Digital footprints from the afterlife

Last week, I watched the funeral service of a friend who had passed away. It was streamed from the cathedral through a memorial web page created in his name and on YouTube. After it was over, a booth was set up outside, and guests and friends were invited to record tributes and messages that would be added to the website.

The US election race also heated up this month with the nomination of Kamala Harris as the vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. But it was a surprise to see a tweet by Herman Cain, a former presidential candidate, and now an associate of President Trump who tweeted in strong opposition to her nomination. What was curious was that Herman Cain passed away on July 30. But his daughter later wrote to clarify that her father had requested that his family continue the tweet on his behalf as part of his legacy.

Whether the claim is still true is debatable but the digital world allows people to live on long after they exit this world. After all, when you write a will, you are stating your intention and giving specific direction on what should happen to your nominal and physical assets. So why not give away about digital assets? 

There are about ten people I follow on Twitter, who have passed away. I have not deleted their accounts. I can’t. But I wonder what would happen if they started tweeting again.  What would it be like to hear from them again? Perhaps if a family member who knew them well and had access to their writing could continue to write for them. 

Memorials

I also got a Facebook birthday reminder of another friend. She passed away in January and her funeral service marked the last time I was in church.  Facebook had a provision for when somebody passes, to have a designated family member who to take over your page into a memorial.

Facebook and Instagram now have policies to turn accounts of dead people into memorials for their friends and family, while Twitter announced last year that they would delete any account that had been inactive for six months. But after an angry reaction by users, upset that it would mean a loss of private photos, videos, posts, and messages, Twitter seems to have set it aside. Now they will rely on other people to request that an account be deactivated if a person dies or is incapacitated.  All three social media sites allow family members to request that accounts of deceased people be taken down or deleted.

It is possible to have a digital life after death. Isn’t the Bible the best example of a living text? It is read thousands of years later and still inspires new interpretations, meaning and revelations.

This also happens with celebrity pages. Their managers or families mark important days with posts e.g. “on this date, Michael Jackson did this or released that.”  There is usually a short clip to accompany the updates. Often it is with never before seen clips, of audio or video.

At another extreme of digital afterlives, we have “The Deamon”, a fictional best-selling book by Daniel Suarez in which a brilliant dying programmer embeds secrets instructions in the code of powerful computers. And the publication of his obituary triggers the computers to kill and recruit more computers and devices, and his online followers to recreate a new world that he had envisioned.