Tech Won't Save Us - What Happens to Our Digital Footprints When We Die? w/ Tamara Kneese

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Tamara Kneese to discuss the difficult question of what happens to our digital presence after we die and why some tech billionaires are so desperate to make themselves into chatbots.Tamara Kneese is a researcher, organizer, and author of Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Tamara wrote some pieces on AI and death for Wired and The Baffler.Support the show

I am just hoping that this is the time when we kind of reckon with the materiality of digital infrastructures and really think about what we would want long-term preservation to look like and who should be in control of it. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Tamara Nies. Tamara is a researcher, organizer, and author of Death Glitch, How Technosolutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond. I never really thought about talking about the relationship between technology, digital platforms, and death on the show until I came across Tamara's book. And I was like, this is such an interesting topic and one that so many people don't really think about when it comes to what we do online and then what happens to all of these things that, you know, we leave

behind on the internet when we die. And also, you know, how we relate to death in online spaces. So we explore a lot of different aspects of this in this conversation from like how platforms manage the death of users, how people have to manage the digital footprints that their friends and loved ones leave behind when they die, and kind of like the care work that goes into actually handling those things. But also, you know, how that presents a broader question of like, what actually should or does get saved and archived online, and what should ultimately be lost and not saved and just kind of fade away as that happens to us as well. And that's not necessarily an easy question to answer. It can seem quite easy like on the face of things,

but then when you start to drill down into the specifics of what it actually means to keep certain information, decide what information to remove, things get tricky really quick because different people have different ideas about what should be saved and what shouldn't. And then naturally, you know, we also get into this broader discussion that is quite relevant right now because of all the conversations that generative AI has us having about like this idea of people, especially tech people wanting to turn themselves into chatbots by

using all of these digital trails and all these things that they've left behind to train, you know, basically an algorithm or a large language model and to make it seem like they're still around. And on the one hand, like, what does that mean for that person and for that chatbot to exist? But then also, what does it mean for the people who, you know, are then left to like interact with that chatbot? Are they supposed to enjoy it? Are they supposed to keep it active just because the person who died wanted it, even if they don't want it? I don't know. There are a lot of complex questions there that this whole topic kind of brings to mind. And so hopefully while you're listening to this episode,

you'll be thinking of some of these questions as well. And, you know, thinking about what your thoughts and opinions are on them, because I don't know, I feel like it's something that we don't think about enough, but maybe is something that we should be talking about a bit more. But yeah, I think that this is a really thought provoking conversation and not one that I thought to have on the show, but and one that I am happy that I ultimately had with Tamara. And I think you'll enjoy it as well. So if you do make sure to leave a five star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show with any friends or colleagues who you think might learn from it or who you think you might be able to have some interesting conversations with about this topic once they listen to it.

And also, of course, if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week so we can keep having conversations like this and the other critical conversations that we have on the show, you can join supporters like Tobias in Bern, Switzerland, and Matt from Atlanta by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Tamara, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hi, Paris. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. I'm really excited to chat with you. You know, I have a meeting to get to your book for a while. And luckily, I finally like was able to carve out the time to get through it. And I think it's such an interesting book, because it really makes us consider these aspects of digital technology that we don't often think about, and their relationship

to death in particular. And so to get us started, I was wondering, like, how was this a topic that you decided that you wanted to look into further this intersection between digital technologies and the internet and death ultimately? Well, part of it is that when I started studying social media platforms and Facebook in particular, I was getting towards the end of my college career. So I was a junior in college when Facebook appeared on the scene in 2004. And I knew people in my own classes and on my college campus who died suddenly. And I watched as those people were memorialized on Facebook. And I thought about the strangeness of somebody's picture of them smoking a joint becoming a lasting memorial and the sort of problem of context collapse in that way also, where you have profiles that are intended for friends and for one particular audience, but then they become this memorial that is intended for the

larger community, family members, and then becomes basically a way for people to remember you in the long term. And I was watching as different features of the platform changed over time. And then when I was doing my master's thesis, I was really interested in the surveillance aspects of Facebook. And so I was really beginning to look into how governments were using platforms to monitor groups of people. I was really interested in thinking about the relationship between platforms and power. But then the Virginia tech shootings happened in 2007, when I was in the middle of writing my master's thesis proposal. And I was quite struck by the way that Facebook became so prominent in the news media and

descriptions of the massacre at Virginia Tech and a way for journalists to make sense of the individual personalities of the people who had been killed. But I was especially interested in the way that Facebook profiles of the dead also became part of a kind of user-based resistance against the platform, in that the platform had its own policies and protocols. And so they would deactivate the profiles of dead users if they were presented with an obituary or were informed of a user's death after a 30-day period. And so because the Virginia Tech shootings were so high profile,

the company was like, OK, we're going to deactivate the profiles of all of the people who died and had Facebook accounts. And it was a group of friends and family members of the victims of the shooting who decided to rally and ask Facebook to prevent their profiles from being deactivated or deleted and to maintain them as shrines to their fallen loved ones. And part of the reason why I started this larger project was that I was really interested in that power dynamic and struggle over who should really be able to control the long-term fate of the digital objects that we were all producing at increasing rates. Yeah, you know, is it the platforms or is it the people who you were closest with before you died, who then kind of control things afterward. But as you're talking about that, like, I found that

really interesting as well, right? Both as I was reading about it in your book, both this question of like, okay, initially, Facebook was like, if these people are dead, we should remove their profiles because they're not around to use the platform any longer. But then, you know, presented with this shooting and this tragedy and this kind of different opinion that people had about what should happen to these profiles once the people who own them had died, kind of changes the policy in response to that. And I wonder how you think about the legacy of that decision. Because, you know, I certainly have, quote unquote, friends on Facebook who are no longer alive, but their profiles are still there. And, you know, I've certainly talked to people about it in the past where they feel that on one hand, it's nice to like, have it there. And you can go back and look at their pictures sometimes and things like that to like remember them. But at the same time, it can also be a bit weird sometimes when it's like the profile is still there and maybe it pops up sometimes and it makes you feel like, you know, this

person is still alive or there's kind of like an uncanniness to it because the person is dead, but the profile is still around. What do you make of those questions as you've been talking to people about it and researching it over the years? Well, what's interesting is that almost everyone I know has at least one anecdote at this point about a friend or family member and an issue that they have had with a dead loved one's account, either getting access to an account, an account being hacked and taken over and turned into a spamming mechanism, or just an inability to access accounts, especially for people who are not blood relatives of somebody who has died.

And so the idea of, you know, it really just being up to direct, you know, blood kin members to organize people's digital remains, when in many cases, the people who are probably interacting more with people's online personas are actually their friends and broader networks. And it's very difficult. And even today, most people are unable to reach a human to have a conversation about especially a more nuanced case. And it can take a really long time to contact people at major platforms to get a response. And a lot of this is because even with some of the features that a lot of platforms have built into their platforms, there are very few people out there who are actively planning for their own digital

afterlives. Most people are not thinking about it. They do not have a guardian appointed or a legacy contact on Facebook appointed in case they die. So this is really an ongoing problem. But then the other issue is that on the platform policy implementation side, platforms are not hiring a bunch of staff to be dealing with this issue. So they're relying on content moderators, and they don't want to hire enough of them to actually do the work. They're not paying them well. They're not training them. And so the platforms are not taking responsibility. At the same time, there's a degree of recognition that maintaining the profiles of the dead is in some ways helpful to corporate platforms because

it maintains some level of engagement. And I would also say that a lot of the awkward moments that people have, for instance, I have a friend who died, and about maybe two months after they found her body, LinkedIn pinged me and wanted me to congratulate her on her work anniversary. And in this case, her workplace had actively contributed to her death. You know, that was quite jarring. But a lot of these features that are upsetting if they are in relation to a dead loved one, they are built into the platform to encourage engagement. That's the problem. You know, not being able to distinguish between living and dead users.

You don't know if they're inactive because they've just not been particularly online or maybe they are dead. And so for platforms, they're always kind of weighing the benefits. So is it helpful to encourage more engagement around an event like death? Or is it more of a liability if you have a bunch of inactive profiles hanging around that could be hacked? Or, you know, in the case of Twitter, for example, the idea that, hey, if you get rid of all the inactive accounts, it'll free up a bunch of handles that are laying dormant. Some of them could be quite lucrative. And so

in that way, removing inactive profiles is helpful to the platform in some way. Yeah. Like it's such a difficult question, right? Because in my mind, when I'm initially thinking about it, I think it makes perfect sense to remove these accounts, right? The person is no longer around. Would they even want the account to still be around? Is this for the people who are left or the people who are not? You know, you talked about the possibility on Facebook to kind of have your account turned into this memorial type of account. But I feel like for a lot of people who are not, you know, you talked about the possibility on Facebook to kind of have your account turned into this memorial type of account. But I feel like for a lot of people who die, that doesn't actually happen, right? Like the regular account just sticks around. And so you still get these like notifications every now and then that might have their name

in it and whatnot. And it feels really weird. But at the same time, I also know there are people who like having that account still there that they can interact with it. And, you know, on Twitter specifically, there are times when people go back and link to the tweets of people who are dead or quote tweets or whatever, to be able to have that kind of memory of them and that record of the postings that they've made. So it seems like such a complex issue. And I can kind of understand why the platforms struggle with it. Now, of course, then, as you say, there's the other side of it where Facebook is like, hey, there can be engagement by still keeping these accounts around. But yeah, like I can understand the difficulty there.

Definitely. And I think that is the other problem, you know, for a lot of individual morning people, you know, a lot of the people I interviewed for the book, they were really maintaining very long term relationships with something like a Facebook profile or a Twitter account or a blog, especially something where there is a level of craft of readers and a community. And so in that way, for a digital belonging like that to disappear would be really sad, not just for individual mourners, but also maybe on a more sort of historical level of this is an archive. This is something that can tell you something about, you know, web culture around illness in the early 2000s? And what happens if we lose access to that kind of history? Yeah, I think that's an important question. And I think one that I want to come back to and talk

a bit more in just a minute, but you mentioned the point about blogs there. And we've talked about Facebook accounts. And you've talked about sometimes the difficulty of accessing these accounts or kind of knowing what to do with what is left behind. And one've talked about sometimes the difficulty of accessing these accounts or kind of knowing what to do with what is left behind. And one of the things I found really almost novel about the book as I was reading through it was this discussion of like the care work that is actually involved in that, right? We're used to this idea that, okay, someone dies and we need to plan their funeral and we need to, you know, the people closest to them need to like go through their will and manage their affairs and their estate and whatever to kind of like close up

legally and physically at their life. But I feel like one piece of that that's often not discussed as much or not thought about as much is also this like digital legacy that they leave behind and the need to manage that or like, do you just leave it and let happen whatever is going to happen with it? But that is also this amount of work that we don't often think about. Right. I mean, death care management is also going to depend in general on different kinds of bureaucracies, dealing with the bank, dealing with insurance companies. These things can be quite vexing. So anyone who's ever tried to close down an estate and deal with all of those logistics will know that the digital housekeeping aspect of it is just sort of one part of it. But it can be especially tricky because with digital accounts, you may not even know where all of them are.

And so a lot of people are not even aware of perhaps some of the accounts that were quite significant to the individual, especially depending on who died and who is left behind to care for their stuff. You know, as I mentioned before, there might be somebody who is a really prolific blogger and has a very active online life. But if their parents are the ones who are managing their estate after their death, they may be unaware of it. They may not recognize its significance. So they may not even know that they should be paying for a domain name, or they may not know that there are, you know, a whole network of readers and community members out there who don't even know that the person has died. And so even knowing who to alert, how to get information out there, what kinds of publics need to be told, all of that

is now even trickier just because most people do have at least some online accounts that they have to manage. Yeah, it's so wild. And like what you're bringing to mind is earlier this year, I think it was I like, set my mom up as I don't know what the proper term is for the special contact on my Apple account. So if like something happens to it, like, she can access it or let me back in or whatnot. And it's kind of like this hidden option that's there. But I was like, I don't know, I feel like I should have this protection. So if something happens, like that there's that connection. But like, these are things that we don't often think about, right? Like trying to put these contingencies in place, even just to like, access an account if you lose it, let alone thinking about dying, and then people having to like, deal with all these leftovers. I remember hearing someone talk about how, I can't remember who it

was who was telling the story now, but they were supposed to go on a honeymoon and their father died just before the honeymoon and their father was going to pay for the flights or the whole thing or something on like the points that he had. And then like, that was all messed up because they couldn't access the points. And it was like, there are all these like considerations of how the digital can then make these things very difficult. It's just things that people don't often think about. But when you really start to consider it, the kind of enormity of it, especially if you're not just someone

kind of using Facebook in a social way, but have this much broader presence online, it becomes this daunting thing to start to have to think about and to deal with and to wonder what happens with all this stuff after you're gone, because you're clearly not thinking about that is going to happen unless maybe you're ill and know that this is coming, right?

Right, definitely. So with digital death care, there's the planning that one might put into imagining one's own death and kind of thinking about what a digital afterlife would look like. So some people might have really elaborate plans for how they'd like to be memorialized. Some people may actually want to be turned into, say, a chatbot version of themselves so they can continue to kind of awkwardly haunt their next of kin. But for most people, as you say, it's not something that they're thinking about very often and they're not really planning out. They probably, you know, in many cases don't even have a password manager. And so the idea of even just having people know what kind of accounts you have and

what is significant to you or what you would want to be maintained is something that you can do fairly easily without the aid of, say, a digital estate planning startup company. So that was one sort of shift that I saw, particularly after social media memorials became much more prominent. And there seemed to be this kind of growing understanding that like, okay, you know, people really make a lot of digital stuff. They have a lot of digital assets, and they seem to want to hold on to them after people die. So we need a better solution because individual platforms all have different policies, if they have them at all, regarding digital remains. And the law has not really caught up. And so, especially in the US, it's like a complete nightmare. And so, you know, basically,

it's just up to individual tech companies to do whatever they want. And so, okay, we're going to have these new startup companies that will help people either manage their own digital afterlives or that will help people who are grieving deal with the digital upkeep after a loved one has passed. And so, you know, I watched as all of these different startup companies kind of came on the scene and then very quickly dissipated because almost all of them were unable to find any kind of viable way of making money. And so, you know, because again, like if people are not planning for this in general, they're certainly not going to pay for it. And so getting people to pay for that kind of service up front is quite difficult.

It felt very Silicon Valley to like have all these startups form being like, we'll it. And so getting people to pay for that kind of service up front is quite difficult. It felt very Silicon Valley to like, have all these startups form being like, we'll be here when you die to help your loved ones and stuff with what comes after in terms of like everything online that has to do with you. And then after a few years, they all die and they're gone. And it's like, yeah, we're not going to be there. Totally. And then, I mean, I think what's been really interesting to watch now is that because generative AI has become this kind of soul sucking hype machine. And a lot of it is about just the accumulation of data and using it to generate new material. And so that fantasy of being able to somehow resurrect dead people as a way to create more value for corporations is something that we have been watching over and over and over again. And so now there seems to be more of a sign in terms of like policy recommendations and bills that are appearing, including one in California that will protect the likenesses of actors

who are dead. And so this issue of consent and not knowing where your data is going. So thinking about all of the authors whose books were mined for training, thinking about what that means within the context of the data of the dead, and then those materials then being used to generate basically actors or writers or any kind of creative worker who is able to replace living workers because that's the actual fantasy the fantasy is not only that the dead will continue to be productive but that you can also use that productivity as a way to avoid paying living workers yeah and we can see that in so many

films from like disney in particular recently where you know a character or an actor who played a character can't die they need to be brought back through visual effects constantly. Because, you know, recasting it and having someone who looks kind of similar is just unimaginable, right? But it is interesting that like, these are the issues that finally get lawmakers to start thinking about like, what regulations are necessary in terms of like, death and the digital, I guess, if you can put it that way. I was wondering, you know, kind of based on what we've been talking about, do you feel that the internet has changed how people grieve and how people think about death? So I do think that it makes grief much more public and traceable in certain ways. So, you know, there are certain things that

are much more possible when you have an online morning public. And so I think especially in terms of the relationship between death and mutual aid. So mutual aid is, you know, something that, of course, like pre-internet days was very much connected to communities that were situated and specific. And now with the rise of GoFundMe, and I know that you had Nora Kenworthy on your show, and she's wonderful. And I read her book, of course, also. And I think this idea that, you know, these other kinds of platforms are now also kind of mediating the way that people grieve. And so thinking about the rise of crowdfunded funerals, and other layers of making death potentially go viral. And I think that is

something that is also a unique feature, particularly of algorithmic forms of attention. So I do think that there are both good things and bad things about online mourning and its particular affordances. So I think the idea that, especially during the first days of COVID, when people were unable to attend funerals in person, when people were unable to say goodbye to dying loved ones who were in hospice care and who were not even actually physically getting touched in some ways by nurses. But the idea of having FaceTime as a way of saying goodbye, having ways of still carrying out morning rituals, even through something like a Zoom call. I think those things are all really good. But then there's some really, really dark,

very macabre aspects of viral death and algorithmic attention. And so something in particular that I have been tracking a bit and finding extremely disturbing is on TikTok, the strange phenomenon of various accounts in different places around the world, kind of troll farm-like, creating deepfake versions of dead children, largely children who were murdered and abused often by their own family members. And it is a strange kind of fetish thing. But the idea, I mean, also, you know, the problem with consent on this sort of violation. But I think the capacity for virality and monetization, and kind of doing anything to garner attention in relation to the data of the dead and the likenesses of the dead can be especially gross right now. You can definitely see that in very many ways. I wasn't aware of that deepfake example that you gave, but I think that we can see very

clearly if anyone goes online today and using social media, you're going to be encountering death. You know, death was always there, but especially over the past 10 months since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza, now it feels like you use social media and you're just encountering these images of dead children in particular very commonly. And that is kind of necessary in a sense to make sure that we're aware of what is happening in Gaza, that we're not ignoring it, you know, that those people are not just kind of dying silently and that there's no outrage over what's happening. But it also feels kind of perverse that we live in this world where this is even happening in the first place. Not that these images are on social media, but that the death itself is occurring in this way. And it's interesting then how the engagement with that happens because of the affordances of social media and the way that those platforms

are designed. It feels a bit odd. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And I have to say, especially on Twitter, where we're on Elon's platform and, you know, similarly with Meta, I think knowing exactly who is profiting from this kind of attention. I think the other disturbing thing from my perspective is that on the one hand, you have the potential for mutual aid campaigns to get attention and actually get people the resources that they need. You also do have a form of witnessing that is happening and a documentation of war crimes and a documentation of people's lives and saying goodbye, their end of life messages essentially for the world as a way of documenting that they existed and to document what happened to them. But then you also are often on platforms where the platform owners are going to make decisions about what happens to all of that

data and could very easily decide to erase a lot of those archives. And that history, at the same time, they are also profiting from that attention. And so that creates just a horrible situation. And I think points to, you know, the need to abolish the kinds of corporate owned platforms that are unfortunately really intervening, not only in our memorialization rituals, but also, you know, preserving a lot of our histories at the moment. Yeah, it's incredibly perverse, right? Especially when you think about someone like Elon Musk controlling this platform where this sort of stuff is being posted, you know, someone who clearly does not care at all about what is happening in Gaza, has no interest in even

trying to do anything to stop it, you know, halted his brief idea to roll out Starlink to humanitarian organizations in Gaza because for a long time the Israeli government didn't want him to do it. But then, of course, the notion that these things are being posted on Facebook, which is a platform that is known to have contributed to a genocide in Myanmar, and now all this content documenting another genocide is being posted on the platform, and they're deciding who sees it and what is elevated and what I don't know, to start to think about the details and the complexities of it, like it turns your stomach. Well, and I think pointing to the role that platforms also have in actively aiding and abetting genocide in many different contexts. And then also,

the fact that algorithmic configurations are also potentially deadly. And so what we're seeing right now is also a lot of public outcry over not just the role of companies like Google and Amazon in perpetuating genocide, but also their contributions to climate catastrophe. I think all of these things are very closely related. And again, point to the need to have some other kinds of spaces for people to gather, to have forms of collectivity, to memorialize, to mourn, and to provide mutual aid that are not controlled by the companies that are enacting genocide and climate catastrophe. You know, I think it's always helpful to find these pockets of resistance where people are able to kind of use particular kinds of platforms as a way to get the kind of visibility and

attention on their own causes and to advocate. But I think there's also a limit to what we can do when we are relying on these same infrastructures. No, absolutely. And I think you've made a really good point there. I just want to go back to something that you were saying before about the GoFundMes as well. You know, and I think people will know that I am very conflicted on GoFundMes. I'm not much of a fan of them, but I also see how they can really help some people who are in difficult situations.

Right. I just wanted to like kind of give an example to you how I kind of saw this play out recently and how these platforms like can actually sometimes have a positive impact. Obviously, this is an obvious thing. There are definitely positive uses and negative uses to everything. But there was a story recently in Newfoundland, where I'm from in Canada, and there was a woman, you know, she didn't have very much money. She was on social assistance and she didn't have the money to bury her daughter who had died. And the government hadn't raised the amount of money that they provided to people on social assistance who needed to bury loved ones in a very long time. And she, you know, she posted about it on social media, the mainstream media picked up on it. And of course, you know, people launched a GoFundMe when they heard about it. But

I thought more importantly, it got this discussion into the public. And eventually, the government was forced to raise the amount of money that they provided to people who are on social assistance to be able to bury their loved ones. And I was like, more than the GoFundMe, I was like, I think that this is like, you know, the more positive part of this story where sure it's going to help this woman and her family, but it's going to help so many other families as well. Because, you know, after holding this number where it was for like 20 years or something, all of a sudden now the government is working with the funeral homes to increase the amount so that it won't be such a burden on people. No, definitely. And that's the thing. I think trying to enact some kind of policy change, trying to do things beyond the

immediate goal of, say, a fundraising campaign can really be quite transformative. So towards the end of the book, in the last part where I'm kind of trying to grapple with the power that users and brokers can have even within this kind of terrible corporate platform controlled context, I think the case of gig workers collective and their fight for occupational death benefits. And so one in eight worker deaths in the US, people who die on the job are gig workers. And we saw during the early days of COVID, how gig workers were labeled essential workers and were not given care of any kind or any kind of support from the gig companies. And the fact that gig workers do

not have things like health benefits or paid time off, but they also, when they are killed on the job, their loved ones are left without life insurance policies. And companies like Uber do not take responsibility for those deaths because, of course, they are independent contractors. And so with Gig Workers Collective, it was a push to create more recognition for the need across the board for occupational death benefits and really thinking about death care as a right and as an extension of healthcare in many ways, and a way of supporting people's families as well after they die. Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. And the gig work advocacy is always like a really bright point. When you look at what's

happening in this like tech dystopia that we have to live in. The gig workers are fantastic and they deserve much better than they receive from those companies. I wanted to pivot again, though, and ask you about another aspect of this. We've been talking a lot about the data that gets built up on people as they use the web, as they make all these accounts and things like that. I feel like there's often this discussion around archiving and what's going to be left over once things are done. And on the one hand, I feel like there's this impulse to want to archive everything and have a record of kind of everything that has happened online. But then I

feel like there's this other piece of this where, you know, on the one hand, there's a whole infrastructure then that needs to be maintained to keep all that archive going. But then when I think about my kind of digital trails, I don't know if I want all of that archived, if, you know, some posts that I made on forums when I was a teenager should be kept around. I don't know if that's really important, you know, and certain other things like that. I wonder how you think about that question of archiving and what remains and what we actually choose to keep a record of, because certainly in the past, you know, when things were physical and paper, we didn't keep everything. And so I wonder if that expectation in the internet era is a little over expansive

as well. Definitely. So I think there were promises made by companies like Google in like 2012, 2013, that you could maintain all of your digital stuff forever on the cloud, and they would keep it for you. And that was a service that they could provide. But now in 2024, there's just too much stuff. You know, we all know that the cloud is material, that it relies on data centers. And we have seen how data center expansion has completely undone a lot of the climate pledges that large companies were making. And there is a limit to the amount of data that can be preserved. And I think this question of, do you want your legacy or do you want every aspect of your life archived? And do you want those archives to be dependent on like a handful of tech companies? Do you really want them to have access to your data. Because, I mean, keep in mind that Microsoft also did at one point, not that long ago, file a patent about creating generative AI ghosts, right? Like, the idea is that now, especially with how data is being used for training models, I think it is even more alarming to think about all of your traces kind of persisting forever and being used in ways that you don't have consent over. And so, yeah, I think being able to do small levels of self-archiving for whatever reason, I know many people right now who are researching kind of small archives,

especially for artists and activist groups who maybe are thinking about how to preserve their own history without relying on large scale companies. Or, you know, I think what we're seeing right now with the Internet Archive, understanding that you cannot rely on an institution even to maintain all of your stuff in the long term. And so finding other ways of preserving what you want to preserve and what you care about. But I think a lot of it is also about the need to maintain that context. And that's something that comes up a lot when we talk about other forms of heirlooms or other forms of memorabilia from the past. And the stuff only matters if you have the story and the context and the affect and sentiment tied to it.

And I think the fantasy with data in particular is that, you know, if you kind of have enough of it, you'll be able to kind of persist in some way as a datafied version of yourself. But I think that aside, the context is always important. And being able to have stories to tell future generations, if that is something that is important to you, there's a way to convey that without necessarily relying on an entire corpus of information. Yeah, I feel like a couple of the things that are really brought to mind to me as well,

like as I was reading the book, and as I was thinking through it, were on the one hand, like even above the individual level, it brings up this question of like, Facebook is not going to be around forever. And I don't think we're planning for that. And we're even hoping for that. So at some point, like this platform is going to go offline. And do we want to have an archive of the whole thing as it ever existed? Or is there just like kind of bits and pieces that we try to keep hold of and maintain? And I also feel like there's, you know, obviously, physical things can be broken, they can be burned, they can be lost, what have you. But I feel like there's a particular kind of precarity to this idea of the digital archive or the digital legacy because it relies on these hardwares and these file types that need to still be maintained and have support and all this kind of stuff. And I feel like that's a piece of it that doesn't kind of enter into these

thought processes of people who do want this kind of digital legacy as often as they probably should. Definitely. So I think, yeah, the problem with the fantasies around transhumanism, particular branches of transhumanism, I should say, that are more aligned with the notion of computational immortality, that somehow if we have enough data, it can kind of approximate you in the afterlife and prevent you from having to die in a real way. Who's going to be maintaining the servers? Who's going to be keeping the lights on? And I think a lot of the fantasies are not only detached from embodiment and thinking about what life is or the collectivity of something like life itself and embodiment, but also

it ignores the collectivity of even simply data preservation and the material resources that go into that. And the fact that yes, even digital systems do decay and break down. And in fact, they become obsolete rather quickly. And if there is some sort of software glitch, who is going to fix that for you, if there are no humans left, and you're just kind of uploaded to the cloud because the earth is burned yeah but you know we're just all gonna live in the future as post-humans in these big server towers on other planets right as some of the long-termists would want us to believe but you know as you talk about that kind of transhumanist idea you know i feel like this is something that has has gotten an extra boost in the past year and a half as the generative AI conversation has happened. And we've had these chatbots and this

idea that if you just have enough data, you can have this thing that seems somewhat intelligent, even though that's not what it actually is. In the book, you talked about this idea of digital immortality versus, you know, the singularity that, say, Ray Kurzweil kind of talks more about. Can you talk about the distinction between those two things? So I think there are plenty of people who are not necessarily believers in the singularity, who don't believe that we're all going to become post-human, and who are, in fact, kind of waiting for that moment to happen because it'll be a moment of freeing us from the shackles of our decaying, imperfect bodies. And, you know, we all have to take a lot of supplements to keep ourselves alive as long as we can until the singularity comes and we can all become machines.

And that'll be great. Hey, I'm getting my blood boy any day to keep me young, you know. Yeah. But, you know, just from like living in the Bay Area and being very connected to a lot of different strains of techno culture in Silicon Valley. And so I feel like, I mean, in the book, when I take a little trip to a Stanford kind of meeting in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum, there was a conference on digital immortality. are transhumanists in any concrete sense of the term. But they were very much interested in the idea of preserving their legacies in doing so with the combination of monumental building and engineering and digital archiving. And so Gordon Bell, who recently passed away, I interviewed him in the book, and he was part of this meeting. And of course, he's somebody who is very, very focused on legacy in general. He was one of the founding board members of the Computer History

Museum. And he had a self-archiving project called My Life Bits, where he was trying to capture every single waking moment of his life and document it. And he did have a sense that, you know, okay, well, I've captured enough of this information, enough of this data, you know, maybe in some way, I will have a form of immortality. He would not be a self-identifying transhumanist, no. But I do think there's something about the enchantment of computing, of digital files, and kind of imagining that you can persist in some way in the ether. I mean, there is something there spiritually that can grab a hold of people who are also in many other respects, they're engineers who are very rational and are really about collecting great amounts of wealth. And in the case of members of the Long Now Foundation, including Jeff Bezos and Stuart Brand, of course,

building large scale monuments that will also last in their minds for millennia. And they have created a number of different, very elaborate projects that combine both material infrastructures and monuments with digital aspects. And they are definitely thinking about very long-term preservation. And it is very odd to think about that within the context of climate change and where we're at right now with that. Yeah, it seems like a very niche interest as well. If I think about this notion of living forever through a computer computer that seems very unappealing and i feel like if you ask the vast majority of people in the world about that they would say like what are you talking about this makes no sense like certainly i think that there's this maybe generalized like

you know i don't really want to die i like being around the people who i know you know i like living life and being alive but like like, I think if you presented the idea of immortality to a lot of people, especially the way that these people conceive of it, I don't see how it would be appealing to a lot of people. No, it's definitely a very kind of male dominated, very white, like, very wealthy and very Californian version of power, I think, and of fantasy. And do also think that the sense of wanting to solve a problem. So death itself is another engineering problem. It is something that can be fixed through some kind of technology and the application of technology. It makes sense in who are living the good life. You know, if I'm hanging out with a bunch of tech billionaires, and they're telling me about their

latest scheme for extending their own lives, well, yeah, of course, they're going to be doing that. Why wouldn't they? Yeah, you know, listen, I think it's cool that the elves in Lord of the Rings theoretically live forever unless they're killed or whatever. But I don't feel the same desire to escape the biological that these people seem to feel really deeply that they want to do. Yeah, I think the hyper individualism is another odd part of it. So I remember my grandmother lived to be 97. And by the end, you know, she'd been the baby in the family, my grandfather had been dead for a while. And she was the only one left. And she'd been the baby in the family. My grandfather had been dead for a while. And she was the only one left.

And she even before she hit like the very final phase of her life, she would just say, it's really lonely. You know, I'm the only one here. Everyone else has been dead for a long time. And yeah, she had her daughter and her son and her grandchildren. But it was a different everything from her context and from her childhood and all of her memories from before she became a mother, all of those were kind of cut off for her. And I think that's the loneliness of radical life extension is something that is really kind of interesting. And I think there's a relationship between that and the idea of AI companionship. So I think the kind of interesting pivot that we've had lately to AI companions and

kind of AI is a surrogate for different kinds of human intimacy. I do think that it has a similar kind of issue in terms of thinking about you and yourself and your technology are kind of enough. And so either if that's through the things that you use to enhance your life and expand your lifespan, or the things that you use to provide yourself with entertainment and interaction when you are kind of the only one left. And so it's like a way of building your own version of kin and not having to deal with the messiness of other human relations. And similarly, with radical life extension, it's a way to avoid having to think about, you know, the messiness of mortality, of aging, of decay, of cancer, and the things that are kind of just part of life and death. I think there's a similar logic in both of those cases. Yeah, I can definitely see what

you're talking about there. I was also thinking, you know, the types of people who you're talking about who, you know, are kind of collecting all this data on themselves and hoping that there is some way to be able to continue, or at least they have this idea that it would be nice to be able to continue conversing with the people who have died after they've died. You know, I believe in the book, you mentioned like a Google or Amazon commercial where like the voice of someone's dead grandmother was coming out of their Alexa or their Google home. And like, to me, that feels really odd. And like, I was thinking, you know, like for generations, for hundreds and thousands of years, like people have died, we've mourned them, but you know, we've continued living until it's our time to do that. And the idea that now that like, there's this desire to like, create this digital form of the self that

is going to remain and kind of be conversable afterward. I don't know, it just continues to strike me as like, something very odd. And you know, a very kind of niche interest, maybe unless it's sold in some PR marketing campaign by some tech company to the broader public as being an attractive thing. But I don't know, it feels like this change that is like, not really necessary, not really desired. But this thing that these tech people think is attractive and want to push on the rest of us. Yeah, there's something. So in the fourth chapter, which is the smart home chapter, where I think I mentioned the Alexa dead grandmother bedtime story, there was a whole chunk of stuff on domestic violence and surveillance in the smart home that I think I

ended up cutting a lot of it, honestly. I think I was like getting too, maybe too in the weeds. But I think for me, it was also really interesting to think about the desire for enacting a form of control from beyond the grave. And so if you think about people who have a lot of wealth, who maybe create very elaborate trusts, or, you know, maybe they leave behind a foundation that has very specific rules. I think, you know, that is another way of continuing to be a force in some way, even after you die. And the kind of AI chatbot version of that is kind of along the same lines. So, and again, it doesn't, you know, with a foundation or a trust, I mean, you have an entire staff of people who are like paid to

operate that even if it is in your name, it is being carried out by an entire group of bureaucrats and workers and perhaps other extended family members. But with the digital version, that too does rely on not only the continued kind of maintenance and upkeep on the part of the platform that it's dependent on. And so thinking about like, oh, yes, I'm going to be a chatbot that will continue on and definitely accept like the company that I used to build the chatbot that will continue on indefinitely, except like the company that I used to build the chatbot with like went away. And so now chatbot me is also dead. But then also thinking about, yeah, the upkeep on the part of family members or loved ones and the fact that they will have to continue to interact with it or expecting that people would want to. And there's

often a disconnect between what people kind of plan for their own afterlives or how they want to be remembered or what they want at their own funeral and what happens. Because when you're dead, you're dead. And you can only have so much control over the situation. And so I think, you know, it may also just be a way of people coping with something like mortality, which is incredibly difficult for a lot of people to face. And so this idea that you can somehow maintain a semblance of control is maybe appealing. Yeah, I think, you know, putting it in the context of like the trust and linking that to like the chatbot version of the self that remains there for a long time into

the future, like that makes total sense to me. I can completely see that and I can see why the particular people who are attracted to it would be attracted to it for that particular reason. You know, this has been a really fantastic conversation. To close things off, I would just ask, you know, do you have any final thoughts on these visions of the digital afterlife and what it actually means to consider like what this digital footprint that we leave behind is going to be and like how to better manage it,

maybe not just on an individual level, but if there's other approaches like collectively, societally that we should be taking to make sure that this isn't so much of a burden? Well, I think we need to have much stronger antitrust laws. I think we need to have ways of preventing tech billionaires from having the ability to make decisions about archives, not just on an individual level, but also on this more collective scale. And yeah, I think that we need to really seriously consider more the relationship between data preservation, particularly at scale and data infrastructures and their environmental impacts.

And this is something that I think generative AI has made much more apparent because it's just such a spectacular hype bubble, but it is an ongoing problem. So this is something that has been growing for a long time. Scholars like Mil Hogan have been writing about Facebook's data centers and water consumption since 2014, 2015. This is not a new problem. And so I am just hoping that this is the time when we kind of reckon with the materiality of digital infrastructures and really think about what we would want long-term preservation to look like and who should be in control of it. Yeah, I think those are really great points. And keeping in mind that materiality always, because these things can seem very ephemeral, but actually there's always something very physical on the other end of it. Tamara, it was really great to talk to you. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thank you so much for having me. This was

so much fun. Tamara Nies is the author of Death Glitch, How Technosolutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by bridget palou fry tech won't save us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry you can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week Thank you.