Illustration: Arafath Ibrahim

Last month, Facebook reminded me of a friend’s birthday. I get a handful of these notifications every week, but this one was different. It was for a close friend who had passed away a couple of years ago. And yet there he was, all smiley-faced and adventurous, with friends and relatives wishing him many happy returns. Why was this notification sent? Why does Facebook think he’s still alive? How should a person react to the continued social media presence of the dead? These are all questions I never thought I would ask.

What happens to our social media after we die? The short answer is nothing, as my Facebook notification testifies. Provided we don’t deactivate our Facebook and Instagram accounts, remove our LinkedIn posts, or delete our WordPress sites, they will remain in place. The potential repercussions of this are statistically staggering. Facebook could have 4.9 billion deceased users by 2100, according to researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute. This means the social media platform will have more dead members than living by 2070. The implications of this are huge, not only for the families of the deceased, but for our legal, ethical, social and cultural worlds.

From a purely practical perspective, what happens to our social media after we pass into the afterlife is fairly straightforward. “In principle, a person’s social media accounts can still be found after a person’s death unless the deceased has taken precautionary measures to ensure that their accounts are deleted or utilized in a specific way,” says Marina El Hachem, an associate at Dubai-based law firm BSA. Those precautionary measures include deleting any unnecessary accounts, choosing a legacy contact, and the creation of a digital will.

Facebook, for example, allows users to choose a legacy contact who will have access to their account after their death, explains El Hachem. Once a request to memorialize an account has been accepted, posts and memories can be shared in remembrance of the deceased on their timeline. The legacy contact cannot edit or delete past posts or remove any existing friends. Users can also choose to permanently delete their account after their death, which means all posts or photos they have shared will also be deleted. Posts shared by others in which the user is tagged or mentioned will not be deleted from the platform.

In contrast, Snapchat does not provide access to a deceased person’s account. Nonetheless, it does offer the ability to delete an account once proof of death has been provided. Twitter policies, meanwhile, stipulate that in the event of the death of a user, a person authorized to act on behalf of the deceased may have the deceased’s account deleted, El Hachem adds. Accounts may also be permanently removed due to prolonged inactivity, which essentially means failing to log in every now and then.

Despite these policies, in the absence of any planning on the part of the deceased, a person’s “digital data is at risk of being lost, forgotten, or hacked,” says El Hachem, who notes that the likes of Instagram can use a person’s photographs to advertise the platform, even after their death. As such, the “most important thing is for a person to prepare for the legacy of their digital data”.

As a first step, El Hachem suggests people “set their account preferences in every major social media platform and make informed decisions as to the future of their digital identity. Whether they choose to memorialize their accounts, delete them, or grant them; organizing in advance is wise. As a second step, users should consider creating digital wills as a means of safeguarding their social media legacy and personal data. Users should also be aware that aside from the legal repercussions, moral considerations should be taken into account such as ensuring that their image, reputation and digital identity is protected.”

All of this is very morbid, of course, but if you want to get a sense of the importance placed in the digital footprints of the deceased by those who mourn them, look no further than Twitter. The company’s recent decision to purge inactive accounts, including those of the dead, led to online backlash in May. For those who have lost friends or relatives who were active on the platform, their profiles not only help to keep their memory alive, they are a window into who they were.

The digital afterlife, however, is far bigger than any individual. As the digital ethicist Carl Öhman says, the “data of the dead is more than individual user history, it is the heritage of the 21st century”. That user history includes everything from social media profiles to search queries and online shopping behavior. Throw in emails and WhatsApp messages and the excess of information that we leave behind becomes more than an individual priority, it becomes a matter of societal concern.

“One problem is that the information we leave behind upon death can be used as a proxy for living individuals,” says Öhman, an associate senior lecturer at the department of government, Uppsala University. “For example, my personal data holds a lot of information about those I regularly communicate with, such as my family (kind of like DNA, but social). This fundamentally relational nature of information makes the matter of digital remains (what we leave behind online) a truly collective concern. The privacy of the dead is also the privacy of the living.”

The quest for digital immortality

There are those who want to be remembered and those who don’t. Jennifer Fischer, chief innovation and growth officer at Publicis Groupe Middle East and North Africa, falls into the latter camp. She does not post on social media, apart from sparingly on LinkedIn, and chooses to only share her life with the people she engages with. As such, she wishes to leave nothing behind. This is a conscious decision that others do not necessarily make.

Sometimes, however, there is a disparity between what people wish to know of their ancestors, say, and how much they themselves wish to leave to posterity. In ‘The Future of Secrets’, an interactive installation created by Sarah Newman, Jessica Yurkofsky and Rachel Kalmar, participants were asked to anonymously share their secrets as a way to question the trust we place in machines. The aim of the project was to raise the question of what it means for us ‘to share so much of ourselves through complex systems and digitally distributed networks’.

Before the project began, Newman, director of art and education at metaLAB at Harvard, carried out a quick survey. One of the questions she asked was: ‘If your great grandparents had email accounts and you had access to their emails, would you want to read them?’ Most people said yes. Another question, posed later in the survey, asked: ‘In the future, would you be OK with your descendants reading all of your emails and text messages?’ Most people said no.

“Of the people I surveyed and interviewed, on the whole, people are curious about the past and, given the dearth of information, wish to know more than they already do,” explains Newman, who is also a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “Sometimes people can go back only one generation with any real accuracy. Others may know more, but often only have spotty or anecdotal information. Occasionally, people are lucky to have a handful of letters or other mementos, but they are few and far between.

“We now produce such an excess of information that is both private and contextual. The technologies have come along so quickly that few people have stopped to reckon with where their personal correspondence will be in the long term future: who will have access to it, whether it will be preserved in or out of context, and how their own stories might get (re)told.”

For those who want to be remembered, there are varying degrees of digital immortality. Some wish to leave only traces behind, others seek to curate a sanitized or idealized version of themselves. A few, perhaps, are looking ahead to their grandchildren and beyond. Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at The Envisioners, remembers being part of a forum discussion during which a YouTuber was asked why he creates and posts videos. His response was simple: ‘So my grandchildren and their kids can see who I was.’

“So this is a guy who’s already thinking about his digital legacy and he’s curating a story – a narrative – for people to be able to see him beyond his physical life,” says Coplin. “Which I thought was really interesting. There’s this almost philosophical thing about how we want the world to remember us. Because the world in a sense will never forget. But the world will forget, because we’ll just get fuller and fuller and the signal becomes less significant amongst all the noise.”

If individual signals will weaken (especially for those with common names) as the quantities of data move beyond our comprehension, algorithms will play a huge role in determining what information surfaces. Yet, even it is possible to scan large corpuses of text to find a single piece of information, it is unlikely that a full, rounded picture of an individual will emerge.

“When I think of digital immortality I tend not to think of the survival of our minds, but of our personhood, that is, the narrative of who we are,” says Öhman. “The people granted this privilege in the past have been a limited few. With digital technology almost everything is recorded by default and so the personal stories to survive will (hopefully) be more diverse.”

  It is this personhood that Newman is interested in. The personal, poetic side of what it means to be human. Yet, even if all of our digital traces remain, they will not provide a clear portrait who we were, believes Newman. Digital text that is read in the future will be flattened and context will be lost. Entire lifetimes – their growth and evolution, their wisest as well as their most regrettable moments – are being recorded, but perhaps it will be the non-representative or anomalous aspects of a person’s life that resurface. This will depend on the data that has been stored, how it is searched for, and how it is interpreted. It will also depend on the complex legal environment related to personal data.

Answering the bigger questions

Much of the above depends on the holy trinity of storage, processing power, and memory. Although advances in quantum computing, renewable energy, nanotechnology, and DNA digital data storage could mean we have the ability to save and host absolutely everything in the near future, why would we do so? And who would pay for it? It’s all very well to suggest our YouTube videos will last forever, but what’s the point of hosting something with only marginal value for eternity?

Unlimited computing power, infinite storage, and endless renewable energy, however, are not yet within our grasp. We also live within an economic system that prioritizes profit. In such a world, companies are unlikely to store huge amounts of data unless it makes financial sense to do so. A business might make services available to preserve all of our data, but how do we pay for it? And to what end? Although the digital world often strikes us as intangible and virtual, data storage is a material business, states Öhman. It is “a matter of hard drives, servers and wires. And like all material objects, they have an expiration date”.

“For digital information to survive, we constantly need to transfer it to new storage facilities, update it, format and curate it,” states Öhman. “This is a costly enterprise, so the ethical questions that arise are: whose data do we preserve for posterity? Who should pay for all this? And who has the right to control it? Depending on how we answer these big questions, new ones will emerge. For example, if Facebook has the right to all of its dead users’ information, this means that, in a few decades, they will more or less control history. Do we really want a society where one or two firms own virtually every detail of our recent history on their servers?”

These are questions we are only beginning to grapple with. Although it is unlikely that everything will be kept, archived and indexed, the complexity of these questions will increase as our relationship with the digital world intensifies. We are moving towards a future where our physical and virtual worlds may become inseparable. A future where the virtual reality platform Somnium Space is already planning to introduce a ‘live forever’ feature, which will allow a virtual version of ourselves to converse with our descendants. And let’s not forget that digital clones of the deceased already exist (albeit in limited form) thanks to companies such as DeepBrain AI and HereAfter AI.

It won’t be long, suggests Coplin, before it will be possible to create a convincing digital avatar that not only sounds like us (Microsoft’s VALL-E can clone a voice based on a three-second audio snippet), but looks and acts like us too. “Much of the input for this will come from our social media (I can already train ChatGPT to respond as if it were me by training it on the posts I’ve written, for example),” says Coplin. “The legal ramifications of this are pretty significant, not to mention the emotional and ethical considerations that such an act might have for the friends and family of the deceased.”

There are wider social concerns, too. What if the inequalities experienced in life continue into the digital afterworld? If the cost of storing a diverse representation of humanity is too expensive to contemplate, or requires too much hardware and labor to maintain, the emergence of two species is possible, suggests Fischer. An immortal species that would spend 60 to 80 years on Earth and then live forever in the virtual realm. And normal humans like us, who would just disappear.

“It’s hard to predict all the implications that digital immortality would bring, especially without knowing what its parameters might be,” says Fischer. “But the obvious risk of such a world would be that inequalities would be magnified. The TV show Upload shows a world where the wealthy are able to upload themselves to the afterlife of their choice, while others have a restricted afterlife or none at all. Furthermore, we can easily imagine a world where life (a mere 80 years into  the start of an endless existence) could become transactional, just a means to pay and get access to the best immortality possible. That feels like a very dystopian vision of the future.”

Right now this is all a bit science fiction, but the dangers are implicit. Maybe that’s why Coplin believes a “series of legal and ethical discussions by the platform holders and those with an interest in the data” are inevitable. Especially relating to who owns the data on those platforms and whether it should be kept beyond a certain point. Social media companies may introduce an industry standard that limits the amount of time a user’s data is held, suggests Coplin, just like laws governing the retention of medical records. That in itself would raise the awkward question of whether it’s ok to erase part of a person’s digital history.

As the lines dividing the real and virtual worlds become increasingly imperceptible, these discussions will intensify. We will be faced with challenging questions, not least how we negotiate such a mixed reality existence and retain our humanity. “This is a big question,” admits Öhman. “We no longer say that we are on- or offline, we are always surrounded by the network. One of the consequences of this is that the past is all the sudden present everywhere. Before the digital revolution, the past could be stuffed away in an archive, photo album or in a cemetery. Today, it is the opposite. It is as if we have all moved into the archives and cannot get out. My phone, which I carry around me all the time, is a portal to heaps of information (videos, pictures, tweets) from people that are now long gone biologically speaking, but continue to be around me virtually.”

In his upcoming book, The Afterlife of Data, Öhman argues that we have all become ‘archeopolitans’ – citizens of the archive. “Just like globalization has forced us to be good cosmopolitans,” he says, “responding to the moral presence of people far, far away, the internet has forced us to be good archeopolitans, responding to the moral presence of people who may have lived a long time ago, yet continue to be present through technology. Figuring out what it means to be a good archeopolitan will take decades. Perhaps it is one of those questions to which we will never find a final answer. We will continue to ask it day after day. And that is a good thing.”

The very real threat, of course, is that we will all be sucked into the rabbit hole. To avoid this, we will have to make a series of important decisions – both personal and societal – in the coming years, believes Fischer. “Our brains are plastic and incredibly malleable, making us able to adapt,” she says. “However, the risk with technology changing so fast is to adapt without being conscious of how it will impact who we are as a society, civilization and ultimately as a species. We must be more intentional in the choices we make over the next few years. It’s not just about advancing but advancing in an inclusive, fair, sustainable and ethical manner. One that is worthy of the best of humanity. And that includes everything from laws and regulations, to simply how we engage with technology daily, what we teach the next generation, and the decisions we take within businesses today.” 

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