He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Afterlife of Data: What Happens to Your Information When You Die and Why You Should Care, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about The Afterlife of Data at the University of Chicago Press website.Cemeteries may not in themselves be society’s most lucrative businesses, but they have unique capacity to forge bonds between people and the soil in which their departed loved ones lie buried. When this “soil” is a for-profit online platform rather than a geographical space, that bond may prove highly profitable. People will stay on Facebook, or at least continue to care for its existence, because it is where their loved ones, living or dead, are to be found.The above excerpt is from chapter 3 “The Rise of the Digital Afterlife Industry” in The Afterlife of Data (though first and last sentences are from the adjacent pages). I’m honestly quite shocked by how well it captures many of the book’s central themes: the fact that the online presence of the departed is by and large mediated by a commercial logic; the ways in which this may be problematic; the fact that the phenomenon relates to all our personal data, even those data trails we leave unconsciously; the societal dimensions of this matter, and so on. Though the argument I present in the book is of course much more detailed, these themes do a pretty good job of summarizing the book’s key argument—that we should all care about our digital afterlives, because we are all members of a society that will be greatly affected by their fate.
It is unlikely that Facebook’s memorialization feature is part of some elaborate plan with the intention to appropriate central cultural functions in society. But the takeaway here is not that the tech giants have some hidden agenda in their appropriation of features from the digital afterlife start-up scene. It is that every business that stores its users’ personal data will eventually, whether it intends to or not, become stewards of their digital remains. This could be seen as a burden, in that the digital remains may need to be destroyed, which may turn out to be rather costly. But it could also be turned into a rare opportunity to become even more intertwined with the social fabric of society. Make no mistake, any rational for-profit firm will choose the latter. And this is why the monetization of the online dead is related to you, even if you are not planning on subscribing to a posthumous chatbot service and have no intention of using online memorials. Insofar as you use the internet, you are leaving some trail of information behind, especially if you are using social media. Indeed, even the most passive user produces a ton of information every time they log in. And when you die, these data will still be there, stewarded under the same logic that governs all businesses—the logic of profit.
Critiquing the Industry
Many people feel an intuitive unease about making a business out of our relationship to the dead. Indeed, controversies over mixing death and business go a long way back. Though this instinct may be justified, it is no justification in and of itself. If something is morally questionable, one must ensure that the explanation of why and how it is questionable makes sense before doing anything about it. …
The one thing that is not captured here, however, is the broader civilizational change that comes with this development. As I argue in the book’s opening chapter, the relationship between the living and the dead is at the core of human civilization. As such, any technological disruption of how we relate to the past and its inhabitants—the dead—will also disrupt our way of relating to ourselves. As philosopher Patrick Stokes writes about the book, “the digital dead sit at the intersection of fundamental historical, economic, and cultural forces.” This is why our stewardship of the online dead is such an important matter, because our online privacy is intimately intertwined with theirs.
Now, I realise that this may all sound terribly abstract, but the book is actually quite an accessible (and short) read—I promise. Go check it out!
--Marshal Zeringue
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