dead increasingly haunt us and have made themselves comfortable, ever-present, and accessible through their digital remains—the photos, videos, and messages left behind by deceased users.¹

The permanence and accessibility of digital remains raise the prospect of virtual immortality² or a digital afterlife.³ In the wake of this ongoing rearrangement of the boundaries between life and death, long-standing ideas about the death-denying tendencies of human culture, and in particular Western culture, demand reassessment. Far from intensifying the life-defining “fear of death” described by Ernest Becker and subsequent anthropologists, the digital revolution may be providing us with new ways of not just reckoning with death, but even embracing it.

From Séances to Spectacular Death

“It is perhaps today downright impossible to say anything original about death that was not already stated by the ancient scribes and philosophers or which cannot be read on the back of a cereal box,” wrote the sociologist Michael Hviid Jacobsen in 2021.⁴ That may be so; death has always been a fact of life, and death-anxiety, just as enduring. The ways that humanity has coped with death and found the means to maintain connections with the dead have varied with time and place. For instance, when the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century introduced the possibility of two-way communication with the dead through séances in dark rooms, Ouija boards, and mediums, people flocked to hear the messages received and to witness connections from the otherworldly realm.

The twenty-first century marks yet another shift in our relationship with death, permeating as it does the cultural, social, and economic structures of the digital age. Mediated spectacles of death dominate the films we watch and the apps we scroll through. We live-stream our funerals even as we engage chatbots made in the likeness of the deceased. Graphic “shock sites” attract so-called “dark tourism” of catalogued images of death. One popular shock site, Rotten.com, marketed itself as the internet archive of morbid curiosities. The selling tagline of the now-defunct website read: “The soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to see.”⁵ As Jacobsen explains, the visibility of death in this way reshapes death as spectacle, “something to be observed, marketed, consumed, and discarded again after use, which makes death not all that different from other consumer items.”⁶

Yet “seeing” death through the medium of technology alludes to a new relationship with the phenomenon that is no longer an estrangement, but not quite a comfortable acquaintance either. Instead, this tendency demonstrates the experience of vicarious death.⁷ By experiencing death through the medium of technology, individuals understand death from a safe distance where it remains “present whilst being bizarrely absent.”⁸ Drawing on Philippe Ariès’ The Hour of Our Death (1982), Jacobsen characterizes this moment as a transformative move into the age of the spectacular death, marked by the emergence of a contemporary “renaissance” concerned with the “de-tabooing” of death, particularly on digital platforms.⁹ In the age of spectacular death, a new voyeurism emerges that blurs the boundaries between depictions of dead bodies, places of death, and the digital traces of the deceased.

Researchers exploring digitally mediated practices of mourning and memoria have a particular interest in social media platforms, as they are inherently places where users are compelled to share their experiences of loss. For instance, a quick “R.I.P.” search on Facebook reveals how the bereaved have appropriated the profile pages of the deceased as spaces for open mourning.¹⁰ Online communities and sub-communities have provided a space to support disenfranchised grief, or death-related losses that may be societally stigmatized, devalued, or misunderstood. Examples include suicide or the death of a child, pet, or celebrity.¹¹ Researchers of online memorial sites for deceased children have found that parents who constructed online memorial sites often continued the practice for years after the death event. The dead continue to reside in an online “a-temporal space”¹² where parents engage in mourning practices whilst nurturing their continued bonds with their deceased child.¹³

The mediatisation of death thus makes it easier to maintain connections with the dead through the haunting digital traces they leave behind. Séances and Ouija boards are replaced with virtual graves, Facebook memorialisation pages, and even, more recently, the voice of a deceased loved one playing on Alexa. The digital remains of deceased internet users allow for the continued construction and co-construction of the relationship between the living and the dead. In this way, the dead maintain their presence through their ongoing accessibility on the platforms where their digital remains linger.¹⁴

Do Not Delete: The Emergence of the Digital Afterlife Industry

Digital platforms serving as repositories for the virtual legacies of individuals have made way for the emergence of the digital afterlife industry—an umbrella term for digital platforms and infrastructures that offer services for end-of-life planning, commemoration, and posthumous digital legacy management.¹⁵ The services are wide-ranging and include virtual graves and memorials; chatbots and avatars; and virtual reality. One particularly poignant example was recently demonstrated in the 2020 South Korean documentary Meeting You. Through virtual reality, Jang Ji-sung was able to reunite with her six-year-old daughter, Na-Yeon, who lost her life three years ago to a rare blood disease. The digital avatar of Na-Yeon was modelled upon a child actor, as well as the use of photos and videos, all of which allowed for the heart-wrenching real-time rendered interaction between Na-Yeon and her mother.

The digital afterlife industry has often had a hand in resurrecting celebrities. For instance, the 2021 documentary Roadrunner follows the life and career of the American celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain before his death by suicide in 2018. Although the documentary has been praised for its intimate portrayal of Bourdain, it faced heavy criticism for using his digital voice recordings to generate an A.I voiceover of the last email he sent before he took his life. Bourdain is not the first celebrity to be reanimated via his digital remains. Other examples include the holograms of Tupac Shakur performing at the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival; Michael Jackson at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards; and Robert Kardashian at his daughter Kim’s fortieth birthday party in 2020.

Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi have noted how the commercialization of digital remains was anticipated by the commodification of deceased celebrities. Michael Jackson, who died in 2009, earned $825 million in 2016 and remains the highest-paid dead celebrity of all time. Öhman and Floridi argue that “what was previously a celebrity privilege to have an audience and a recorded life, has become democratised.”¹⁶ This democratization has taken the form of widely available services enabling individuals to control their digital remains posthumously.¹⁷ The digital death industry includes platforms that create or generate what Bassett calls “intentional digital afterlife providers” in which individuals can subscribe to platforms that enable them to “control how they are remembered after they die.”¹⁸

One example of an intentional digital afterlife service is SafeBeyond. Now defunct, SafeBeyond was launched in 2014 and allowed a subscribed user to upload personalised videos, texts, and/or date-or location-based voice messages to a “vault.” These messages were to be released to the desired recipients at predetermined dates and locations. For instance, a SafeBeyond promotional video depicts a soon-to-be-married bride receiving a video message from her deceased father on her wedding day. What the promotion video did not specify is how long the subscription lasts, or if the subscription transfers over to the family of the deceased. In any case, SafeBeyond is but one of dozens of failed online platforms that have emerged in the last decade aiming to connect customers to their dead loved ones.¹⁹ The emergence of these platforms raises an important question: what happens to the digital remains uploaded by an individual when the company trusted to hold and distribute the data vanishes or goes bankrupt? Who inherits and obtains the rights to this data?

Instructive case studies are provided by unintentional digital afterlife providers such as Facebook. In the (un)likely event that Facebook goes bust, what would happen to the digital remains of all the millions of deceased users on the platform? The potential ethical and legal harms of Facebook’s demise would arguably be colossal for the stakeholders, including non-users (i.e., the deceased), “whose data continues to be stored and used by Facebook.”²⁰ Facebook does not delete its dead users. Instead, once a user is reported as deceased, the platform recategorizes the profile as memorialized. In this way, Facebook involves the dead in the continued collaboration, participation, and production of the platform.²¹ Once memorialized, the profile is controlled not by the user’s family or friends, but by Facebook.²² Indeed, Facebook has become the de-facto steward of its users’ digital autobiographies. In other words, users’ uploaded photos, videos, and messages fall into the hands of a faceless corporation with a reputation for scandal. Little exists in the way of data and privacy protections for the digital remains of the deceased: “Facebook does not have legal obligations to seek their consent nor that of their representatives before deleting, or otherwise further processing, users’ data after death.”²³ Considering the scale of the collection, storage, and sharing of digital remains, we should be compelled to consider the potential for their unauthorized exploitation and commodification—all of which have serious and lasting implications for families at their most vulnerable.²⁴

The lack of any feasible control over so-called “category kings”—companies which have created and dominated new markets, such as Facebook (social media industry) and YouTube (video sharing industry)—has precipitated a plethora of sociotechnical failures. For example, in 2017, Lisa Menzo Santoro, a mother of four, was shot to death by her boyfriend in the home they shared in Palmer Township, Pennsylvania. Lisa’s Facebook profile page was converted to an online memorial. Initially, Lisa’s family took comfort in knowing that her page was still available and accessible for those wishing to post messages and photos remembering her; however, as more information came to light about the years of physical and psychological abuse that Lisa endured at the hands of the man responsible for her death, the family’s outlook changed. Lisa’s memorialised page contains dozens of photos of her and her murderer posing together throughout the years. The family asked Facebook to remove the photos, but their request was rejected because Facebook’s policies on memorialised pages are meant to honour “the decisions the user made while they were alive and preserve the account as they left it.”²⁵ The family has been unwilling to take down the profile itself, as it allows them to remember Lisa in their own way. Although seeing Lisa in photos with her killer is painful, removing the years of posts, birthday messages, photos, and comments she had shared would be a pain akin to a second death—a second loss of the woman they loved.²⁶

Deceased internet users are thus embalmed in the online spaces they once occupied, saved as haunting reminders of life after death in the digital dimension. Digital platforms like Facebook have become popular mediums for the expression of grief; mourners turn to these platforms to continue experiencing the presence of the deceased and to find solace in the virtual communities that form as a result. Addressing the vulnerability of digital remains and the implications of the digital death industry is thus paramount. We must recognise the emotional value of digital remains; preserve the privacy and dignity of digital remains by protecting them from illicit access; and establish legal and regulatory frameworks that ensure protections against the exploitation of posthumous digital data.

Post-Death and Death Positivity in the Digital Age

The ever-present spectacle of death online in the form of shock sites, digital remains, and digitally-mediated practices of mourning may be facilitating an increased willingness to confront our mortality, that long-suppressed unconscious of human (and in particular, modern Western) culture. While death denial will likely never fade entirely, a counter-tendency appears to be emerging. The rise of death positivity movements, exemplified by Death Cafés, YouTube videos by morticians addressing frequently asked questions on death, and narratives of near-death experiences shared across social media reflects a growing willingness to engage in conversations about mortality. Death Cafés especially continue to proliferate as informal gatherings of individuals coming together to discuss death, with topics ranging from end-of-life care to funeral planning. The objective of the Death Café movement is to promote death literacy and contribute to a cultural shift in how society engages with the inevitable.

To what extent the emergence of such movements will overwrite the long-standing Western cultural tendency to suppress open confrontation with death remains to be seen. What is certain is that digital remains have come to function as modern cultural symbols, signifying the ongoing quest for meaning and recognition. The online communities that have risen around such remains have naturally facilitated the expression of diverse spiritual perspectives on mortality, both religious and secular. Perhaps, though these attempts at lifting the veil of death denial, we find meaning in how we choose to live our lives, how we wish to be remembered, and how we choose to live life after death in the digital dimension.

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Notes

1. J. Lingel, “The Digital Remains: Social Media and Practices of Online Grief,” The Information Society 29, no. 3 (2013): 190–95.

2. M. A. Rothblatt, Virtually Human: The Promise – and the Peril – of Digital Immortality, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014).

3. C. Öhman and L. Floridi, “The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information: A Critical Approach to the Digital Afterlife Industry,” Minds and Machines 27, no. 4 (2017): 639–662.

4. M. H. Jacobsen, The Age of Spectacular Death (New York: Routledge, 2021), 199.

5. Audra Schroeder, “The Legacy of Rotten.Com – The Kernel.” Net of the Living Dead. October 26, 2014.

6. Jacobsen, The Age of Spectacular Death, 9.

7. Ruth Penfold-Mounce and Rosie Smith, “Resisting the Grave: Value and the Productive Celebrity Dead,” in The Age of Spectacular Death, 36–51.

8. Ibid, 11.

9. Ibid., 6.

10. M. Massimi and A. Charise, “Dying, death, and mortality: Towards thanatosensitivity in HCI,” CHI ’09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2009), 2459–2468.

11. J. Bell, L. Bailey, and D. Kennedy, “‘We do it to keep him alive’: Bereaved individuals’ experiences of online suicide memorials and continuing bonds,” Mortality 20, no. 4 (2015): 375–389; J. Douglas, A. Alisauskas, and D. Mordell, “‘Treat Them with the Reverence of Archivists’”: Records Work, Grief Work, and Relationship Work in the Archives,” Archivaria 88 (2019): 84–120; L. M. Mitchell, P. H. Stephenson, S. Cadell, and M. E. Macdonald, “Death and grief on-line: Virtual memorialization and changing concepts of childhood death and parental bereavement on the Internet,” Health Sociology Review 21, no. 4 (2012): 413–431.

12. L. M. Mitchell, P. H. Stephenson, S. Cadell, and M. E. Macdonald, “Death and grief on-line: Virtual memorialization and changing concepts of childhood death and parental bereavement on the Internet,” 42.

13. J. R. Brubaker and G. R. Hayes, “‘We will never forget you [online]’: An empirical investigation of post-mortem MySpace comments,” Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work – CSCW ’11 (2011): 123; M. Gibson, “YouTube and bereavement vlogging: Emotional exchange between strangers,” Journal of Sociology 52, no. 4 (2016): 631–645.

14. E. Kasket, All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data (London: Robinson, 2019).

15. C. Öhman and L. Floridi, “The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information”: 639–662.

16. C. Öhman and L. Floridi, “The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information”, 642.

17. C. Öhman and L. Floridi, “An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry,” Nature Human Behaviour 2, no. 5 (2018): 318–320.

18. D. Bassett, “Profit and Loss: The Mortality of the Digital Immortality Platforms,” in Digital Afterlife, edited by M. Savin-Baden and V. Mason-Robbie, 1st ed., (Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2020), 78.

19. E. Carroll and J. Romano, “Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter are your estate, what’s your legacy?” Choice Reviews Online 48, no. 12 (2011): 6948–6952; C. Grimm and S. Chiasson, “Survey on the Fate of Digital Footprints after Death,” in Proceedings 2014 Workshop on Usable Security (Workshop on Usable Security, San Diego, CA, 2014).

20. C. Öhman and N. Aggarwal, “What if Facebook goes down? Ethical and legal considerations for the demise of big tech,” Internet Policy Review 9, no. 3 (2020), 9.

21. T. Karppi, “Death Proof: On the Biopolitics and Noopolitics of Memorializing Dead Facebook Users,” Culture Machine 14, no. 20 (2013).

22. Ibid., 11.

23. C. Öhman and N. Aggarwal, “What if Facebook goes down?”, 9.

24. C. Sofka, “The Transition from Life to the Digital Afterlife,” in Digital Afterlife, edited by M. Savin-Baden and V. Mason-Robbie, 1st ed., (Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2020), 57–74.

25. R. Yates, “Brother gets joy from sister’s memorial Facebook page, but misery lurks there too,” The Morning Call, April 21, 2018, https://www.mcall.com/news/police/mc-nws-palmer-township-facebook-family-seeks-removal-of-killers-photos-20180416-story.html

26. P. Stokes, Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).