Are You Ready For the Digital Afterlife?

theodp writes "Dave Winer's call for Future-Safe Archives goes mainstream in Rob Walker's NY Times Magazine cover story on how the Internet can provide a certain kind of immortality to those who are prepared. To illustrate how digital afterlives might play out, Walker cites the case of 34-year-old writer Mac Tonnies, who updated his blog on Oct. 18, 2009, sent out some public tweets and private messages via Twitter, went to bed and died of cardiac arrhythmia. As word of his death spread via his own blog, Tonnies's small, but devoted audience rushed in to save his online identity. 'Finding solace in a Twitter feed may sound odd,' writes Walker, 'but the idea that Tonnies's friends would revisit and preserve such digital artifacts isn't so different from keeping postcards or other physical ephemera of a deceased friend or loved one.' Unfortunately, how long Mac Tonnies's digital afterlife will remain for his Web friends and parents is still a big question, since it's preserved in a hodge-podge of possibly gone-tomorrow online services for which no one has the passwords. Hoping to fill the need for digital-estate-planning services are companies like Legacy Locker, which are betting that people will increasingly want control over their digital afterlife. 'We're entering a world where we can all leave as much of a legacy as George Bush or Bill Clinton,' says filmmaker-and-friend-of-Tonnies Paul Kimball. 'Maybe that's the ultimate democratization. It gives all of us a chance at immortality.'"

Comments

Re:are you ready for death?

[Tom]

That's just as much a statement of faith as those who believe in the concept of an afterlife.

Only due to the way I stated it, not in principle. See Russell's Teapot for an extensive treatment. If you want an afterlife, you prove it. You can't rest on that it hasn't been disproven, because I can always make a more outrageous claim that you haven't yet falsified. I could claim right now that there's a Starbucks on Jupiter. Prove me wrong.

Ian Stevenson spent his life investigating cases that were suggestive of reincarnation. I have his books somewhere. He never found proof positive of reincarnation, but the evidence he did find is compelling. As long as it doesn't interfere with one's belief system, that is.

I might actually pick it up because I'm interested in such stuff. But the key word is "never found proof positive". For such a dramatic claim that would uproot a lot of science and belief systems, there better be more than some compelling evidence, and it better be independent of belief systems.