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

are you ready for death?

[Tom]

That's all beating around the bush. There is no afterlife, so how about the more serious question of coming to terms with someone's death? I is a frightening aspect that doesn't make it easier to cope that thanks to technology, people can still "act" (i.e. post updates) after they died, due to automation etc.

Does it make it easier or more difficult to cope when the deceased is still around somehow? There's a well-known structure for humans dealing with drastic changes like this, and it has two key parts that matter in this context: The phase where you ignore and fight the truth, i.e. the "he isn't really dead" part. Everyone who griefs has it, some get over it very quickly, some linger on it sometimes for years. The other is the "letting go and re-orienting" phase. Both are presumable more difficult the more old stuff you have around.

I personally think that our ancestors had a good formula: You were given a year to grief, and everyone would understand. But after that, you'd better be done with griefing and continue on with your own life. It at least gave people a guideline.

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.