Category: Digital Afterlife

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Preparing for the Unthinkable

— A Brief Guide to Digital Legacy Planning

By Adam Engst

The sudden death of our friend and Take Control author Charles Edge emphasized how terrible things can happen to anyone at any time (see “Take Control Author Charles Edge Dies,” 22 April 2024). Those later on in life are usually more aware of their mortality and plan for it, but for younger people, it’s hard to contemplate the possibility of incapacitation or death, whether due to an accident or just bad luck.

I don’t know what Charles may or may not have done in this regard, although he wrote about the topic three days before he died from a cerebral aneurysm. Since then, Tonya and I have been thinking more about what would happen if one of us were to be incapacitated or die. We both know a lot about the other’s digital setup, but is it enough? We’ve come up with a list of items that we need to share with the other so they could take over, and we hope it’s useful for you, too.

The most comprehensive reference for this sort of planning is Joe Kissell’s ebook, Take Control of Your Digital Legacy. He wrote the first edition back in 2017 when we were still running Take Control, and he published a second edition in February 2024 that brings it up to date in myriad ways. If you want to do more than the basics—and I highly recommend that you do—read Take Control of Your Digital Legacy and put thought into the many aspects of your digital life that go beyond just allowing your spouse, partner, or child to get through the early days of not having you around.

Identify Your Trusted People

First, figure out who will need to take the reins when you’re incapacitated or dead—I’ll refer to that person as your steward. For those in a couple, one member will likely take the role of steward for the other, but if both die, there needs to be a backup.

You may also need other people in various roles: a healthcare proxy, someone with power of attorney, the executor of your will, the guardian of your minor children, or a trustee. I’m far from an expert on this topic (we’re about to update our woefully outdated will from 22 years ago), so get advice from a lawyer or estate planning professional.

Whoever you choose, talk to these people soon to make sure they’re willing to help and know what’s involved. Such discussions can be tremendously difficult, but just think how much more difficult it will be for them if they’re thrust into such a position without having had the talk. That’s doubly true if your preferred steward isn’t all that technically adept.

Create Digital Legacy Information

If you’re incapacitated or dead, your steward will need to work with healthcare professionals, organizations with which you do business, government agencies, and much more. To ease that process, I recommend building a set of digital legacy information they can turn to whenever some question or problem arises. For instance, they might need to share your health insurance information if you’re admitted to a hospital, notify family members they’ve never met, pay your mortgage, and more. From what I’ve heard from those who have gone through this, there’s always more.

Here are some items that I encourage you to assemble and ensure that your steward can access in the event of an emergency:

  • Login passwords/passcodes: It’s essential that your steward be able to get into your Mac, iPhone, and iPad to access other information, so make sure that they either know your login passwords and passcodes or can look them up in a secure location. Don’t assume that Face ID or Touch ID is sufficient—devices with biometric authentication still require their password or passcode regularly.
  • Password manager: I can’t emphasize strongly enough how important it is that you use a password manager for all your online accounts. By collecting everything in one place, a single master password gives your steward instant access. Although password-sharing setups like 1Password for Families and Apple’s Shared Family Group work well for everyday use, sharing the master password ensures your steward can access accounts that may not be shared.
  • Medical information: Your steward will likely need your health insurance information if you’re admitted to a hospital in an emergency situation. A short list of current medications, allergies, and surgical histories may also be helpful, especially if you have severe allergies to common medications or must take certain medications regularly.
  • Estate planning documents: An estate planning professional should help here, but your steward will likely need to access documents that specify your healthcare directives and power of attorney, along with your will, guardianship documents, trusts, and so on. Make sure to communicate the location—online or offline—of those documents.
  • Communication plan: A stressful aspect of someone dying is communicating their passing to family, friends, and community members. Develop a list of people who should be contacted quickly. They can then be asked to spread the word further to your relatives, employer or clients, friends, and community groups.
  • Financial affairs: Create a document that lists your bank accounts, investment accounts and assets, and insurance policies. For each, include an account number if appropriate, and either a link to the website (the login credentials should be in your password manager) or a description of the location of physical documents (“the bottom drawer of the wooden filing cabinet, in an Insurance Policies folder”). Add any notes that might help your steward, such as contact information for accountants or lawyers.
  • How to be me: Joe Kissell suggests this item in Take Control of Your Digital Legacy, and I think it’s brilliant. The goal is to create a document that briefly explains what you do—think of it as training someone to take over from you. It could include regular tasks, details about home or car maintenance, important financial tasks like paying property taxes, and notes on how to deal with your technology. If you are your household’s IT person, tech notes may need to include how the network is set up, how the home automation system works, how backups work, and how to reboot the router. Generating such a document from scratch might be challenging, but if you start one now and add tasks as you perform or remember them, it will become a valuable resource over time. You may want to organize it chronologically, listing key actions for each month.

One final note. Apple’s Legacy Contact system for sharing Apple data in the event of your death is worth setting up because it ensures your account won’t be deleted for 3 years, but as long as you trust your steward sufficiently, providing full access gives more flexibility. Google provides an Inactive Account Manager you can configure to share select data with specific people if your account goes inactive, but that will take at least three months.

Other Decisions to Consider

My goal so far has been to lay out the information your steward will need to take care of you and manage your affairs in the immediate aftermath of your being incapacitated or dying. As horrible and stressful as that will be (but less so if you’ve left them good information), there’s vastly more work that comes from winding down your life. You can make it easier for them by thinking ahead and documenting your wishes in these areas:

  • Email: How do you want your steward to respond to incoming email messages from individuals, businesses, and mailing lists? What should happen to all your saved email in the long run?
  • Chat: How should your steward respond to incoming chats in Messages, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and so on?
  • Social media: If you use social media, it’s a good idea to instruct your steward to post a final farewell so anyone looking you up will know what happened. Consider it an opportunity to have the last word. Some social media services allow accounts to be archived so they remain online but limit access, so if that’s desirable, let your steward know. Or just have them delete your accounts.
  • Photos and videos: Dealing with thousands—or tens of thousands—of photos and videos is going to be a ton of work for your family. If you have the time, create albums of photos and videos you’d like to share with specific family members.
  • Other data: It’s hard to know what additional documents you might have or what you want to have happen to them. If you have data that should be shared, be sure to leave some high-level instructions about what it is, where on your drive it can be found, and who should get it.

Again, this article is far from comprehensive—my goal is to help you start thinking about these issues. Take Control of Your Digital Legacy addresses additional topics and provides a great deal more advice. I also encourage those of you who have had to serve as stewards for a family member to share anything you learned from your experiences in the comments.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Digital afterlife

– How to deal with social media accounts when someone dies

Untangling digital interactions after someone dies is becoming increasingly complicated.

Deciding what to do with a dead friend or relative’s online presence is complicated and time-consuming but there are shortcuts

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Gavin Blomeley was lucky his mother was incredibly organised before she died. She left a note that included the passcode to her phone and access to all her online passwords.

“I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult this could have gotten not having these passwords or knowing this note with all of her passwords existed,” Blomeley says.

“In the note, my mum had an alphabetised, formula-based logic to all her passwords including banking, pensions, social media – everything.”

Untangling the web of someone’s online life after they die creates additional stress on top of grief and funeral planning, and it is getting increasingly complicated as more and more daily tasks are carried out online. There are bank accounts, email accounts, online bills and streaming subscriptions, as well as various social media accounts to consider.

There is no one-stop-shop or single method to memorialise or delete accounts. Some companies, including Google, are now deleting accounts after two years of inactivity but there is no consistency across platforms.

“Facebook, in some ways, is probably actually pretty progressive and a leader in this space,” says Bjorn Nansen, a digital media researcher in the “death tech” team at the University of Melbourne.

“Over time, they’ve developed their policies; you can nominate a legacy contact, so that when you pass away that person … can follow your wishes, and either close your account or memorialise it.”

Nansen says other platforms don’t have the same policy.

“You just have to follow the same old workarounds, which is, you leave your passwords to somebody and your wishes as to what you want to be done with the accounts and content. Often, you’re breaching the terms of service.”

He says it is getting more complicated with the advent of two-factor authentication using biometrics to ensure that only the account holder can access the account.

Nansen says online companies should make the process easier but increasingly people are including directives in their will and this is likely to increase over time as baby boomers die.

“We’re entering a period that’s been referred to as ‘peak death’. The baby boomer bubble means there’s going to be a high volume of deaths and it’s always going to be the next generation that’s going to have to deal with it … it will make awareness of the issue wider and may help bring around change.”

Standards Australia says about 60% of Australian adults have made a will but not all of those have accounted for their digital legacy.

The nongovernment standards body is part of a group of organisations from 35 countries proposing core principles and guidelines for how organisations should manage the process when a relative or executor requests access to an account of someone who has died.

Adam Stingemore, general manager of engagement and communications at Standards Australia, says that means developing a common set of definitions that companies can then build into terms of service.

“The worst time to be dealing with a challenge like this is if you know someone in your family has died, and there’s a feud between parties,” he says. “What we want to do is get ahead of that on these different types of platforms. There’s common sets of questions and people can make choices about what happens to their data and assets.”

Nansen says another factor is the privacy of the person who has died, and whether they want personal messages and content to be seen by family members or deleted.

“There’s complexity and nuance,” he says. “You might have emails, you might have messages, you might have photos, you might have videos that for a whole range of reasons you might want deleted or not want certain people to see.

“If you really want to be thorough, it’s not just providing access and instructions to a digital executor; it might be quite detailed instructions about different platforms and different content.”

Blomeley says his best advice is to ensure power of attorney is arranged beforehand, and access to accounts included as part of a regulated will.< He says the process of shutting down his mother’s accounts was time-consuming, despite having all the passwords. It took several weeks to sort out, through the grief of losing his mother. “Thankfully, we were all in a position where we were able to take time off work … but I can imagine this being much more complicated for certain individuals, based on varying circumstances.” Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How we remember the dead by their digital afterlives

— A broad-ranging analysis asks whether we can achieve a kind of immortality by documenting our lives and deaths online.


Through virtual reality, people can interact with avatars of loved ones.

By Margaret Gibson

The Digital Departed: How We Face Death, Commemorate Life, and Chase Virtual Immortality Timothy Recuber NYU Press (2023)

Many of us will have turned to the Internet to grieve and remember the dead — by posting messages on the Facebook walls of departed friends, for instance. Yet, we should give more thought to how the dead and dying themselves exert agency over their online presence, argues US sociologist Timothy Recuber in The Digital Departed.

In his expansive scholarly analysis, Recuber examines more than 2,000 digital texts, from blog posts by those who are terminally ill to online suicide notes and pre-prepared messages designed to be e-mailed to loved ones after someone has died. As he notes, “the digital data in this book are sad, to be sure, and they have often brought me to tears as I collected and analyzed them”. Yet, they are well worth delving into.

Recuber brings a fresh lens to studies of death culture by focusing on the feelings and intentions of the people who are dying, rather than those of the mourners. For example, he finds that a person’s sense of self can be altered through blogging about their illness. Writing freely helps people to come to terms with their deaths by making their suffering “legible and understandable”. Reflections on family and friends also reveal a sense of self-transformation. Indeed, many bloggers “attested to the positive value of the experience of a terminal illness, for the way it brought them closer to loved ones and especially for the wisdom it generated.”

This theme of self-transformation, which Recuber refers to as ‘digital reenchantment’, continues throughout the book. This terminology relates to the work of German sociologist Max Weber, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, argued that humans’ increasing ability to understand the world through science was robbing life of magic and mystery — a process he called disenchantment. When the dead seem to be resurrected through digital media, Recuber argues, they regain that mystery.

Recuber explores how X (formerly Twitter) hashtags can act as a form of collective online rememberance. He focuses on photos and stories shared in posts that use two hashtags, sparked by violent deaths of Black people in the United States: #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, in response to Sandra Bland’s death in prison in Waller County, Texas, in July 2015, and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, which remembers Michael Brown, who was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. The “thousands of individual micro-narratives” posted in these threads, Recuber writes, amount to a “collectively composed story affirming the value of all Black lives and legacies”. They are memorials for the lives that have already been lost and for those that might be in future.

The author considers the perspectives of the individuals whose deaths inspired each hashtag. For example, 28-year-old Bland was imprisoned after being arrested for a driving offence. Friends and family questioned the police’s assertion that Bland had committed suicide, and #IfIDieInPoliceCustody was tweeted 16,500 times in its first week, as the result of the online attention that the case gained. What would Bland and Brown think of this coverage, Recuber asks? They might have been proud of this legacy, but they had no say in it. In a sense they are “doubly victimized”, he suggests, losing not only their lives but also “the agency to define themselves and the ways they’d like to be remembered”.

In the book’s most intriguing section, Recuber turns to transhumanism — the idea that, some time in the future, advanced technologies yet to be imagined could enable digital records of the human mind to be uploaded to the Internet. A person’s consciousness could then ‘live’ online forever.

Recuber interviews four men who lead companies that are helping people to preserve digital aspects of themselves or that are otherwise concerned with transhumanism. Bruce Duncan runs the Lifenaut project, part of the non-profit Terasem Movement Foundation, based in Bristol, Vermont, which allows users to create a digital archive of their reflections, photos and genetic code for future researchers to study. Eric Klien is the president and founder of the Lifeboat Foundation, a non-governmental organization based in Reno, Nevada, which is devoted to overcoming catastrophic and existential risks to humans, including from misuse of technologies. Robert McIntyre is the chief executive of Nectome, based in San Francisco, California, which works on techniques for embalming brains for future information retrieval. And Randal Koene is the chief scientific officer of the Carboncopies Foundation, based in San Francisco, a research organization that works on whole-brain emulation — a “neuroprosthetic system that is able to serve the same function as the brain”.

A man works on a laptop whose screen is covered in rectangular icons.
Artificial-intelligence firms are working to develop digital replicas of the dead.

According to Recuber, none could give a clear explanation for how mind uploading would work. That’s not surprising — neuroscientists are divided on whether it is even possible. But each interviewee had faith that it would become a possibility. Koene wonders whether uploaded minds might find a home in some kind of robotic body. Duncan and McIntyre imagine a disembodied human consciousness able to travel through space and visit other planets or stars.

Yet, Recuber was troubled to find that these men said very little about the social and ethical questions raised by mind uploading. Building a ‘superior’ type of human has a “whiff of eugenics” about it, he writes. The whole process would be expensive, perhaps creating a future division in social classes, with only the rich able to afford it. Duncan and Koene pointed out that this might not be true in the future — the prices of technologies, such as smartphones and data-storage units, tend to fall quite quickly.

Recuber does find people raising ethical concerns on the online discussion platform Reddit, where he examined more than 900 posts about transhumanism. One user was appalled that “the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants”. But philosophical debates are much more popular, such as whether the uploaded disembodied mind would be equivalent to or superior to one’s own.

Transhumanism, Recuber notes, is working towards a very different type of online legacy from those discussed elsewhere in his book; it is focused not on strengthening ties with humanity but on cutting them. This idea of moving beyond mortal biological limits — gaining immortality through science and technology — is an old dream in a new guise. For religious people, the immortal substance is the soul; for transhumanists, it is the mind.

It is in these critiques of transhumanism that Recuber is at his sociological best. His astute comments exemplify a second theme of The Digital Departed — that inequalities that persist in the physical world are mirrored in peoples’ online lives. He cautions the public about narratives that promote technological progress as necessarily good. Despite the rhetoric of liberation through technological progress, we all must remain wary. There are no guarantees that mind uploading will be properly regulated, or benefit those in need. Mortal problems such as food and water shortages and human violence, as well as the lack of housing and health care, have greater priority in my view.

It is a shame, however, that the book ignores feminist perspectives on transhumanism. These contend that ideas of the soul or mind in philosophy have historically operated as a gender hierarchy — men and the masculine are considered primordial, whereas women and the feminine are treated as secondary, linked to the body and the mortal realm. Transhumanism will not benefit women or gender-diverse people unless it engages with its own inherited systems of thought and narrative.

Nonetheless, The Digital Departed is a valuable book that presents many moving stories about the way that our digital life foreshadows our biological departure. The author’s engagement with classical and modern sociological theory will be appreciated by scholars and appeal to readers of all stripes.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Digital Afterlife

— Preparing for the Psychological Impact of Virtual Selves and Memories

“Life after death is real in this digital era.”

By Roshni Chandnani

Welcome to the age of the digital afterlife, when the lines between the real and virtual worlds blur, giving rise to the notion of virtual identities and memories. As technology advances, the concept of digital immortality becomes more apparent, compelling us to investigate the psychological consequences of existing beyond our physical life. This article delves into our emotional commitment to our virtual selves, how we cope with grief and loss in the digital domain, and the ethical concerns surrounding digital immortality.

Virtual Immortality: A New Existential Paradigm

Consider a world in which our mind exceeds the confines of our physical body. We can attain virtual immortality in the domain of the digital afterlife, allowing our ideas, memories, and personalities to live on after death. This virtual life is made possible by breakthrough artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies that digitally replicate our essence. However, the idea of immortality brings with it significant ethical quandaries that call into question our notion of life, death, and what it is to be human.

The Psychological Consequences of Digital Afterlife

The concept of surviving in a digital form raises concerns about the emotional commitment we establish to our virtual identities and memories. We form profound emotional connections with these representations as we devote time and attention to creating our digital identities. When faced with digital loss, such as the deactivation of a virtual self or the erasure of digital memories, we feel a distinct sort of grieving that necessitates the development of new coping strategies.

The Role of Technology in Memory Preservation

Artificial intelligence and virtual reality advancements have enabled the creation of lifelike virtual representations of ourselves as well as the digital preservation of cherished memories. These technologies not only allow us to review our prior experiences, but they also allow future generations to engage with their predecessors’ digital legacies. However, the advantages of digitally storing memories are accompanied by possible downsides, such as the change or manipulation of these memories.

Embracing Digital Estate Planning

The notion of estate planning has expanded beyond physical assets to embrace digital assets in the age of the digital afterlife. Proper digital estate planning entails organizing and managing one’s virtual identities, social media profiles, and digital memories in order to ensure their smooth transfer to trusted others after our death. By taking control of our digital legacy, we can make a significant difference in the lives of those we care about.

Security and Privacy Concerns

As we spend more of ourselves in the digital environment, the need to protect our virtual selves and memories becomes increasingly important. Concerns about privacy and security develop as a result of the possibility of unauthorized access to sensitive data and the danger of identity theft. To prevent exploitation and misuse of our virtual existence, we must strike a balance between sharing our digital lives and preserving our digital identities.

Support Groups and Virtual Therapies

Virtual worlds are becoming significant instruments in therapeutic and emotional support, not merely as a form of entertainment. Virtual treatments give a secure area for people to examine their emotions and tackle unsolved concerns. Furthermore, virtual support groups provide consolation and solace to people who have experienced digital loss by allowing them to connect with others who understand their specific challenges.

Ethical and Legal Considerations

As the notion of a digital afterlife gets traction, it becomes critical to build updated legal frameworks to address concerns such as digital estate planning, virtual self-inheritance, and digital memory ownership. Furthermore, ethical issues necessitate a more in-depth examination of how we handle the digital afterlife responsibly while honoring individuals’ preferences and liberty in both life and death.

Cultural Views on Digital Afterlife

The digital afterlife also calls into question our traditional assumptions about life after death. Various civilizations have different ideas about what happens to the soul once the physical body dies. We are witnessing a development of spiritual practices that integrate traditions with the digital era as technology and spirituality meet. Accepting these cultural ideas offers up new doors for spiritual development and understanding.

The Effect on Social Dynamics and Relationships

As our virtual personas grow more and more ingrained in our lives, they unavoidably have an impact on our relationships and social interactions. Nurturing relationships with our virtual selves, participating in virtual groups, and establishing connections in the digital domain all influence how we interact and relate with people. It also calls into question the sincerity and depth of these connections when contrasted to face-to-face conversations.

Grief and Healing in the Digital Age

“The people you shared those times with, the times you lived through; nothing brings it all back to life like an old mix tape.” It is more effective than genuine brain tissue at storing memories. Every mix tape has a tale to tell. When you put them all together, they may tell the tale of a life.”

Grieving takes on a new level in the domain of the digital afterlife. When faced with the loss of a virtual self or a loved one’s digital memories, individuals suffer a distinct sort of sorrow that necessitates creative ways of healing and closure. Virtual monuments and digital places for memory provide comfort to people looking for ways to respect and love their virtual relationships.

Mindfulness and Digital Detoxification

Living in an era where the digital afterlife is a reality necessitates balancing our physical and virtual selves. Mindfulness and digital cleansing assist us to be present and avoid getting excessively tied to our digital selves. We may maintain a healthy relationship with technology and focus on developing significant real-life experiences by withdrawing from the virtual world on a regular basis.

Identity and Self-Concept Development

The emergence of virtual selves calls into question established ideas about identity and self-concept. Individuals have the option to explore different facets of themselves in the digital afterlife, adopting a more fluid and dynamic sense of who they are. This identity growth opens the door to deeper self-acceptance and an appreciation of human complexity.

Preservation of Educational and Historical Values

The digital afterlife expands educational and historical preservation opportunities. Virtual selves may be used as dynamic and engaging instructional tools, allowing students to connect in a profoundly immersive way with historical personalities and events. Furthermore, digitally archiving historical personalities and their memories guarantees that their contributions to society are never forgotten, establishing a stronger feeling of connection with the past.

Future Planning: Embracing Change

As technology advances, so will the notion of a digital afterlife. In order to prepare for the future, we must welcome change with an open mind, cultivate continual debate, and explore the potential of the digital environment. We can design a future where virtual selves and memories improve our lives without overshadowing the beauty of the actual world if we approach the digital afterlife properly and ethically.

Final Thoughts

The digital afterlife represents a fascinating and difficult frontier of human existence, testing our understanding of identity, relationships, and the essence of life and death. As technology advances, the psychological influence of virtual selves and memories will only become more prominent. However, with mindfulness, empathy, and intentional preparation, we can traverse the digital domain with wisdom and compassion, ensuring that the virtual world supports rather than overpowers the depth of our real-life experiences.

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Four things you might not know about your digital afterlife

What happens to your data after you die?

By

1 Your digital footprint will one day become your digital remains

If a complete stranger were granted access to every scrap of recorded information about you that exists in the world, would they be able to stand up at your funeral and deliver a personal, moving eulogy that captured the essence of you? Thanks to the modern digital world, the likely answer is yes.

If you’re not active on social media, you might think that you’d be leaving behind very little in the way of a meaningful or personally telling digital legacy. Social media, however, are merely the tip of the little toe when it comes to our digital footprints. Anyone who has access to your devices and accounts after you die – including all the material you never intended to share – could tell quite a lot about you.

Formerly ephemeral communications are now comprehensively stored in searchable, time- and date-stamped emails and message threads. Once untrackable movements are logged by our smartphones, smartwatches, and facial recognition technologies in public spaces. Internet of Things (IoT) devices like video doorbells and virtual assistants are filling our homes.

And our internal desires, thoughts, and feelings can be discerned by innumerable others through our search histories, websites we’ve visited, and the documents and photos we store in cloud accounts and our data-storage devices.

Little wonder that the algorithms seem to know us better than we know ourselves – in this hyperconnected and electronically surveilled world, we are constantly feeding them our data.

A 2019 survey found that 1 in 4 people in the UK want all of these data to be removed from the internet when they die, but no legal or practical mechanisms exist for this to occur. There is no magical switch that is thrown, no virtual worms that traverse the internet nibbling away all traces of us when we die.

Physical death does not equal digital death. Our personal data is simply too voluminous, spread too far and wide throughout the digital world, and too under the control of innumerable third parties to simply call it back home to ‘bury’ it.

2 Social media are becoming digital cemeteries

Dedicated digital cemeteries do exist, the oldest being The World Wide Cemetery, founded in 1995, where people can still visit online graves and leave virtual flowers and tributes. Memorial gardens are dotted around the virtual world Second Life.

Many funeral homes now offer online condolence books, and some physical cemeteries even feature graves with digital components such as video screens or QR codes affixed to traditional headstones. Scores of digital legacy companies appear regularly, often going out of business shortly thereafter.

None of these digital cemeteries can hold a memorial candle, though, to the platforms that never intended to become online places of rest in the first place: sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Facebook has been memorialising profiles in one form or another since the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, after which users pleaded with the site not to delete profiles that had become memorials for the lost.

Scholars at the Oxford Internet Institute have estimated that the number of deceased users on Facebook could be as high as 4.9 billion by 2100. The dead are also mounting up on Instagram, which also memorialises profiles, and Twitter may follow suit. In November 2019, Twitter cancelled an imminent inactive-account cull in response to an outcry from bereaved people who feared the loss of their deceased loved ones’ Twitter feeds.

Social media companies may be actively trying to work out what to do about the data of the deceased on their servers, but dead people’s information is all over the internet, across all sorts of websites and apps. Many – perhaps even most – of the entities that manage our data are not planning well for the end from the beginning, so information can stick around online for an indeterminate period of time.

We should never assume, however, that online is forever. Disappearance of online data is inevitable through deliberate culls, accidental data loss, and companies going bust.

3 People are struggling to make plans for their digital legacies

It’s not only organisations that are flummoxed by what to do about digital legacies. It’s us, the people who are accumulating them. Less than half of adults in the UK have made a traditional will, and far fewer have considered what will happen to their digital one.

In the Digital Legacy Association’s 2017 Digital Death Survey, 83 per cent of respondents had made no plans at all for their digital legacies. A handful of people – 15.2 per cent – had made their wishes known for their Facebook accounts using the Legacy Contact feature. Legacy Contact allows you to appoint a trusted person to manage your memorialised account after you die, and you can also stipulate if you want the account deleted.

Whether instructions left on Legacy Contact or any other online platform would hold up in UK courts, however, is another matter. As in many realms of modern life, this is an area where laws and regulations are not keeping pace with technology. GDPR and the UK’s Data Protection Act 2018 don’t comment on what should happen to the digitally stored information of the dead, who are no longer entitled to data protection.

Service providers are understandably reluctant to hand over account contents or access to next of kin, especially when that’s likely to compromise other (living) people’s privacy.

Laws governing wills and probate don’t help much either when it comes to digital material. To bequeath something to someone in the UK it has to be tangible or valuable, and your social media profiles might not be judged to be either. In addition, you can’t pass on what you don’t actually own in the first place.

You do not own your social media profiles. Even if you’d like to, you cannot pass on an iTunes or Kindle library, since you have only purchased a license to watch, listen or read while you’re alive. The vast majority of your online accounts and their contents are non-transferable: one account, one user.

It may be a while before coherent, enforceable systems are instituted to govern what should happen to the data of the deceased. Until then, the companies to whom we entrust our data when we’re alive largely decide what happens to it upon death and who can access it.

In this legal and regulatory void, we can only make arrangements as best we can. For sentimental and practical material that might be valuable to our loved ones, we need to leave behind instructions for how to access it or – even better – back it up in secure but accessible formats that are not under the control of online service providers. In the not-too-distant future, digital estate planning may be a career all its own, or at least a necessary component of an existing profession.

4 It is impossible to predict how digital legacies will be meaningful to the bereaved

Our expectations that ‘normal’ grief will follow predictable, orderly stages is encouraged by our algorithmic environment. If you type ‘stages of…’ into a search engine, that engine will likely suggestion completion with ‘grief’. If you type ‘grief’, the engine will likely suggest ‘stages of’.

Despite what you and the algorithms might think, however, bereavement is actually incredibly, spectacularly idiosyncratic. Just as every relationship we have in life is unique, each bereavement is particular too. Despite dominating the popular discourse for the latter half of the 20th Century, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous grief stages – which were actually based upon qualitative research done with dying people, not bereaved people – boast little empirical support.

Across cultures and millennia, people have continued bonds with their dead in various ways, and we cannot predict what digital artifacts will be important in helping a bereaved person feel a thread of connection to those gone before.

For every person that relies upon a memorialised Facebook profile in their grief, there will be another that wishes it would just disappear. A preserved Twitter profile might be an absolute lifeline to friends, but the family might want it removed, perhaps imagining it’s not important to anyone. There is no rule book for what should and should not be important to someone in grief.

An astonishing and unpredictable variety of digital artifacts have been reported to me as being sentimentally significant to bereaved people. The digital recording of her husband’s heartbeat, stored in iTunes on a widow’s phone. The way that a woman’s brother organised and named his files on his laptop, giving her a window into how he thought and reasoned. A spam email from a woman’s deceased friend whose account was hacked – even though she knew it came from a hacker, she didn’t want to erase it, because it was his name in her inbox. A mother’s search history on her laptop, revealing to her daughter what she was thinking about in the last days of her life.

And finally, Google Street View, haunted by those who are no longer at that address. There is dad, watering the front lawn. There is a fondly remembered pet, peeking out the window of the house. There is grandma, sitting on the porch where she always did, waiting for the school bus to bring her grandchildren home. Even Google Earth is full of ghosts.

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How the world of death and funerals has become fashionable through digital culture

‘Tearleading’ – the process of publicly sharing condolences after someone famous has died – has become an internet phenomenon. It’s made grief trendy and has digitised the only one true certainty in life: death

Public mourning: Céline Dion pauses at the casket of her late husband René Angélil – his funeral was livestreamed

By Oliver Bennett

[I]t’s one of the more blood-curdling things about Facebook – the social media death notice. You know the score: the recently deceased star of Top of the Pops, sitcom or stage is commemorated by way of a YouTube video and a deluge of weepy RIPs and “part of my life” eulogies, a phenomenon derided as “tearleading”. The high-water mark for this was who “taught us how to live, then taught us how to die” two years ago. 

Of course, entrepreneurs have noticed this spectacle, which writer and psychologist Elaine Kasket brackets as “the data of the dead”. It’s part of a digital-led revolution in dying and death and it’s changing the way we see people pass into the ineffable digital afterlife. “We’re developing an entirely new mentality about death and dying,” she says. 

​Kasket (yes, she knows) is the author of an upcoming book about digital death called All the Ghosts in the Machine, and has observed a huge rise of interest. “I was at a recent SXSW festival and was introduced to someone who put on a super-serious voice and told me: ‘I’m in the death-tech space’.” As a subject, dying has become fashionable, with investors pouring money into startups, bolstering thought leadership and inspirational TED Talks on “new ways to think about death”. 

There are so many new death-tech sites that they break up into different types. There’s the price disruptors like Harbour Funerals, Beyond.life, and Funeral Zone, which offer price comparisons and sometimes, TripAdvisor-type reviews. Derrick Grant set up Willow when a close friend couldn’t afford his funeral expenses and found one-sixth of Britons struggle to pay for a funeral – the average cost of dying is £8,905. He now offers an against-deadline price check to help those who “couldn’t afford to die”: the ultimate poverty. “I found the industry hadn’t changed for 100 years,” says Grant. “People thought you had to pay a lot to do right.” Now it’s becoming more transparent, more open, and partly as a result, says Grant, “funerals have become less funereal”.

Starman: tributes at a Bowie mural in Brixton the day after the announcement of his death

Then there are the planning sites, which include Cake, a US company that has developed an app for end-of-life planning, and the UK’s DeadSocial.org which explains how to prepare your digital estate from the scattered confetti of Instagram, Facebook, Gmail et al. On SafeBeyond, users can create an online cache – including video and audio messages – to be shared posthumously with loved ones which founder and chief executive Moran Zur has called “digital relics” and “emotional life insurance”. My Last Soundtrack will develop your end-of-life Spotify playlist. More than half a million people die every year in the UK, and market analyst IBISWorld says the UK funeral sector is worth £1.7bn. No wonder there’s been significant funding from angel investors in that “death-tech space”.

This stuff enthuses Peter Billingham, a celebrant and “digital death adviser” who founded the website Death Goes Digital. “The world of death and funerals has really been disrupted by digital culture,” he says. “What was stable for hundreds of years has changed enormously in the last five years. We’re more open about death than ever before and technology is helping to reframe what death means.”

Baby boomers, now moving into the death demographic, are leading the way. Milestones include the 2016 livestreaming of funerals, including those of Lemmy Kilmister and Céline Dion’s husband René Angélil; and of course Bowie, who as ever in the avant-garde, favoured a direct cremation, where the body is cremated before the funeral. There’s a growing inventiveness in eco-death options too: recomposition, where the body becomes compost, and aquamation, a kind of a water cremation – even a “mushroom burial suit”. There are death celebrities, notably Caitlin Doughty, a “mortician and activist” who founded “death acceptance” collective The Order of the Good Death, spearheading the “death positive” movement.

But it is the tech spiritualism that is perhaps the most fascinating part of the digital death otherworld. Many readers will recognise the curious and unsettling scenario whereby a dead friend or relative pops up zombie-like on Facebook, perhaps in a prompt to recognise a birthday.

Modern trend: Dave Grohl delivers a speech at Lemmy Kilmister’s televised funeral

This has led to a huge leap in the way we approach the afterlife. In the past, says Elaine Kasket, attitudes to the dead divided into two main global tendencies: cultures of memory, and cultures of care, roughly zoned into west and east: in China, for example, there’s a tradition of believing that one’s ancestors remain active, while here we honour their memory with photographs and grave visits.

“Now, with digital culture the dead are becoming more vocal and socially influential and the West is moving towards a care culture,” adds Kasket. “They are increasingly in the places of the living.” Digital representations of dead persons won’t be confined to cemeteries. They will haunt different spaces: perhaps even become a rights lobby: the “transdimensional”, perhaps. They will be what Kasket calls the “active dead”, and what Billingham calls “present not absent”. Many people have online conversations with the dead on Facebook, which introduced a legacy contact option in 2015, and Billingham says that we’re already seeing the emergence of a new kind of professional: the “posthumous legacy curator”.

There are far reaches of death-tech that encroach upon sci-fi. Eternime, founded by MIT fellow Marius Ursache, is about creating an eternal posthumous avatar: animated by your digital footprint and given life by artificial intelligence, and is building a database of like-minded people who gain the chance for grandchildren to interact with their unmet great-grandparents. Also in the US, Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, a computer scientist and specialist in personality emulation, is engaged in a project to create simulations of the dead people so as to keep our loved ones “alive”. These avatars will start on the screen, move into virtual reality and augmented reality, then potentially become life-size simulations. Ahmad, who was inspired to work in the area when his father died, sees it becoming reality between 2030 to 2050. “It’s not if, it’s when,” he says. And to those who say it sounds like Black Mirror: well, go back and have a look at the “Be Right Back” episode. 

Open-ended: a woman in ‘Black Mirror’ gets an AI version of her husband after he died

Ahmad thinks that cultures like Japan, with its animist traditions and a neophilic acceptance of robots, will be the early adopters. But he doesn’t see why (bar a few surmountable religious barriers) it shouldn’t take hold everywhere as we become used to it. “It means my daughter will have the chance to interact with my father,” he says. “It will deepen our relationships with our dead loved ones and offer a living memorial that can bring ‘emotional enrichment’.” We’ll be less likely to visit graves, perhaps, and more likely to summon Gran like a digital Doris Stokes.

Of course Ahmad has critics. “People bring up the idea that we need ‘closure’,” he says. “But it goes towards solving the ‘if only I’d said this or that’ problem to an extent.” Still, he concedes there are plenty of legal and ethical issues. What if the simulation were sanitised, with difficult opinions edited out? How should their ageing be represented? Does their voice sound right? Ahmad thinks that the development of digital trusts will emerge, and with artificial voice synthesis, the latter will get better. “But these are uncharted territories. It will affect the way we see identity. Adding emotions may be a challenge.” Will Death 2.0 bring on unintended consequences? It’s a dead cert.

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